The veteran music-maker's minimal new album harks back to the early days of Split Enz. He talks to Scott Kara
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There's a song on Tim Finn's new album that has a breezy summery swing to it like Late Last Night, a Split Enz song written by his old friend and band mate Phil Judd way back in 1976.
"That's interesting," he says thoughtfully of Only A Dream, off his eighth solo album, The Conversation.
He can see the similarity, even if he doesn't sound entirely convinced.
What he is certain about is how the stripped-back approach to the new album - with acoustic guitar, piano and violin at the core - harks back to the early 70s when he, Judd and Mike Chunn were tinkering around making music as Split Ends.
"We started out as an acoustic band with a violin," he says. "The friendships and beginnings of Split Enz will always be a thing for me. But I've never used it quite so deliberately before and I actually borrowed a couple of lyrics from Split Enz [for The Conversation]."
On the tender lament Fall From Grace he sings "I'm just a country boy can't you see that I'm still green", which is taken from Maybe, off the band's 1975 debut Mental Notes.
Also playing on the album is violinist Miles Golding who was the first person Finn and Judd asked to join Split Enz. However, Golding was also the first to leave the band after only a few months to further his classical training overseas.
"He left in 73 and Phil and I were devastated at the time because he'd taught us so much with the opening riff of Stranger than Fiction. He'd given us so much music, so it's really nice to finally make a record with Miles."
In the intervening 35 years Finn says he's seen Golding half a dozen times, including when he played on 1976 album Second Thoughts and as part of a 20-piece string section on the Finn Brothers album Everyone Is Here in 2004.
But it was at one of Finn's shows in Milton Keynes in 2007, when Golding turned up and performed Time For A Change off Mental Notes with him, that they decided to join forces.
Golding is the man responsible for the dark and wonky Kronos Quartet-style strings on The Conversation's opening track Straw To Gold.
"It has a medieval sound and as soon as everybody started playing those opening chords that way, we could hardly distinguish between the violin and the guitar. We had the instant atmosphere - and it goes on quite a journey, that song."
Along with Finn and Golding the other players on the album are former Split Enz keyboardist Eddie Rayner and Brett Adams on electric guitar and banjo.
The minimal instrumentation allows, as Finn puts it, "the violin to step out and you really hear the whole texture of it".
"You don't need to keep laying in stuff. I think with early Split Enz we enjoyed doing that, but all of a sudden we just leapfrogged up into drums and bass. But those first stages of Split Enz, I hold them dear."
Finn says he's always been conscious of doing something different from album to album.
"But I'm not as agonised about it as I used to be," he counters. "With Split Enz our template was the Beatles so the changes that they went through, for us that was the normal thing to do. It's exciting to do that and I was in that mindset for a long time.
"It's innate to take different paths but it's not as extreme as it once was. Lately I've just been more inclined to go with what ever the songs need."
And while the "wide-screen" approach of his last album, Imaginary Kingdom, makes The Conversation seem like a dramatic change in direction he insists it's not.
"The acoustic guitar and piano is always at the heart of it."
He rattles off the main themes of the album, which include love, loss, regret, and friendship.
On Slow Mystery he sings: "It's like alchemy, it's like you and me unfolding", which is about "the unknowingness of my relationship with, firstly, my wife Marie, and also other people and friends. Any good relationship is never cut and dried and as well as changing itself it's changing you with it. So that's where the alchemy comes in I guess."
And on single Out Of This World it's family to the fore. The song comes with a great video - "a really backyard job that one" - of Finn singing while his 5-year-old daughter Elliot, bobs around in an astronaut suit that he bought her. "When I was singing it it made me think of her walking around wearing that and you are taken off into that kids world. Well, you get a glimpse of it anyway."
His next project is Poor Boy, a play based on Finn's songs written by Matt Cameron.
"The songs Matt [uses] weren't always the obvious choices. There were some obscure ones in there, and they were an interesting bunch of songs so I felt at ease with the whole thing straight away."
Starring Australian actor Guy Pearce, the play premieres in Melbourne in January and although there are no plans to show it in New Zealand yet Finn is keen to try and make that happen.
LOWDOWN
Who: Tim Finn
New album: The Conversation, out now
Past solo albums: Escapade (1983); Big Canoe (1986); Tim Finn (1989); Before & After (1993); Say It Is So (1999); Feeding The Gods (2001); Imaginary Kingdom (2006)
