KEY POINTS:
The finalists for New Zealand's top songwriting award have been announced - one of them is beautiful, one is crazy and another is about a little girl from Rwanda.
And the other two, well, you'll have to ask Liam Finn and Opshop what they're about.
The five finalists
for the Apra Silver Scroll are Sean Donnelly (aka SJD) for Beautiful Haze, Ruban Neilson from The Mint Chicks for Crazy?Yes!Dumb?No!, Opshop's Maybe, Brooke Fraser for Albertine, and Liam Finn's Second Chance.
The winner will be announced at a ceremony at the Auckland Town Hall on September 18 during which the five songs will be performed by different surprise bands who get to do their own interpretation of the tracks.
Finn beat his father, Neil, into the top five with a song off his debut solo album, I'll Be Lightning.
He was also a finalist in 2000 for Empty Head and 2002 for Life Will Be the Same, both songs by his former band betchadupa.
This is the Mint Chicks second nomination after being finalists in 2005 for Opium of the People and it is Auckland chart-topping rockers Opshop's first nod.
Meanwhile, both Donnelly and Fraser had two songs in the list of 20 contenders, with Donnelly writing the Don McGlashan song I Will Not Let You Down and Fraser's Deciphering Me also rating well.
This year the Australasian Performing Rights Association (Apra) changed the way it judges the awards which started in 1965. Previously a group of anonymous judges picked the winner but this year a panel nominated 20 songs and the members of Apra, made up of around 6000 songwriters, composers and music publishers, voted for the top five.
The winners of both the Sounz Contemporary Award, for excellence in composition, and the Apra Maioha Award, for recordings in te reo, will also be announced at the ceremony.
The finalists in the Sounz award are Christopher Blake for Anthem on the Kaipara, Eve de Castro-Robinson's These Arms To Hold You and Ross Harris for The Sleep of Reason.
The three finalists for the Maioha award are Andrea Tunks and Pierre Tohe for Aio, Mika, Taupuhi Toki, Mokoera Te Amo, and Kingi Williams for Poti, and Marian Mare's Tenei Tamaiti.
