Read an excerpt of the interview, jump to the full interview here.

Singer songwriter, Tim Finn, co-founder of Split Enz and ex-member of Crowded House, has just released his ninth solo album, ‘The View is Worth the Climb’.

Finn called on legendary producer, Jacquire King, who has worked with Norah Jones, Kings of Leon and Tom Waits, and a studio band comprised of Joey Waronker (Beck/REM/Thom Yorke), Zac Rae (Beck/ThomYorke/Cold War Kids), Brett Adams (The Mockers/The Bads), Tony Buchen (Andy Bull) and Mara TK (Electric Wire Hustle). He even co-wrote one song with one of Australia’s most well-respected and popular young songwriters, Megan Washington. Suite101 caught up with Tim Finn to talk about ‘The View is Worth the Climb’.

Suite101: What’s the main inspiration behind the new record?

Tim Finn: The main inspiration…I think I said once, friendship, disappointment, encouragement and love. Those are probably the main themes that are on the record. My wife – all my songs are always to do with my relationships with other people, whether it’s a partner or a friend or a child, so I’m still finding endless inspiration in those kinds of areas.

Read the full interview here.

Check them out at their website http://abcdigmusic.net.au/features/5-songs-tim-finn

Speaking from his Auckland home, Finn admits to becoming a big fan of Washington during a brief run of NSW dates.

“She was really good fun and in the van afterwards travelling back to Sydney (from shows) was always full of good stories,” the 59-year-old silver fox of Kiwi pop says. “Occasionally, she would wake up with conversation remorse, she would tell me. She’s a great person. We really clicked and I love her talent.”

Washington later helped Finn finish a song for which he only had the chorus refrain – The View is Worth the Climb. The collaboration is the title track of Finn’s ninth solo album, an 11-track overview of his at-times turbulent career and current contentment.

From his home of the past 11 years on the north side of Auckland, the mellowed musician looks out over a bay filled with boats as we chat. “The weather’s great today, everything looks radiant in the winter sun,” he says.

Click here to read the rest of the interview with Simon Collins at TheWest.com.au

Tim Finn is familiar with recognising the unforseen. His is a life which has stalked curiosity with vigour, taking him places – both real and imagined – previously unimagined. Unlike his pop star brother Neil, Tim Finn has spent his life courting the abstract, creating some of the most delightfully left field records to ever transmit from the Antipodes.

It was at the mercy of this will to ignite the rule book that he decided his eighth solo studio album, 2008’s The Conversation, would be his last solo recording. Having also rounded off Split Enz’ career with eight studio recordings, he felt the ‘Tim Finn’ brand had run its course – capped with a 2009 career retrospective, North, South, East, West – and it was time to find a new vehicle for expression. But, with his guard lowered, the sweet timbre of what would become his ninth solo recording began to take root.

Read the full interview at X-Press Magazine

We’ve had a great time playing live shows.  Thank you to those who came along and thanks too, to Swamp Thing, the Sami Sisters and my AMAZING band of musicians, Brett, Tony, Michael, Naill.  Many thrills along the way…and more to come.  I’ve got a few gigs planned in the US next year. Put in your calendar and save the date….Tim

TIM FINN takes the road to the Mount.

DECEMBER 1965, summer came on as a softening and letting go, fragrant with possibility . . . the structure of school days suspended for a time and now, for me, at 13, a new world opening up in Auckland where I was to be a boarder at Sacred Heart College. But that was off in the distance, beyond our holidays at Mount Maunganui, holidays that ran the days and weeks together in a loose unravelling, salt on our skin and long twilight meanderings, through the legs of dancing grown-ups and out into the springy grass that surrounded our weatherboard bach.

Primary school was finished for me and I needed a rite of passage. A friend and I decided to ride our bikes the 70 miles from Te Awamutu to the Mount. He was older than me and had already been at Sacred Heart for a year. His life had cruel fate and a responsive heroism mixed into it. His father, a Polish doctor who had delivered me, died when my friend was still too young to have formed a memory of him. As well, his one leg being shorter than the other gave his swaying walk a kind of wounded intensity.

He brought out the warrior in me and perhaps I brought out the romantic in him. There was something of the mythical journeying in our friendship. As 6-year-olds we had sworn that one day we would sail the world together. But there was rivalry, too. I remember the school grounds becoming a battlefield one day when the line between us had been crossed in some brutal way and I stood alone as he rounded the corner of St Patrick’s Convent School with his massed forces and savage charisma. Leadership reasserted, there had been no actual fight.

WE WOKE when it was still dark. I had stayed the night in his house, on Picquet Hill to the east of town. His step-dad was a butcher and we breakfasted on prime steaks, bacon and sausages, probably an egg or two, then set off. A boy I had befriended because his sister looked like Hayley Mills had sneered dismissively when told of our quest but we didn’t need the spur now, our bare feet pumping the pedals with the exhilaration of release into a summer morning claimed by us for wandering.

My friend had borrowed his live-in uncle’s bike and it was immediately obvious that he rode a superior model. A subtle drawing ahead as we approached Cambridge became a defining distance between us on the far side of this lovely town.

We rode along the ancient river bed, great boulders embedded in the banks on either side and on towards the Kaimai ranges, a blueness in the distance that daunted us as it drew us on. We stopped at each milk bar and had an ice-cream, a staggered reward system that reconciled us briefly before my friend would again race off. Occasionally he would allow me to draw alongside and we talked of the days ahead, the surfing, and who would be there this year. And whether Atlas Wood or Roger Land made the better surfboard.

By Hinuera we had pulled off the excess clothing that had seemed necessary in the crispness of pre-dawn. We were now festooned with jumpers and jackets that we would have gladly flung into the fields had they not been part of our intended coolness at the Soundshell’s evening concerts. And so we rode and argued and separated and rode and talked and by late morning had begun our assault upon the great blue hills. The bikes had no gears and we were soon walking barefoot on the warming tar-seal. The rivalry alive in every aspect of that day was probably felt least here as we struggled for the summit, my friend with his odd limp and both of us imagining the ecstasy of descent to come.

Half way up we were hot and exhausted. Dehydration was a real possibility, the cordial long gone. We trudged silently on, our legs strong from a decade of tree climbing and war games, of diving for cover when we heard the skilfully simulated sound of machine-gun fire chattering through pursed lips and clenched teeth. Over and over, obsessively, we played these games and drew with our Lakeland coloured pencils the platoons of stick-men soldiers engaged in endless carnage and the destroyers strafed by fighter planes (a breakthrough in perception coming when we learned to draw them bow on.) Perhaps this was our way of reaching and understanding our laconic Dads who never spoke of the great war they had returned from.

NOW, DEPENDING on which of the three women in my family you speak to, there were encounters at the start, middle and end of this part of the journey. My mother emphatically remembers seeing us begin our downward swoop. Could it be that she imagined this as a way of quietening her anxious thoughts of our ascent? My friend remembers his family giving us milk to drink somewhere on the way up. Certainly somebody gave us something because there we were, finally, the Waikato spread out behind us in a swoon of summer ripeness. We rested for a while, drinking the cool fresh water that trickles down the bank on the south side of the road and that to this day my Uncle George fills his bottles with on the way home to Hamilton.

I’m sure we bought another ice-cream from the shop that used to perch above the drinking place. The shop is long gone. Perhaps it went out of business when the road across the ranges improved so much that people no longer felt the need for satisfied resting and a bit of a day-dream at the top. Do we widen our roads and reduce the angles of corners, only to drain the tension and release from our travels?

Back on our bikes we approached the first dip, ready for the hurtle down. The midday sun burned into our two small cycling selves as, shadowless, we went by the ancient Makomako trees’ entwined dishevelment and let gravity pull us down to the sea.

But gravity pulled harder on my friend and our competitive instincts were once more aroused. I remember rounding a bend, not having seen his cruel pedalling self for at least 10 minutes and there he was lying back in a field of daisies, mocking me with his best “what took you so long?” expression. There was a theatricality to the gesture that was always a part of our friendship; a sense of the moment that in later years, after a night of drinking, would illuminate for me all that was grotesquely funny in the world. I think even then I could see the humour in it.

I remember very little of the last part of our journey, but it must have been hard going. We had allowed ourselves to feel the arriving too soon, and the downward rushing was followed by three or four hours of strained pedalling. Up the steep hill after the Ngamuwahine stream, past the sign to the McLaren Falls that beckons to me each time I go by but is ignored in my haste for the sea, and over the Ruahihi Power Station bridge towards Tauranga.

DUSK WAS settling in as we crossed the railway line and turned for the Mount, only straight level roads ahead and very few miles of them.

The allied armies turned for Paris, their slain enemies littering the hot dry plains and rocky peaks behind them, all the town waiting to welcome and acclaim them, garlands of flowers, wine, music, the affections of exotic nubiles . . . a carload of Finns in a yellow Zephyr, arms waving, cameras clicking and for me, the beginning of a long, intense sulk. I was always an expert in mood-throwing and this was to be one of my best. I was furious that our moment of triumph had taken on the banal atmosphere of a family outing. Once again I had measured up short against my friend who was able to smile condescendingly, even pitying me, as the family reeled me in.

Of course I over-reacted and even now am ashamed to see the bad-tempered face refusing to look at the camera. In a culture bereft of ritual we had invented our own small rite of passage with the full encouragement of our families. But I feel for those on the awkward and sometimes dangerous journey from childhood to adulthood who are not encouraged to find the myth and poetry in their awakening selves.

The sulk soon lifted and the ordinary pleasures and pains of summer returned. I remember my friend and I resolving to wake before dawn on the last morning of the holidays to make our final salutes to the Gods of the Sea. The waves were perfect and we surfed for hours, little whoops of exultation punctuating the ocean’s white noise. At nine o’clock, the time we normally came down to the beach, the wind shifted and the surf disappeared, illusorily back into itself as if it had never been.

We realised then that there were moments in each day like these, magical and splendid. All we had to do was find them.

TIM FINN is a singer-songwriter and a founding member of Split Enz. He grew up in Te Awamutu and now lives in Sydney.

MY TIMES appears each month, with different writers sharing stories of their lives and times.

Whether it was the full makeup and Split Enz bouffant of the 70s, or the furrowed brow and wavy locks – now thoroughly grey – of the solo singer-songwriter, Tim Finn has never been hard to recognise.

Neither have his songs. Six Months in a Leaky Boat, I See Red, Weather with You, It’s Only Natural  they’re all part of any respectable accounting of New Zealand’s best music.
Finn is playing in Wellington on Friday, a night before his equally-famous brother, Neil, brings his new group, Pajama Club, to town.

“I know, it’s bizarre, isn’t it?” he says. “After all this time, we intersect in Wellington.”

And after all this time, he’s still a passionate performer, who throws himself into every song with a kind of fury.
For our talk, he’s agreed to forgo the usual questions about where he’s been lately or what the next new project might be, and relive some of the stories behind his best-loved songs over the years.

At one point, after he’s told another tale of heartache or delight, I ask how he feels about the more personal material compared with his other stuff  the songs told from more of a distance.

“What do you mean?” he responds. “Most of them  certainly the ones I still perform and sing, and the ones people know – they’re all very personal. That’s the way I write.”

And so it is. His songs come from relationship bust-ups and moments of hope, from grim, angry days in London and sunswept Auckland summers, from friendships gone awry and the “blood harmony” he shares with his brother. They’re always full of feeling.

There are other common threads, too, – a habit for grafting songs together from bits and pieces; a penchant for wordplay; a willingness to collaborate when the timing’s right.

With Neil, for instance, he recalls the “purple patch like no other” they had – a two-week period in the early 1990s that produced some of the biggest hits the pair ever wrote. “All those years in Split Enz, we never really wrote together. It was quite bizarre. I think it was two or three songs, and they weren’t true collaborations, in a funny way. It was almost like we’d saved it up.”

Above all, his rules are “obey the melody” and make the songs real.

“It was deeply felt,” he says, of hit I Hope I Never. “All the best ones are.”

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