1 month ago 02nd Jul 15:54
A young Liam Finn learned to play many instruments, because when you’re a Finn, there just are a lot of instruments about. And when you’re possessive of as much natural talent as he, to have them sit there gathering dust would not so much be a waste as it would a crime on an internationally important scale.
Though I’ll Be Lightning is his first solo album, it’s not by a country mile the 24-year-old’s debut musical endeavour. Liam’s first publicly visible use of those aforementioned skills came in fronting the band Betchadupa, a close knit outfit of childhood best friends with whom Finn relocated from his native New Zealand to London in early 2005. Yet Liam eventually found himself torn between band concerns and a new set of songs, inspired by his relocation, a more personal, confessional sound he felt uncomfortable presenting to the other members.
“The songs were emotional so I was a little hesitant to show them to my band, who are my three best mates. It just felt more natural to play these songs by myself”, he says of the decision to try it alone. It soon became more and more clear that the songs that would form I’ll Be Lightning were not going to work with a band, but did have to be worked with all the same. Yet instead of becoming your average, run of the mill, lonesome solo artist, Liam decided to become his own band.
A debut album a few years in the making now, I’ll Be Lightning is a record on which Liam Finn – over a two month period in Roundhead Studios in Auckland – like some bearded, Kiwi version of Prince, plays, records, engineers and produces nigh on everything you hear. It’s a process born out of a strikingly singular, unshakable vision, a desire to record the songs exactly as they were in his head, free of outside influence. It seemed, and was, the only way he could have done it.
I’ll Be Lightning also admirably shunned a few contemporarily popular, trendy recording techniques. “I purposely did it all analog; there were no computers involved. Tape has such a warm sound and really captures something you can’t on computers.” (As if to propel it further in to the realm of unshakeable rock n’ roll credibility, the mixing desk used throughout had once belonged to The Who.) But despite the attention to detail, it’s not a record full of ponderous or overcooked ideas. Standout moments such as the title jam were written and recorded in the space of a day, and appear in thrilling, honest, warts ‘n all versions, virtuous precisely because of their lack of polish.
Liam would agree with you if you told him these were the best songs he’s ever written. But behind his impenetrable beard, he’d probably blush uncontrollably if you told him, however honestly, that you reckon if these songs were penned by Neil Young, Elliot Smith or Stephen Merritt, they’d be among the best songs any of them had written too. I’ll Be Lightning only feels like a debut in its freshness, not in that anything about Liam Finn is other than the finished article. It’s not that he can’t go anywhere from here (conversely, the world is his oyster), but that you don’t get the impression anything about it could be deemed half formed, or the work of someone still finding their feet. Unlike the first full lengths of his contemporaries, this shares more in common with glorious sprawls like Pavement’s Wowee Zowee or Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. Like those records, it rejoices in loose ends and untidiness, but has a sleek ghostliness and an ‘if the demo’s the best take, we use the demo’ attitude shared with Springteen’s Nebraska.
As Liam puts it, “your demos always end up being the versions of your songs that you fall in love with but never release. You keep on trying to make them ‘better’ with a band, an engineer, a producer and so on, but you usually fail, so I thought I’d release the demos instead. Of course that means there are heaps of mistakes in there, but they add a lot of character. The accidents and the mistakes are often the things that become your favourite bits.”
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