Neil and Liam Finn arrive together at All Time, the Los Feliz cafe they picked to meet and talk about “Lightsleeper,” the debut collaboration from father Neil, whose bands include Crowded House and Split Enz, and son Liam, primarily a solo artist to date.
It’s 10 a.m., which might seem early for musicians, but Liam has a toddler son at home, while Neil is rehearsing most afternoons for his new band, about which we’ll talk more shortly.
“I think it was in the cards, it was always going to happen at some point,” Liam Finn says of the album released on Friday, Aug. 24. “It would seem a shame not to, both of us doing the same kind of thing, let’s do it together. And we’ve done it together a lot since I was 14, well, since I was born, really – “
” – in one form or another,” Neil Finn agrees.
” – but it seemed like after enough time of dabbling in each other’s things that it’s just kind of the stars lined up and it seemed obvious that it was a good time to make the most of all the time we were spending together,” Liam says.
“Yeah, we definitely worked out that we actually liked each other after a lot of life experience,” Neil says, prompting Liam to laugh. “Which is really good.”
The origins of “Lightsleeper” reach back about three years to the wedding of Liam and Janina Percival, part of what the Finns describe as a “generational shift” in the family, a prompt for Neil, 60, and Liam, 34, to work together as creative partners instead of musician father and sideman son, roles they’d filled since Liam first started playing gigs with Neil when he was 14.
“Perhaps earlier on it might have been difficult,” Neil says. “To some extent it was a bit like that with my brother (Tim Finn) and I when I joined Split Enz. It took quite a few years where it felt like we were working together as equals, which is why we didn’t work together as the Finn Brothers for many, many years.”
But amid the planning for the wedding at home in New Zealand, the celebration of it in Greece, and a handful of Neil and Liam Finn shows played in England, they realized they both were ready to embrace the family business as equals, both Finns say.
“That was our first,” Liam says of the European shows he and Neil collaborated on. “That started the conversation that wouldn’t it be cool to have our own repertoire that we could do at these shows, since we were having so much fun?”
And they knew each others’ work so well, Neil adds, that it made the collaboration more intimate, more personal than either might have with an outside producer on any other project.
“It was interesting to get into the minutiae and the nuts and bolts of it and be able to say, ‘Well, you know I really like it when you sing like that,’ and, ‘Maybe this doesn’t suit, this is where your voice would be,’” Neil says. “And maybe Liam might say, ‘You know it sounds a bit formal the way you’ve phrased it, maybe it would be good just to let a few words come out of rhythm.
“It’s things you would never think of on your own,” he says. “You just get set in your ways. So we were able to do little favors for each other like that. Point out thinks we liked about each others’ styles, I guess.”
Work on the album that would become “Lightsleeper” began in New Zealand in early 2016, though they had jammed a lot the previous Christmas, and those rough demos provided a foundation for the 11 songs that eventually made it onto the record.
“They weren’t finished songs by any means, they were impressionistic things with some grooves and atmosphere,” Neil says. “But the first one that got slightly formalized was ‘We Know What It Means,’ I think, wasn’t it?”
“It was on the first day we started,” Liam confirms.
“I found a little melodic idea for that, and a few of the words,” Neil says. “And it was one of those nice moments where you don’t really realize you’re writing something that’s true to life. It felt like an invention but when we looked at the lyrics it came out, and it was definitely a reflection of the way Liam grew up, in and around music, on tour buses, watching the world go by, and sort of reflecting on that now.”
The sessions in Neil Finn’s Auckland studio were part family affair —, wife Sharon played some bass, and son Elroy, the drums — and part friends – longtime friend and collaborator Tchad Blake came down for a spell. And then there’s Mick Fleetwood, drummer and co-founder of Fleetwood Mac, whose role ended up having a much larger impact on the Finns than just the 10 days he spent drumming on songs such as “Anger Plays A Part,” “Any Other Way,” and “We Know What It Means.”
Neil says he’d met Fleetwood years earlier, and reconnected over dinner in New Zealand about six months before he and Liam got serious about the record, and hit it off once more.
“I just had the whimsical thought, ‘Hey, maybe … ‘ because he said he’d really love to do something, play, if anything comes up,” Neil says, explaining that after consulting with Liam he called Fleetwood not really expecting him to say yes.
“But he jumped at it,” Neil says. “It just seemed nice as a sense of occasion.”
Fleetwood is a bit of a rock ‘n’ roll raconteur, the Finns discovered, who loved to share tales from his colorful career to the extent that they laugh about how often they found themselves waiting for him to get ready to play.
“We’re reasonably conscientious when we come to working,” Neil says.
“Strangely driven,” Liam says.
“We’d be sitting in the studio, Mick would be regaling someone with a great story from the ’60s, and we’d be sitting in there ready to do a take and looking in the lounge room going, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’s going to come in?’” Neil says. “But he would.”
Nearly two years later, in March, Fleetwood remembered how well he got along with Finn during the 10 days they’d spent recording and talking, and called him up to ask him if he would join Fleetwood Mac.
“I never saw it coming, and (it’s the) last thing in the world I expected to be doing,” Finn says of joining that legendary band along with Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers after Lindsey Buckingham departed. “Clearly getting to know Mick alerted him to something, some deeper knowledge of the way that I work and what I can do.”
After taking a day to think about it, and getting the encouragement of Liam and the rest of the Finns, Neil says he realized there was only one answer to the question Fleetwood posed, and he called back to say he was in.
“It’s like opening an envelope and having the magic ticket from Willie Wonka,” he says.
Touring for “Lightsleeper” is on hold until 2019 after Fleetwood Mac’s fall tour, which includes shows at the Forum in Inglewood on Dec. 11 and Dec. 13, is done.
“His side project is dominating our main project,” Liam jokes.
But at a surprise show at Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles on Saturday, Aug. 18, father and son played without a band for more than two-and-a-half hours, dropping six of the 11 new tracks, including the single “Back To Life,” the video of which was filmed on the same stage at Largo, into a set that also featured solo work, Crowded House, Split Enz and cover songs.
It was a beautiful night of music, which if you’re lucky, will happen there again before long, and no matter the original source of the song, in performance they captured the essence of the Finn family tradition.
“Nothing turned out as expected,” Neil says of the recording of “Lightsleeper” and events that came after. “That’s what lights a little bit of a fire to us. That’s become precious to us.”
