Tom Morton Show - broadcast Wednesday 25 September 2002

TM:  The latest issue of Uncut magazine as usual has a cover CD with a compilation of the best new music on it.   It’s an exceptionally good CD this month, and there’s one track on it which just leaps out at you and it forced me to run straight out and buy the album by Jeff Finlin, which is called ‘Somewhere South of Wonder’ and it’s great to have him talking to us now.   Hi Jeff.
JF:  Hey how are you.

TM:  I’m very well.   As far as the Uncut side of things is concerned, it’s a very influential magazine of late in British music, and you must be pleased at the reaction to just that one track leaping out of all that competition.
JF:  Yes I am pleased, it’s always good when people respond to your work .

TM:  As far as you’re concerned, your history in music goes back quite a long way to being a drummer.
JF:  Yeah.

TM:  I’m fascinated by that, because there seems to be this link between drummers and lyrics.  I’m wondering whether it’s something to do with the concern for meter and rhythm and language.  There’s a lot of drummers who specialise in writing lyrics.
JF:  It is kind of a thing, I think.   Rhythm has always come natural to me. So there’s rhythm in the lyric, there’s rhythm in the melody, and I found it easy to go from being a drummer to a guitar player to a piano player… I just basically play everything like I play the drums…   It kind of works out, you know, so if I play something wrong at least it’s in time.

TM:  What kind of a drummer were you, were you a bit of a thrasher, like Animal in The Muppets?
JF:  I was kind of like Levon Helm, Charlie Watts, those were my two heroes.

TM:  Charlie Watts is the best drummer in the world.
JF:  Mickey Waller, the Faces guy.   A drummer  named Fred Below who played on all the Chuck Berry and a lot of the Chess stuff, he’s really the big cat, you know.

TM: Tell me about the process of metamorphosing into a frontman.  I know you’re going to hate this comparison but one immediately thinks of Phil Collins.   Admittedly he’s a great producer and a great drummer but on the other hand perhaps not a very good frontman.  That process of going from the back of the band to the very front - is it something that required an enormous procedure of getting confidence, or was it quite natural for you?
JF:  It was an enormous procedure, I had to learn how to sing, although I started out playing drums and basically just sang high harmonies.    I’d never really sung in my natural register.  I wasn’t very proficient on guitar.  I could write, but as far as playing…  It was just like starting over completely at a later time in my life and it was really a challenge, but it’s what I needed because I’d kind of reached a dead end as a drummer, I just had something to say and that urge to say something really outweighed all the stuff I had to go through to say it. 

TM:  Ok well let’s have an example of what you are saying on the album ‘Somewhere South of Wonder’, and this is ‘Sugar Blue’.

- Sugar Blue -

TM:  That was Jeff Finlin and ‘Sugar Blue’ from ‘Somewhere South of Wonder’.   And Jeff’s with me now.  Jeff, you said earlier that having something to say and wanting to say it transcended everything else in terms of your musical background.   There is a tremendous amount of content in this album, it’s a very literary album and there seems to be that trend amongst certain songwriters, someone like David Baerwald for example, represents someone who’s writing from a literary standpoint.    I was just wondering if that represents a lot of reading on your part, your interests in American literature.
JF:  Yes, it does.   I’m just as interested in writers like the Beats, John Fante or Bukowski, as I am by the musical side of things.  And I think it’s that combination of literary with rhythm that is really what I do.  The rhythm will help you get to the heart of the matter a lot quicker, I think, because you feel it on yet another level.

TM:  When you talk about Bukowski and the Beats, these are people who seem to have an affinity with the rock music approach, is it because of the lifestyle or the extremity of the prose, do you think?
JF:  I don’t know, I think it was just part of the times, when Ginsberg and those guys were writing in they were just surrounded by jazz New York in the Fifties that’s what was going on there.  You hear people from New York talk about the Fifties and they don’t remember Chuck Berry, they remember the jazz going on there, because it was huge.  There was a big separation between what was going on in the cities and the rock and roll in the suburbs,  in the midwest.

TM:  One of the interesting things of the album is first person writing from an ironic point of view.   It’s like Randy Newman you get that detachment, it’s in character, in other words.  And it’s caused Randy Newman and all kinds of other people trouble…  ‘This guy thinks he is the king who does he think he is?’
JF:  I try to write and separate myself.   I keep it open for people to interpret things themselves.  It really doesn’t matter what it means to me.  When people ask me that, I’m not going to limit myself by telling you what the song means to me, what does it mean to you?

TM:  Come on, that’s what rock musicians always say, isn’t that a bit of a get-out clause?
JF:  No not really, it’s just a statement, it’s a piece of work and it leaves it open. People will come back to me after hearing it and say ‘this is what it means to me’.   That’s great.  And then I’ll find a different interpretation.   I’ll find it means that to me aswell, without me even knowing it.  It’s kind of a circle.   Words are just amazing that way, you just put them out there - they’re limitless in a lot of ways.

TM:  They are sometimes difficult to pin down, the songs, aren’t they?  They’re elliptical, a lot of imagery coming from all kinds of different directions.
JF:  I wanted to make a big Southern mythological record with this, lots of symbols and that would encompass a lot of what I see by living in the South. 

TM:  I think it’s a great album.    I’m listening to it all the time at home.  I was just wondering if the fact that you’re from an Irish heritage, if that’s influenced you at all?   Do you take from that at all?
JF:  I think it has to.   It’s who you are, you know, it’s a part of your being just being passed on through all that.  As much as we don’t want to say we are our fathers, you know, we are really. You look at your dad and you go ‘I’m not that guy’, but you really are in a lot of ways.    I think there’s a certain amount of acceptance you just have to have.  ‘OK, this is who I am, this is where I’m from’.

TM:  I have to quote back at you one of the reviews that you’ve had in this country in the Guardian.  It says ‘…the bedraggled croak of his voice and the weary drone of the cellos, slide guitars and harmonicas…’  Gosh, it sounds dispiriting, it’s not like that at all, this album.  There are a whole variety of tones on it - quite original production touches, and hints of later Tom Waits production sound.   I think you’ve worked with people who’ve worked with Tom Waits, like Mark Ribot and people like that.
JF:  I was fortunate enough to do that on my last record.  Mark Ribot came in for a couple of days and played...

TM:  Sorry, Mark Ribot.    With Americans you never know whether they pronounce it the French way or the Americanised way…
JF:   I’m the same with the Scots – ‘what did you say?’.    Tony Garnier played.  He plays with Dylan  I was lucky to be able to work with these guys.

TM:  Are you happy to acknowledge the Dylan influence?  A lot of people who have heard the album have said there’s a comparison there.
JF:  Who isn’t influenced by him?  He changed the entire scope of imagery in lyrics.   Anybody who even picks up a guitar, whether they realise it or not, and sings a song, is influenced by that guy. 

TM:  OK.   You’re playing in Edinburgh on Thursday October 3, which is something to look forward to.  I would certainly encourage anyone who can to get along there.  The album’s terrific, it’s called ‘Somewhere South of Wonder’, and this is Jeff Finlin and ‘Good Time’.

- Good Time -

TM:  I don’t know about you, but that pushes all the right buttons for me!   And he can quote Bukowski, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, all in the same sentence.  Definitely must have something going for him.  It’s a  great album, ‘Somewhere South of Wonder’ by Jeff Finlin.

Tom Morton Show, Weekdays, 14:05-16:00

BBC Radio Scotland