LBC 1152AM - The Weekend Wireless Show with Jon Briggs
Broadcast Saturday 20 October 2001

Jon Briggs:  …We hope we find you fit and well and raring to go on a Saturday which is slightly grey and drizzly, but we brighten it up, of course, with the radio.  In a few moments we have… Jeff Finlin, from our ‘Department of You Heard Them Here First Before They Were Famous’, he’s playing the Borderline on Tuesday night… and the lovely Hazel O’Connor is here talking about ‘Breaking Glass’, how it made her famous, and what it did to her afterwards aswell... it’s all here on the Weekend Wireless Show…
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You are listening to the Weekend Wireless Show…. Where else would we be making so much noise about things on a Saturday morning?  Now, there is nothing like experience for a musician to finely polish his act, and experience is certainly what Jeff Finlin has got because he’s been doing it for years in various bands and combos.  He’s now used his experience as a solo artist and has just had his second solo album re-released on Gravity Records, which has garnered some ecstatic reviews, one calling it, and I quote, “a peach of an album”, and they’re not far wrong.

- Waiting on A Flood (part)  -

JB:  ‘Waiting on a Flood’ by Jeff Finlin, whose lyrics are as important as his music, as you might have observed.   He’s been termed... well how about ‘a natural poet’, that’ll do for starters.   He’s here playing a handful of dates in the UK and also here in the studio with me now.  Jeff, thanks for coming in. 
JF:  Thanks for having me.

JB: Original Fin is getting a major re-release, how did that come about?
JF:  I had been over a couple of times just kind of working it myself - there’s a fellow at BMG named Nick Stewart who had a radio show and had picked up the record and was playing it on his radio show.  He had a mind to do this new Gravity singer-songwriter label, and decided to put it out.

JB:  You’d done it originally, you released it yourself, hadn’t you?   How easy was it getting it released in the first place?
JF:  You just kind of do it.   I got it recorded and just put it out - box by the door - and just kept mailing it out.    You do what you can, you know.

JB:  It’s a thankless task, though, isn’t it?
JF:  Kind of.  Because I had to make a decision that I was only going to be able to do so much.  So I just started giving it away, and seeing what came back.  Just took that attitude.  And things started coming back.  That’s kind of the way it is.

JB:  Your experience extends way back to… when you first started gigging, it was kind of the punk scene round Boston?
JF:  Yeah, kind of,  I did that.  I started out as a drummer.  I played drums for ten years, and was kind of a late-blooming songwriter.

JB:  You don’t hear of many writers who are drummers, do you?
JF:  No, and believe me in Nashville I took a lot of ribbing for it, in the songwriting capital of the world, I got a lot of ‘Who does this guy think he is?’…

JB:  To look at you now you’d never have thought you were a punk.
JF:  No, I was never completely, wholeheartedly into the thing.   I kind of grew up with Dylan and the Stones, that kind of thing.

JB:  There’s an element of Dylan in what you do now, isn’t there?
JF:  Yeah, he’s kind of the king, what he takes from… he goes farther back into the beats.   He steals from Baudelaire, I like that.

JB:  There are some nice quotes referring to your work, one from Music Row Magazine, which says  ‘Imagine Steve Earle with three cups of espresso and a thesaurus’. 
JF:  That’s a flattering quote.  I like that.   Because Steve would probably never pick up a thesaurus, it’s probably against his religion, you know.

JB:  When you’d sat there and you’d done the drumming bit, what was the point where you converted to being a songwriter?
JF:  I don’t know.  I kind of always had something to say.  I actually met my wife, and just to go through that transition of having to break a lot of barriers down, a lot of walls down, to make the relationship work;  that was kind of a by-product of that.  I broke those walls down and all this stuff came just flooding out.    It was kind of a natural process really.

JB:  I know if I sat down and tried to write something that was vaguely akin to poetry, I’d just look at it the following morning and dismiss it as complete tosh.
JF:  Well I do that a lot too.

JB:  Well there’s got to be a lot of self-belief in what you write, hasn’t there?
JF:  Yeah, well, it goes back and forth.  A lot of my songs, I had no idea where they came from. I always say I didn’t write ’em, I wrote ’em down.  I still do that.  I kind of have to go into this space that I really don’t understand and they come in and I write them down.  It’s not really anything I do a lot of.

JB:  You have - as often discussed in this studio, in fact, with musicians - you have had that flirt with ‘the big boys’.  You signed to MCA, and had a writer’s deal with Warner-Chappell aswell.  What went wrong there?   You talked about a political nightmare you found yourself in.
JF:  Well, it’s just big business, and big money, that’s fine if that’s what you do.  I just didn’t do those things at that time.  You get into a market where people are… It depends how secure someone’s job is.   If you get signed by a guy and their job’s not so secure it doesn’t matter what you do…

JB:  They go and you go with them.
JF:  Sure, it’s kind of bigger than all of us, it’s this big machine.

JB:  Does that not frustrate you immensely?
JF:  It did back then.  Now I’m a little more mature, and it doesn’t really… Things happen for a reason, I believe now.

JB:  How did you get rid of those frustrations?  How did you deal with that?
JF:  I had to take some time off, because I reached a point where I was just frustrated and angry a lot, and I just had to stop doing it for a while.

JB:  You signed to Little Dog Records for Highway Diaries, which was your first one.  How was that received?
JF:  It was received very well.  It was a smaller company - they didn’t have the power to push it, but I got to the point where I did a lot of touring with that record.    It was a stepping stone, I think.

JB:  There is a comment here that Original Fin is something of ‘a novella about the story of the everyman’   Is that fair, is it accurate? 
JF:  There are certain things in all of us that are the same.  Everybody has their own story that deals with living your life, and what’s important, and what’s not important, and how you deal with insecurity.  Everybody has their own story that’s similar in dealing with the same basic things about their life and that’s kind of what it’s about.

JB:  Do those same basic things infiltrate the other aspects of your life?   As well as a singer-songwriter, we mentioned the poetry.    You also paint aswell.
JF:  Yeah, when I have time. Yes they do.  It’s just a desire to create. 

JB:  Does it make you slightly schizophrenic?
JF:  It's just... I have this incredible desire to create.  I have to really control that, because it takes over my life sometimes, it can make me miserable or whatever…

JB:  We are fans of the live number, as regular listeners to this section know, so would you be so kind as to do a live number for us and also tell us what it’s about before you do so.
JF:  Sure.   It’s kind of self-explanatory, we had a little boy about six years ago and this is what came out of it, it’s called ‘She’s A Mama Now’.

JB:  Jeff Finlin, live on LBC…

- She’s A Mama Now  -

JB: Jeff Finlin, live on LBC.   The only place you’ll find stuff like that is on the Weekend Wireless Show.  Fabulous.   And such a privilege when people play live here in the studio.  We love it very much.  Thank you very much indeed.
JF:  Thanks for having me.

JB:  You’re playing the Borderline on Tuesday...
JF:  Yes.

JB: Then later in the week you’re playing Wymeswold.
JF:  Wymeswold, wherever that is.  A crazy British amusement park or something…

JB:  The equivalent of Nashville I’m sure… all the musicians that go down to Wymeswold...  We were talking about this before and the only thing I can think of is there’s a cheese called Lymeswold.  Does anyone know where Wymeswold is?    Displaying my ignorance…we don’t know where Wymeswold is.  But I know you’ll have fun playing there. But if you want to catch up with him then it’s the Borderline, because he'll be there on Tuesday night.   And you will come back and talk to us again, won’t you?
JF:  I’d love to, thanks.

JB:  Jeff Finlin.    It’s LBC and we’ll probably talk to more exciting people along the way..  Because they just kind of drop in, we’re lucky like that.  The door’s open, people wander in off the streets, they’ve got guitars, they play stuff, and we just sit there in awe.
 

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