Nashville-based singer-songwriter Jeff Finlin started his career in the mid-west as a rock drummer.   Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the grandson of Irish railroad workers, and was brought up in the mid-west hinterland, somewhere between cornfields and industrial wastelands.   Upon graduating, he moved to Boston where he kicked around the post-punk scene of the early 1980s.   Between bouts of college and an endless string of bands, he finally moved to Nashville with long-time friend and collaborator Gwil Owen. 

“I really don’t have anything to do with the Music Row scene, it’s really separate”, he explains.   “But there’s a whole bunch of good people there, it’s a good place to be for a musician.  A lot of the two scenes are starting to intermingle a lot more.   In the ‘90s, when the country scene was just exploding, it was completely separate, and  to a certain extent, it still is.”

Jeff and Gwil formed The Thieves, a rock outfit that released Seduced by Money, a sole album on Capitol, that was produced by acclaimed singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw and garnered a top fifty hit with 'Everything But My Heart'.    As Owens built up a healthy reputation as a successful songwriter, Finlin became bored with the creative constraints of just being a drummer and began writing songs.

“I was kinda known as a drummer, and when I made the switch it raised a lot of eyebrows”, he says.   “I guess within a year I’d signed a publishing deal and then a record deal, so I guess it was what I needed to be doing.”

He travelled around America playing music before winding up in LA and recording the critically-acclaimed Highway Diaries for Pete Anderson’s Little Dog Records.   It was very much a kind of rootsy-rock record that signalled the direction he was heading, musically.

“When I was growing up I listened to American rock’n’roll, Foghat, the James Gang, the Stones”, he says.   “I love Lucinda Williams, a lot of Randy Newman and also Ryan Adams – it’s like being in the South, close to where all that stuff comes from.”

His next album, last year’s Original Fin, shows that Jeff has made a smoothly executed transition from behind the drums to frontman.  A highly distinctive vocalist whose taut warble and saturnine songs weave an often absorbing spell, this is a characteristically bluesy excursion.  His songs often sound like well-worn classics, even though they’re all newly penned.   The soulful grip that he puts around June, a song of yearning and ache, is quite irresistible.   He specialises in rambling yarns of relationships, like the easy gait of The Perfect Mark of Cain, with its rural rootsy feel that will connect instantly with those into the Americana singer-songwriter genre.

To coincide with his latest tour, he has a new album, Somewhere South of Wonder, released on the adventurous Gravity Records.   Jeff Finlin is an American roots-rock act prepared and willing to make a UK connection.   He is deserving of our support.   Go out and buy this new album and make sure you catch him on his next UK trip.

Alan Cackett
Maverick 
September 2002