Tim Finn

It Started with Split Enz 1993

Tim Finn, Sound City Recording Studios, LA 1999

“Protected” is almost a mystical song to me. What is the protection?

Well, Dharma, the Path, the Way. Maybe there is a way, maybe there is a path. You fall off it and then you get back on it. Just knowing it’s there is a liberation in itself. And certainly this song comes from an experience. I went to the mountains outside Sydney and did a meditation retreat for ten days. I didn’t speak to anybody and was silent for ten days. It was very hard—we had to get up at 4 o’clock every morning and meditated for ten hours every day. After that, I felt refreshed and songs began to just come through.

“Persuasion,” which you wrote with Richard Thompson…

He had written this beautiful melody, this elegant tune for a film. I said, “Please, I’d like to make this into a song.” And he had never thought of it as a song, because it has quite a wide sweep from highs to lows. It was just waiting to be written. There was a song inside it, and I didn’t have to think about it much. The film was about a guy who could persuade people, con people and it seemed like a natural title. And then, “I’ll always be a man who is open to persuasion.” It just wrote itself.