Australia is keen to claim Harper Finn, the latest star from New Zealand’s famous music family
At high school and among his musician mates, he was known as “Harper, the piano player”. But his debut single is making a name for Harper Finn, the latest star from NZ’s famous music family.
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THE DNA giveaway that Harper Finn is a member of New Zealand’s first family of music isn’t in the voice or the looks.
It’s in the piano playing on his debut single Conversations (With The Moon).
The 21-year-old singer and songwriter’s discordant notes echo the music his father Tim and uncle Neil created in Split Enz.
“I am a piano player. I’ve grown up with the sound of the piano in the house,” he said.
“That dark, sinister twist, it’s like the wrong note. I play the piano all the time, it’s where a lot of emotion comes out so when I played that chord, it was a feeling I had never felt before.
“That was the door into that song.”
Finn played his first show in Australia last week as his dark, indie pop song continues to find fans here courtesy of Triple J airplay.
That exposure almost guarantees we will claim him as one of ours just as we adopted the other musical members of his family.
“It was really the first time I was being played (regularly) on the radio; someone sent me a link and I was hearing it on the website. It’s bubbling away over here which is so exciting,” he said.
The young songwriter studied music at high school and served his touring apprenticeship as the keyboardist for eight-piece hip hop band Lakes.
He popped up in the choir during the live recording sessions for Neil Finn’s album Out of Silence in 2017, but believes he has come into his own as he began to jam with friends and met other players in New Zealand.
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“It’s been a lot of osmosis, soaking in aspects in the quality of (dad’s) songwriting and the attention to the lyrics and melody and them being a perfect marriage,” he said.
“I really found music, as hard as it might be to believe, in my own way, at high school and meeting other musicians who just knew me as Harper, the guy who plays piano.”
With only four songs out in the world thus far, including Conversations’ B side Teenage Queen, Finn has been using his gigs to road test new songs for a curious audience.
“When you are performing, you always have the internal monologue about impressing the one person in the crowd who looks like they aren’t into it,” he said, laughing.
Originally published as Australia is keen to claim Harper Finn, the latest star from New Zealand’s famous music family