In the end, love was the unifying principle in Finn Andrews’ new Veils album, which just goes to show.
Because the years leading into it hadn’t run smoothly.
There was Covid, of course, particularly brutal on live acts. Record label issues. Then there was the broken wrist.
Andrews broke it live on stage during a particularly intense moment on piano.
"It sounds wild and Jerry Lee Lewis-esque, but it was an absolute f...ing nightmare," Andrews says.
It’s good now, but there was convalescent downtime, so Andrews got stuck into song writing back at his Auckland base.
"I was in a cast and couldn’t use my right hand. I sang the melody lines, then recorded the right-hand piano part, then the left-hand part. It might have been an interesting, avant-garde process if it wasn’t also just profoundly annoying."
All the same, he managed to amass great sheaves of work.
The result is ... And Out Of The Void Came Love, The Veils’ first studio album in seven years. A double album.
It’s an album of two halves, Andrews says, designed to be listened to that way — probably on vinyl. But even when he’d settled on the format, the meaning of the songs as a whole still eluded him.
"Then my daughter was born, and suddenly the whole record made sense to me," he says
In fact, she was born just two days after the album was finished.
And indeed the final track on the second disc is Cradle Song, which seems to have found favour with the infant.
"Actually, yeah, my partner did put that on recently and she did seem to enjoy it."
So, love. And, in the end, having gone through and come out the other side of all of that, a big expansive double album seemed the right thing to do.
"It felt like a big confident thing to do and it felt full of life, and I wanted to make that statement, I suppose," Andrews says.
There are big themes. Track one is called Time.
"Having a baby, obviously, during a pandemic, you are presented with some pretty big subjects to ponder."
At the height of lockdown, when "the fabric of everyday life was beginning to fray", matters of life and death seemed to be on everyone’s mind for a bit, he says.
"It was quite a unique element of all this, wasn’t it, everyone in a similar headspace at the same time."
Typically for Andrews and The Veils, the album has a great colourful cast of characters for the frontman to inhabit. They stretch from the strings-powered philospher-croon of Time, through pulpit banger No Limit of Stars — "I wonder if there’s another primate sitting on a rock out there/squinting into the sky, shaking it’s little fist in the air/saying ‘oh, God, how can I be so alone when there’s no limit of stars ..." — to the distorted rocking street-Nostradamus of Epoch, and on to the Spanish-guitar story-telling of disc two.
It’s all, true to form, entirely filmic — from a songwriter beloved of the likes of David Lynch.
"I have always enjoyed that, the filmic element to the album. I have always, right from the beginning, exploited that side of things," Andrews says.
And the frontman sings all those characters like he means them.
"I feel like I have really found my voice in the last few years as well."
Giving up smoking a few years back helped, as had getting a little older — 39 now — and finding a confidence that eluded him earlier.
"This is probably the first Veils album I have felt some degree of control over what I was doing with my voice."
That includes the Flamenco-flourished nylon-string guitar-driven tunes that dominate the second record.
"That guitar really changed my life," he says. "I fell in love with it. I got taken to this huge guitar shop in the Netherlands on the last solo tour and you go in there and someone meets you with a coffee at the door. You are walked through this old mansion house and each floor is a different era of guitars. I found my way to this one and I just knew it would bring some very special songs to me.
"Sure enough, within very little time at all, all of these songs were written on this nylon-string guitar."
While Andrews is clearly happy to have the album out, there’s a hardly constrained excitement about the prospect of playing live again.
"It’s going to be such a relief to do that ... it has been a long time," he says.
"Just the pleasure of making a racket again, I miss it so much when it is not there."
The gigs
Dive, Dunedin, Friday, March 17
Sherwood, Queenstown, Saturday, March 18
