Neil Finn's "Don't Dream It's Over"

Look, if Neil Finn knew how he wrote this song he'd have written a hundred of them by now. But there's only one this good, only one that he closes every concert with. And I say that with all due respect for the dozens of gorgeous, felicitous songs that he has composed over the many decades of his rich career. 

The ones that are on another level have an aura and sound like nobody wrote them, like they've always been there. Like folk songs. The ones that are on another level were spoken through, not by, the writer. Often, the kernel of the song, or even the whole thing, comes to the writer in a dream. A few off the top of my head: Townes's "If I Needed You," Rundgren's "Bang on a Drum," and, yes, McCartney's "Yesterday," the most covered of all Beatles songs, which is saying something.

Now, all of us get unique, potentially important ideas all the time, and mostly they go: poof. Or, if they don't just vaporize, we don't know what to do with them. This is where craft and commitment come in. You need the changes and the notes and the figures residing within you at all time. I read an interview with Bob Dylan once where he told the interviewer that even as they were talking he was running the fingerings for a particular song he was working on through his head. Ideas for great songs don't just come from dreams and intuitions, they also hatch from an awareness and mastery of the technical elements of the most transcendent of songs.

Neil said he wrote "Don't Dream It's Over" when he excused himself from a social gathering that wasn't working for him, and went to another room and just starting playing around with an idea. It's an interesting thing about songs, or maybe about all art, that a minor idea, if expressed in properly dramatic or grandiose terms, with the proper setting applied to it, can come across as profound. Does this attest to the unitary nature of experience or, perhaps, the arbitrariness of hierarchy? 

Let's consider the lineage of "Dream." When you listen to the live version I've posted here, you can hear that the organ passages in the solo section sound much like "Whiter Shade of Pale," which itself was based in part on Bach's "Air on a G String." Now, before we accuse our modern popsters of stealing from and dumbing down Bach, we should bear in mind that Bach may have stolen the melody from a tavern drinking song. Sandy Denny sang, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" Allow me to ask, "Who Knows Where the Best Ideas Come From?" No one knows, but you've got to be ready.

A couple more quick notes on this performance. It's from the Seven Worlds Collide concert video, drawn from a week of performances Neil orchestrated down in his home of New Zealand, featuring an ad hoc band Neil put together featuring friends of his like Eddie Vedder, Johnny Marr, and a couple Radiohead guys. It works far, far better than it has any right to. Recommended. As for this song, it features what might be the least gratuitous audience singing I've ever heard.