Family affair

Neil Finn, his brother Tim and sons Liam and Elroy are just four of the 21 songwriters, 14 backing musicians and a dog collaborating on the album The Sun Came Out just released in the UK. Finn also invited new faces including Wilco, earmarked as “likeminded, besotted with music”. Ranging from harmonic pop to campfire folk to West Coast guitar fuzz, the album’s 24 tracks all have the same unforced, elemental air. That’s due, Finn says, to the proximity of the Auckland coastline (“very fertile for the imagination”) and a three-week recording period, which precluded superfluous polishing. The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick writes: “If you are an admirer of classic, melodic, lyrically poetic, slightly left field post-Beatles songwriting, then there is at least an album’s worth of real gems to be uncovered here.”