Today’s track premiere comes from Australia’s FINN, a band anchored by the brothers Mark and Luke Finn. Oh Mary comes from their tenth album Control, and features regular band members Terry Hart (multi-instrumentalist), Jeremy Staples (bass), and Daniel Angelini (drums). It’s a gently chugging, low-key reaffirmation of dedication which eschews the big gestures and relies on the more everyday “I’ve been looking for you and I won’t be letting you down.” Not a 24 carat bankable gesture, but a more valuable personal “by the strength of my right hand” commitment.
Speaking of the song, FINN told Americana UK that “We’re huge JJ Cale fans, and one of the things he mastered was simplicity – that ability to make something feel completely effortless while every note is actually incredibly measured and controlled underneath it. People think that kind of playing is easy until they try to do it themselves. Oh Mary was definitely influenced by that philosophy musically. Lyrically too, the song reveals a little more each time you sit with it. On the surface, it can feel like a simple lost-love story, but underneath it, there’s this quieter idea that people move through each other’s lives in different ways; some connections lasting, others temporary, but all of them leaving something behind. One of my favourite lines in the song is: ‘With every new morning, there will be another past.‘”
