201. Song No. 3,019: “Energy Spent,” Liam Finn
I’ll Be Lightning, 2008

Liam Finn is a strong argument for musical nepotism, suggesting that maybe only an incredible talent can tease out the greatness in others.

The son of Neil Finn, Liam looks nothing like his father but sounds enchantingly, eerily similar with dashes of inevitable influence from the countless other famous music-slingers he’s spent his entire life surrounded by weaving in and out of this album. “Music Moves My Feet” and “Remember When,” the two tracks immediately following this one, would be right at home on any of his father’s solo albums and could, quite frankly, pass for Neil’s vocals; the album’s titular track is straight-up tribute to the post-LSD Beatles sound.

I admittedly haven’t listened to the second generation of Finns as much as the first, though this really is one excellent, tightly performed debut album that covers a wide-ranging, multidimensional world, and made all the more remarkable for the fact that Liam essentially wrote all its songs and played most of its instruments and produced/engineered nearly the whole damn thing itself in his dad’s studio.

But it’s “Energy Spent” that got to me first, a true second-chance gift from this project, whose tune originally sounds irresistibly bouncy until the lyrics color that energy with something a little more frenetically anxious fueling it despite proclaiming over and over that “I’m not broken just a little energy spent.” Which is a sentiment I can certainly relate to in normal times but has become the prevailing summation of the past two years and counting.