The Evening Pines - It Will Talk A Long Time CS (Both Worlds, 2023)
"Paul Finn recorded and toured with The Kingsbury Manx and Spider Bags through much of the 2000s and early 2010s, but the roots of his solo project, evening pines dates all the way back to 1997.
In the summer of 1997, he was getting ready to move from NJ to Chicago with his band at the time, Movere Workshop, an instrumental post-prog band featuring Mikael Jorgensen (now of Wilco). Wanting to document his time growing up in NJ and finding himself amidst Jorgensen’s and the band’s recording equipment, he recorded the ambient instrumental piece rathskellar, named after their practice space. Little did he know at that time, that this recording would be the beginning of a 25 year recording project, which would bounce between a cassette 4 track, six recording studios in multiple states, ten recording engineers and eleven different musicians.
The move to Chicago and subsequent work in the warehouse of famed Drag City record label indelibly changed the arc of the song cycle, which became more vocal and songwriter oriented. Work on the record was steady but life was chaotic and the project began the first of a series of stalls and stops.
A move to Chapel Hill in 2003 led to a new productive era, as PF began to record and collaborate with drummer and multi-instrumentalist Lee Waters (Work Clothes, Dean and Britta Band, Essex Green) in his home studio on his 1/4” Tascam 388 tape machine. Touring with the Manx started to pick up at this time so the project stalled again until a final but crucial session with Nick Petersen at his Track & Field studios in Carrboro, where they recorded the center pieces of the record; the lushly orchestrated supply and demand and the album closing cover of Sandy Denny’s timeless It’ll take a long time.
Unfortunately, after this session things started to fall apart again, and he boxed away the now large collection of reels and tapes, and moved to Austin, Texas. It was not until after moving back to NC after a decade and finding some of the reels while unpacking that life began anew on the record. Now armed with a recording studio in the basement of his home, PF set about the two year project of locating, organizing, baking, transferring and mixing the tapes into a cohesive and completed record. That record is the aptly named It will take a long time.
It will take a long time is a record that sounds unmoored from any particular era; from the Sebadoh-plays-Exile opening of hope, constantly changing through the Zombies-esque girls who would say yes, and ending on the denouement of the almost-title-track, it is a song cycle that was almost lost but inscrutably survived the decades." - Both Worlds