Crowded House’s Moodiest Album Is the Subject of a New Book

When Barnaby Smith got the chance to write a book about a Crowded House album, he didn’t choose their self-titled debut – home to Don’t Dream It’s Over – or the hit-driven Woodface. Instead, he opted for 1993’s Together Alone, the band’s first LP recorded in leader Neil Finn’s homeland of New Zealand and a moody outlier in the band’s generally sunny discography.

“I’ve never been ecstatic about the really big Crowded House songs,” says Smith, a journalist (and Broadsheet’s chief subeditor) based in the Blue Mountains. “I’m more interested in the obscurer, darker side of Neil Finn’s musical sensibility. And that’s really beautifully expressed on this album.”

For his entry in the Oceania subset of Bloomsbury’s long-running 33 1/3 series – in which writers explore a single album in a pocket-sized volume – Smith combines scholarship and music criticism with personal perspective and elements of travelogue. He spent a week in Karekare Beach, West Auckland, where Crowded House decamped with British producer Martin “Youth” Glover, to craft a record steeped in that unique landscape.

“The story involves them retreating to a fairly strange, remote part of New Zealand and ensconcing themselves there for a few months to record,” Smith says. “So the album has this really strong connection with, and sound of, a particular place.”

Together Alone, the band’s final album before a decade-long hiatus from ’96 to ’06, takes risks as a rule. It opens with a brooding ballad named for its isolated beach setting and closes with a title track bolstered by a 30-voice Māori choir. Yet it also includes the concert staple Distant Sun and the funky Locked Out.

Smith first obtained it as a secondhand CD in 1999, after relocating from his childhood home of Australia to England at age 12. He connected to it as both a musical oddity and an antipodean artefact when he was a world away. Since then, Smith has interviewed the band’s frontman twice, though Finn declined to chat for the book.

Being split between two countries during his formative years, Smith is neatly positioned to reflect on Finn’s status as a New Zealander who made his name in Australia. “I used to be very anti the idea that they were an Australian band,” he says. “But having looked into their story so much, I think if they are going to be from anywhere, it’s going to be Australia. They formed in Melbourne, and at the time two-thirds of the band was Australian – it was just Neil who wasn’t.”

After he finished writing Crowded House’s Together Alone, Smith began expanding it into a PhD he’s now working on at the University of Sydney. Appropriately enough, the topic is the role of landscape in certain key antipodean albums. And Smith can confirm that, thanks to his sister handing off a copy in Auckland, Finn now owns the book too.

“So he knows it exists,” Smith says wryly. “I don’t think he’s read it yet.”