Crowded House's Together Alone (33 1/3 Oceania)

Intertextual, passionate and personal throughout, Crowded House's Together Alone is a key addition to the surprisingly limited range of scholarship on one of Australasia's most successful and adored bands. Fusing pop music with place and landscape, Crowded House's Together Alone (1993) was unprecedented in its Australasian context, and in the process of making this album, the group's sound transformed profoundly. Crowded House's Together Alone examines why Neil Finn took the daring decision to record amid the wilds of Karekare Beach, West Auckland, considers how British producer Youth impacted the band's dynamics, and places the album within a wider artistic context, expanding beyond pop. The book also recounts author Barnaby Smith's visit to Karekare on the trail of Together Alone's atmospheric melancholy – a psychogeographic adventure exploring what it means to visit a landscape under the spell of the music it has inspired. A song-by-song analysis further explores the fragile alchemy that produced the most poetic statement in the Crowded House catalogue. Read more