Open House

Crowded House keeps things mysterious

by Michael Pelusi

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Published: Aug 8, 2007

"We're attracted naturally anyway to diversity in our records," muses Neil Finn, frontman for the recently reassembled Crowded House, "which is possibly why we've been hard to pin down over the years."

HEY NOW, HEY NOW: Neil Finn (second from left) and Crowded House. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

At first, the statement sounds a tad disingenuous. During their initial heyday, from 1986 to '96, Crowded House didn't exactly toil in obscurity. Their self-titled debut yielded two top 10 U.S. singles, "Don't Dream It's Over" and "Something So Strong," songs still widely heard today. And while the band never achieved that kind of chart action in America afterward, they found plenty of subsequent success in other countries, including Finn's native New Zealand.

The band's music hardly passes for unconventional. Finn's winsome, Beatlesque songs are as comforting as a familiar face, and the albums were given a warm, radio-friendly polish.

But Finn's no dummy. He knows all that. "It's not so much that we were occupying the fringes or avant-garde, but we refused to be one thing or another, and therefore we slightly don't fit in."

See, the music Neil Finn has made over the years — as a member of Split Enz and Crowded House; solo work; duo albums with his older brother Tim, who initially started the Enz — has always been infused with a sense of eerie mystery. Finn writes timeless, pitch-perfect melodies, it's true; songs like "Distant Sun" and "Not the Girl You Think You Are" sound like they've been around forever. But his lyrics take the songs to another level.

The scenarios in Finn's songs are rarely clear-cut; at times they're downright obscure. But he has a keen ear for unlikely details. Something quotidian — a clock, a door, a room — will appear in a song in an unexpected or new way. Even "Don't Dream It's Over," a song we've all heard hundreds of times in cars, supermarkets and dentists' offices, seems to proceed in a stream of consciousness.

Regarding the evolution of his lyric-writing, Finn says, "I don't think that I was a natural lyricist in the way that there are people like Leonard Cohen or Dylan; people whose lyrics are often narrative, brilliantly conceived stories, almost like literature. My lyrics are more impressionistic. The way I found I could do it and feel like I could believe in them [was to] leave doorways open for people to examine them in different ways.

"I rely on my subconscious a lot. And I think I've just worked that same methodology now, even more so; just applying more rigorous standards, I hope, on the finished lyric and making each line count."

Many songs on the new Crowded House album, Time on Earth (ATO), are as strong as any Finn has written. No surprise, really; he's been on a serious roll from the last Crowded House full-length, Together Alone (1993), onward. But the new album came together in an unlikely and deeply bittersweet manner.

In March of 2005, Paul Hester, the band's original drummer, committed suicide. In the wake of his death, Finn reconnected with bass player Nick Seymour, and last year, the two joined forces with friends, family members and session hands to record what was going to be Finn's third solo album.

Near the end of the sessions, Finn gave Seymour a call. "I was realizing that I felt like I was in a band again," Finn says. "Maybe it was just having Nick around, maybe it was the manner we approached the record, but maybe it was also just a feeling I had about the songs and the way the record was shaping up.

"We had the conversation. It was not one I had expected to have, but Nick was feeling the same way as me. And in the end, we thought, well, there are a lot of reasons why we might say no. But the best possible reason to be in Crowded House again was that we just felt like we were, and we had the heart for it again. And it felt right."

And so, latter-day guitarist/keyboardist Mark Hart came back into the fold and a new drummer, former Beck sideman Matt Sherrod, joined. This new lineup plays on only four songs, but the album, despite a slightly soggy middle section, is a unified work. A sense of mortality has always loomed in Finn's work, and Time on Earth, dedicated to Hester's memory, is obviously no different. Even the upbeat first single, "Don't Stop Now," builds to an unexpectedly resonant, haunted peak, with Finn practically pleading, "All I want is something to cry about." In its final stretch, the album grows especially dark, with the band's weighty version of "Silent House," a song Finn wrote with the Dixie Chicks for their Taking the Long Way, and "You Are the One To Make Me Cry," where his falsetto and electric piano cast ghostly shadows.

Not that the sunny demeanor the band displayed in concerts and videos was a put-on. As keenly aware of the dour side of life as Finn is, he is equally attuned to the solace provided by communities — be it family, bandmates or fans.

The band plans to release a boxed set next year, but they also hope to be back in the studio to record the next album by then. "We're already playing really well," Finn says, "but I think with a whole bunch of touring under our belts, the anticipation for some new stuff is going to be really high."

(m_pelusi@citypaper.net)

Crowded House play Fri., Aug. 10, 8 p.m., $39.50-$42.50, with Pete Yorn, The Mann Center for the Performing Arts, 5201 Parkside Ave., 215-893-1999, www.manncenter.org.

 

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