Crowded House’s Together Alone by Barnaby Smith - New Book Explores the Power of Iconic Band
A landmark addition to the limited scholarship on one of Australasia’s most iconic bands, Crowded House’s Together Alone offers a deeply intertextual, personal and passionate exploration of the group’s seminal 1993 album.
In this new book, journalist and poet Barnaby Smith considers Together Alone as a pivotal artistic moment for Neil Finn and Crowded House - an album that redefined the band’s sound through an unprecedented fusion of pop, landscape, and spiritual introspection. Recorded amid the wild beauty of Karekare Beach on Auckland’s west coast, the album stands as the most poetic and sonically adventurous work in the band’s catalogue.
Smith examines why Finn took the bold step of recording in this isolated natural setting, the influence of British producer Youth, and how these choices helped generate an album of rich emotional and geographic resonance. A detailed song-by-song analysis sheds new light on the fragile alchemy behind the music, while a first-hand account of the author’s pilgrimage to Karekare offers a unique psychogeographic reading of the record’s atmosphere.
Part music criticism, part memoir, and part landscape writing, Crowded House’s Together Alone is a must-read for fans of the band, scholars of popular music, and anyone interested in the interplay between place and creativity.