Crowded House's Together Alone - (33 1/3 Oceania) by Barnaby Smith (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Intertextual, passionate and personal, combining poetics, psychogeography, music theory, lyric analysis and biography, Crowded House's Together Alone is a key addition to scholarship on this cherished band.

Fusing pop music with place and landscape, Crowded House's Together Alone 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. It 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 critique further illuminates the fragile alchemy that produced the most poetic statement in the Crowded House catalogue.

Review Quotes

"This is an album where the land sings back - and Smith's book listens closely." --Laura Gordon, Happy Mag

About the Author

Barnaby Smith is an award-winning writer, editor, critic, musician and poet based in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia. He has written about music, art, literature and film for publications including The Quietus, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review, NME and the ABC.