In this interview, Barnaby Smith unpacks how Karekare’s wild beauty shaped Crowded House’s most ambitious album — and why Together Alone still resonates as a masterpiece of music and place.
Barnaby Smith’s deep-dive into Together Alone, Crowded House’s most enigmatic and expansive record, is more than just a study of a beloved album — it’s an exploration of how music and place can become profoundly inseparable.
In this latest entry in the 33 1/3 Oceania series, Barnaby Smith unpacks not only Neil Finn’s most spiritually charged songwriting, but also the intense geographical presence of Karekare, the remote West Auckland beach town where the album was recorded.
The book draws on intertextual and psychogeographic methods to illuminate how the landscape — its mist, its isolation, its history — seeped into the sound, lyrics, and atmosphere of the record.
More than any other Crowded House release, Together Alone embodies a sense of location, becoming a vivid example of how environment can shape creative output.
This is an album where the land sings back — and Smith’s book listens closely.
Catch our interview with the author below.
HAPPY: What are you up to today?
BARNABY SMITH: Ha, juggling a confused mixture of work, study and childcare.
HAPPY: Tell us a little bit about where you live, what do you love about it?
BARNABY SMITH: Currently I live in Leura in the Blue Mountains.
I like it in the moments when out of nowhere you see a large flock of black cockatoos passing overhead, when the valleys are engulfed by mist and, to risk a cliché, the smell of fires burning in the depths of winter.
HAPPY: What initially drew you to Together Alone as the focus for a full-length critical study, as opposed to another Crowded House album?
BARNABY SMITH: Firstly, and simply, it is probably their best album.
This is both my opinion along with the opinion of Neil Finn and, I would tentatively speculate, the majority of Crowded House fans.
The album also lends itself to a treatment like a 33 1/3 because of the narrative attached to it.
The band opted to escape from the draining nature of the centralised music industry to record this album in a private home at Karekare, which although just an hour from Auckland is a pretty removed, rather wild coastal spot.
So the band’s decision to do this, as well as the period spent there recording, gives this album a “story”, which provides a foundation for analysing the actual music.
So a key factor is a theme of place. Few pop albums are as closely entwined with a particular geographical setting as this one, so the book allowed me to explore Karekare – its history, its flora and fauna, its weather, and how those things play a part on the album.
Together Alone also exhibits a certain strain of acute, beautiful melancholy and even darkness to Finn’s songwriting that I don’t think is found on other Crowded House albums to the same depth – certainly not on Woodface, maybe a little on Temple of Low Men.
HAPPY: How did your intertextual and psychogeographic approaches shape your writing and understanding of the album?
BARNABY SMITH: In terms of intertextuality, that just involved drawing on some references from literature to try and understand certain aspects of the album – and Karekare – in interesting or different ways.
Anyone who loves Neil Finn’s music will be familiar with a certain otherworldly tingle that is felt in response to a lot of his greatest songs – and there are a fair few of these moments on Together Alone.
So I wanted to try and articulate this elusive experience/feeling of being moved by melody and harmony, and for that I looked to a particular poem by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, as well as Marcel Proust.
Probably the most significant section that took an intertextual approach, though, focuses on the Aotearoa poet Allen Curnow, who lived at Karekare for a time.
Together Alone offers a quite exultant, metaphysical take on the human perception of landscape, and some of Curnow’s work is the opposite of that – quite objective and almost materialist.
So Curnow’s poems were useful companion texts to Together Alone in understanding Karekare – it’s as if Together Alone is the upper, and I needed the downer of Curnow to level things out a bit.
As for psychogeography, when I spent a week at Karekare I leaned on the framework of this practice – that is, put simply, exploring the surroundings in an aimless way according to whim and a sense of spontaneity, though always informed by some aspect of Together Alone.
HAPPY: What was it like visiting Karekare Beach? Did being physically present there shift your perception of the album in any way?
BARNABY SMITH: I’m dubious of the idea that music can be experienced “better” or differently in one place over another, but yeah, listening closely to the album at Karekare was a pretty special experience, whilst fully admitting the romantic projection I was bringing to it.
I wouldn’t say I interpret or hear the album too differently now having been there though. I guess I was more interested in how the music affected my impression of the landscape whilst there, rather than vice-versa.
The trip there itself was a bit intense as I faced some pretty wild weather, and it was not too long after Cyclone Gabrielle had nearly ripped the place apart.
The exquisite desolation of the black-sand beaches of West Auckland is certainly something that stays with you, Crowded House association or not.
HAPPY: How do you think Together Alone challenged or redefined the notion of Australia and New Zealand Aotearoa’s place in the global pop and rock music scene of the 1990s?
BARNABY SMITH: This is a really interesting and important question, but it wasn’t something I got into much in the book, as I was more interested on looking at Together Alone as a work of musical and literary art rather than surveying anything relating to the wider industry or scenes.
That said, I think the album reminded the world where Neil Finn, by that time a bit of an internationalist pop star, came from and where his heart lay, with its explicit reference to place (the song ‘Kare Kare’) as well as the title track which used a Māori choir and Cook Islands log drummers.
I also think Australasian rock and pop was sufficiently eclectic and self-reliant by this time (1993) for the album to not make a huge difference to how the world saw our music – any large contrast is between Together Alone and Woodface.
The album also introduced the house where they recorded to the world as a possible recording or rehearsal destination – Pearl Jam spent time there, so did Portishead, and it was reported that Radiohead toyed with recording what became Kid A there.
HAPPY: Can you describe how the producer Youth influenced the band’s sound and dynamics during the recording process? What did he bring that was previously missing?
BARNABY SMITH: Crowded House recruited Youth, known mainly for his work as the bass player in Killing Joke and a dance music pioneer, because they wanted to make something more experimental, loose and psychedelic.
He definitely took them in this direction, not so much through technical musical guidance, but more through encouraging them to “jam” more or indulge in different sonic effects and instrumentation.
A lot of the wackier elements of the album unfortunately didn’t make it past the great Bob Clearmountain in the mixing stage.
There was also apparently a bit of friction in the air between the band and Youth, and I wonder if that actually helped bring a certain edge or urgency to certain songs.
Neil Finn wanted to push the boundaries of the band’s identity and see what other versions of Crowded House might be possible, and working with someone like Youth was part of that experiment.
Youth is/was also a fully qualified druid, and while some of those in the Karekare set-up might have regarded that as new-agey bollocks, having someone with that kind of mindset may have been appropriate amid this landscape – and added a bit of theatre to things.
HAPPY: What other artists, movements, or works do you feel echo or parallel Together Alone’s ambitions?
BARNABY SMITH: In terms of retreating to the wilderness to write or record an album, Together Alone is preceded by a few examples in an Australian/Aotearoa context, none more notable that the Triffids heading to the remote family farm to record their third album, In the Pines.
Doing this was also nothing particularly new – numerous 1960s/1970s bands did it, such as Traffic and Fairport Convention, and you could even make a case for the Rolling Stones’ debauched time in France for Exile on Main Street.
He doesn’t have a great deal in common with Finn as a songwriter, but an ambition to try and capture a sense of landscape through sonic means as much as lyrics, within pop structures, I think was part of the mission of Martin Phillipps of the Chills (though I’m probably bias as I’m currently working on a PhD that looks at this very subject, with these very bands).
I struggled to answer this question, which is testament to the fact it’s quite a singular, out-of-time album. Crowded House certainly haven’t recreated the sound on their subsequent records.
HAPPY: Were there any surprises or contradictions you discovered in the band’s creative process while researching and writing the book?
BARNABY SMITH: It wasn’t so surprising as much as notable that several songs were really old, and were dusted down for this album.
‘Catherine Wheels’ and ‘Walking on the Spot’ went back to the early 1980s or earlier.
Another thing is the stunning quality of some of the songs that were left off: ‘You Can Touch,’ ‘I Am In Love,’ ‘Newcastle Jam.’
I was also surprised by some of the lingering ghosts that some of the main players still hold a long time after the album was made. Nick Seymour and Finn have both made rather less than flattering remarks about Youth, and indeed the whole recording experience, in the last few years.
HAPPY: How does the book explore the impact of landscape and place on the album’s sound and atmosphere?
BARNABY SMITH: This is at the core of the book, addressing how Karekare affected the direction of Finn’s lyrics, as well as how the band and Youth attempted to draw on the surrounding environment to create the album’s sonic character.
So the book gets into specific lyrical ideas and also proposes that certain instrumental sections reflect specific environmental elements, such as waves on a beach or an enormous sea mist rolling in to the beach.
The record also has a few examples of “field sounds” to strengthen that sense of situatedness and locality.
HAPPY: How did writing this book impact your personal relationship to the album, both as a listener and as a music critic?
BARNABY SMITH: As a critic, I realised that criticism never bloody ends.
The book could have been double its length, with one idea leading to another, to another, and so on.
As a listener, I guess when I hear the album today it has an extra dimension of meaning as I devoted the best part of a year immersed in it for this book, as well as making the trip to Karekare.
So I’d say it’s just sunk under my skin a little bit more. I was expecting the moment to come when I’d get thoroughly sick of the album, but it never arrived.
HAPPY: Given the limited scholarly focus on Crowded House so far, what do you hope your book contributes to the academic and cultural understanding of the band in a larger sense?
BARNABY SMITH: I think that Neil Finn’s songwriting at its best, on certain records, is worthy of analysis in a scholarly context in the same way that Bob Dylan, the Beatles or Leonard Cohen have been – that is, his songs are artworks of literary and aesthetic value.
So I hope this is a tiny starting point to surveying Neil’s career with this approach in mind (not that this book is overly academic).
In terms of a cultural understanding, the book was in part an effort to redress any lingering idea that Crowded House are a “daggy” or corny band to like, an opinion I remember was widespread in the 1990s.
Together Alone is experimental, adventurous and risky, a refutation of that view.
HAPPY: What makes you happy?
BARNABY SMITH: Getting 18 or more out of 25 in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend quiz.
