Crowded House are releasing a new album, Dreamers Are Waiting, this week, and this is a band I've really found myself appreciating and being influenced by more and more over the years, so I really wanted to dig into their catalog. A lot of people only know "Don't Dream It's Over," or maybe that and a couple other singles, especially in America, but they have so many great songs. 

Crowded House deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 from Crowded House (1986)
Tracks 6, 7, 8 and 9 from Temple of Low Menn (1988)
Tracks 10, 11, 12 and 13 from Woodface (1991)
Tracks 14, 15, 16 and 17 from Together Alone (1993)
Track 18 from Finn by The Finn Brothers (1995)
Tracks 19 and 20 from Everyone Is Here by The Finn Brothers (2004)
Tracks 21 and 22 from Time On Earth (2007)

Split Enz, led by Tim Finn, were one of the biggest bands from New Zealand in the '70s and early '80s, with his little brother Neil Finn joining the band midway through their original run and writing and singing some of their later hits. After the breakup of Split Enz, Neil Finn's new band Crowded House kind of took the baton as the biggest New Zealand band, enjoying much more international success with their debut album than Split Enz had achieved. Eventually Neil and Tim began writing songs together as a duo, although the first batch of songs they wrote for an album as The Finn Brothers wound up on Crowded House's 3rd album Woodface, including the great "Tall Trees," with Tim becoming an on-again, off-again member of the band. 

Given how The Finn Brothers' catalog became sort of tangled with Crowded House's, I thought it made sense to include songs from their two albums, and "Anything Can Happen" is an especially great one. I thought about including Neil Finn's solo work here too, but his excellent 1998 solo debut Try Whistling This disappeared from Spotify in the last couple months that I was working on the playlist, which kind of sucks. Crowded House's 2010 album Intriguer is also currently missing from streaming services, so I only went up to 2007's Time On Earth in the playlist. But Split Enz have an estimable catalog in their own right, so I'm going to give them their own deep cuts playlist. 

I've really come to regard Neil Finn as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, he has that Paul McCartney quality where memorable, beautiful melodies seem to just pour out of him with incredible consistency and there's a real human warmth in his lyrics (although as a singer he's more Lennon, especially on "In My Command"). And Crowded House had the good fortune to start their career alongside Mitchell Froom, who produced their first 3 albums in addition to his great work with Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Suzanne Vega, McCartney, and many others. Froom is, I think, one of the most creative producers who works in the realm of live instrumentation, the way he mics drums and mixes things always creates these rich, ear-tickling textures, he's done more outwardly unconventional things with other artists but I think his work with Crowded House is really lovely and nuanced. 

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