Together Alone is possibly my favourite album, certainly it’s songs resonate with me unlike any other. The trouble is it’s by Crowded House and so telling anyone who doesn’t know the bands musical canon may well be baffled by this statement, thinking only of the popular but ultimately light weight pop of the hit single “Weather With You” What they won’t know is the deeper, darker side to them that always had always permuted through some album tracks,
but which came to the fore with their fourth long player, Together Alone.
It’s hard to explain what makes this album so great for me, but the songs seem to resonate with in me at an almost organic level, it’s something to do with the chord changes, the bass parts, the oblique lyrics – leaving space to relate them to your own life … but like I say, it’s hard to explain.
And while I knew the some of the story of the album’s recording – how the band basically built a studio in a remote part of New Zealand called Karekare, so remote they actually had to build roads first before building the studio. You might ask why, but it seems being isolated from family and civilisation in general brought forth haunting ethereal elements to their sound. The choice of Youth as the producer for this long player also was key, bringing a looseness to the songs missing from other Crowded House recordings.
And that was about all I knew about one of my favourite albums, until I recently discovered a short documentary about the making of the album exists – albeit in grainy VHS quality…
Part 1
Part 2
Together Alone was for a while the final Crowded House LP, the band broke up a few years later, and later still the drummer Paul Hester sadly committed suicide. So while the reformed Crowded House have produced two new good albums since, they’ll never produce an album quite the same again.