Synopsis
Intertextual, passionate and personal throughout, Crowded House's Together Alone is a key addition to the surprisingly limited range of scholarship on one of Australasia's most successful and adored bands.
Fusing pop music with place and landscape, Crowded House's Together Alone (1993) 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, 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 analysis further explores the fragile alchemy that produced the most poetic statement in the Crowded House catalogue.
About the Authors
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.
Jon Stratton is Adjunct Professor in UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia and a member of the university's Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre. Jon has worked at universities in the UK and Australia and held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 1998. His areas of interest include Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies and Media Studies. He is the sole author of 12 books and has co-edited four. In 2002 he published Australian Rock: Essays on Popular Music. His most recent books include Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (edited with Nabeel Zuberi, 2014), When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945-2010 (2014) and An Anthology of Australian Albums: Critical Engagements (edited with Jon Dale and Tony Mitchell, 2020).
Jon Dale is a writer and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches across a number of fields (popular music, experimental writing, media studies, criminology, sociology, screen studies) at a number of institutions. He also writes for the English music magazine Uncut, and contributes liner notes and essays to a number of record labels and other publications. He is currently working on several books about DIY and post-punk music, and texts on experimental film and diary film making. He also runs the record labels Tristes Tropiques and Rose Hobart.
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