I have always held the idea that locality is extremely important to songwriting. That is, the geography and people around you influence the songs you write and the way you record them. There are few albums where this is more apparent than Crowded House’s Together Alone. The story of how this album is made is truly stranger than fiction. Recorded at the remote settlement of Kare Kare on the wild West coast of New Zealand’s North Island, Crowded House recruited the notoriously mad producer, Youth, who turned the recording sessions into some kind of New Age hippie happening. There was an unexpected wedding at the studio, the band had self-constructed the studio in a rented home, and band members found themselves in many situations that were highly untypical of your average recording session. Yet it was this spontaneity and pagan mysticism that resulted in a beautifully crafted, resonant album.

Together Alone is an inherently kiwi record. Anyone who has walked along the North Island’s West Coast beaches will be able to hear their irrepressibly chaotic spirit in these songs – known as the ‘Untamed Coast’, it was a perfect geographic fit for a producer as unpredictable as Youth and a band as worn out by constant touring and sterile recording studios. Together Alone is music produced by a man overjoyed to be back in his homeland. This is apparent from the very first track, appropriately titled ‘Kare Kare’, where Finn sings: “Sleep by no means comes too soon/in a valley lit by the moon”. His lyrics are so often concerned with what it feels like to be somewhere, anchored in the present, but remembering the effects of the past. Meanwhile ambient slide guitar echoes the wind tussled trees and gentle roar of the ocean, which is an inescapable presence throughout the entire album.

There is a tremendous feeling of space on much of this album. As if the very wind from Kare Kare beach blew into the tapes and scattered the instruments throughout the realm. On the most organic song of the album ‘Private Universe’, it sounds as if all the instruments were recorded at different locations around a beach – some on a cliff, others on the sand, and more in a shack up the road. Each instrument, while sounding very much a part of the same song, is also distinct – partly, this is due to the extravagant use of reverb on almost every track on the album.

It turns out that Youth actually did have band members recording in isolation, at strange locations. Guitarist Mark Hart was forced to play in a stone circle 100 meters away from the main studio, while drummer Paul Hester was requested to sing back-up vocals sitting in a suitcase holding assorted crystals. Whatever the reasoning behind these outrageous tactics, they clearly worked. Youth has proven himself time and again as a producer able to create the ‘big’ sound that is so often sought after. At times, Together Alone is almost ambient pop, and its production competes with melody for the most memorable aspect of the album. Yet the album is at its best when both combine to produce some truly transcendent pop moments, such as on the aforementioned ‘Private Universe’, where the only constant amongst the swirling currents of sound is Finn’s understated but gorgeous melody – the shelter from the chaos.

You could probably count on one hand the number of Australasian songwriters who have as much of a natural gift for melody as Neil Finn. Whenever you feel like a song is lagging in a verse with seemingly no hope of redemption, Finn somehow bails it out with an effortlessly melodic chorus. On ‘In My Command’, Crowded House build tension beautifully through an awkward verse of paranoid piano and vocals, before releasing it in an exhalation of sensuous melody backed by a choir of reverb-shrouded male ahs, enveloping the song in mystery. I cannot think of another Crowded House chorus that sounds so effortless, so joyful, as if it were merely a recording of a jam-spontaneous melody.

There are a few generic grunge touches on the production of Together Alone, particularly in songs such as ‘Black and White Boy’ and ‘Locked Out’. In ‘Black and White Boy’ the distorted guitars sound as if they were buried beneath layers of sludge, sort of like the effect you get when an old cassette is wearing out. Yet it is in keeping with the deeper earthy resonance of the album, sounding like rainforest blues. It’s almost like mid ‘90’s Radiohead – who, incidentally, cite Finn as an influence – with an ominous tone that reflects their surroundings.

Crowded House’s departure from convention on Together Alone results in an album that is at once vintage Neil Finn but also a mutated earth-anchored incarnation of Kiwi rock, irremovable from the setting in which it was recorded. Kare Kare is the ‘fifth Beatle’ on this album, and it is better off for its presence.