CROWDED HOUSE TIME ON EARTH

Following the suicide of Paul Hester in 2005, Finn and Nick Seymour decide to turn Finn’s embryonic solo record into a strong new Crowded House album In the aftermath of losing Paul, Nick and I spent a lot more time together. We’d stayed close, but we hadn’t seen each other for a long time. We reconnected, to mourn and to accept what had happened. It was a big shock in our lives. I was working on new material and I thought it would be great for Nick to play on some songs. It was essentially a solo album with Nick playing bass until quite close to the end, when it started to feel like there was a good reason to embrace it as a Crowded House record. It’s such an awful full stop when something like that happens in your life. We’d put all that positive energy into the band, spread a lot of joy and goodwill, and it felt like we needed to put some good history on the board to work it through. We weren’t motivated by just putting the old band out. That would have been crass. At that point, we rang Mark Hart and got him involved, and embarked on the process to find a really kick-ass drummer, which turned out to be Matt Sherrod – who only knew one Crowded House song! We recorded four more songs for the record, with Steve Lillywhite at RAK studios, and it felt good. The record was a hybrid in the end. I would love to make some more music with those guys. We did some great shows before Christmas, I just haven’t made plans along those lines. There is some gravitas in the idea of a band, but it’s sometimes mysterious to me how much that matters to people. I see it as a continuous body of work.