Dad-Pop? : Where do you stand on Crowded House?

No, honestly. Crowded House strike me as the kind of band I will end up liking for their high quality song craft (incidentally high quality song craft and dull dad-pop seems like a non-choice to me, har). At the moment I don't like them one bit.

Split Enz: if you're not severe metal (Krokus) or cult soul (Klymaxx), please spell your name correctly. Dud.

I most often listen to them when I write. Unobtrusive, yet catchy, their songs make perfect pleasant background music that you might want to sing along to occasionally.

I would never force anybody else to listen to them, and honestly, I don't know I would want to spend time with some one who considered Crowded House their favorite band. But try to take them away from me and you'll draw back a bloody stump.

Crowded House was hit and miss for me. Together Alone was a really nice album, I thought, but no one else seemed to like it. The rest I can take or leave, but make sure you keep the abyssmal "Chocolate Cake" single the hell away from me.

Now on-topic: erm...nothing to add.

search - 'four seasons in one day'

What can I say? He got it right first time. A real Johnnie Walker / Richard Skinner / Roger Scott / Bob Harris band. Now quintessential boomerised Radio 2 fodder. Henceforth, dud, but not offensively so, just boringly so; they don't bring forward any opinion from me. But, yeah, dud.

Tom is right : hi-quality songcraft and dull dad-pop are indeed the same. although it's funny how 'craft' is sneered at when applied to song-writing, but is OK when it means layering up samples or slaving over a hot turntable. Hardly any good music comes effortlessly, although it sometimes sounds that way. I don't mean Crowded house are any good, by the way.

My football prediction: Sol Campbell to stay at Tottenham, to be joined by Teddy Sheringham, but not Petit. And Spurs to finish about 7th next season. I've a feeling there could be a shock result tonight.

Fulham will be pretty active in the transfer market as well. ;)

But don't you already like 'high quality song craft' (if not the Crowded House variety)? But seriously, won't you still like the things you like now when you're 40? And if not, why not?

I blame Ned. Even if he didn't start it. I know him. He has powers.

Great game. I went for a walk with my daughter when L*****l went up 2- 0 came back it's 3-1, I sit down and before I know it's 3-3. Nice to know there are still games like this one. LFC would have won on penalties anyhow, only the Dutch are worse penalty-takers than the Spanish.

Second up: Tom E, you are wrong to equate 'finely-honed song-craft' with 'dull dad pop'. OK, we could take a detour into Stevie's very good, well-put, and largely unexplored, point about how 'adult pop' might be a good thing - we really ought to take that detour soon. But for the meantime, I'm going to put that aside, assume that we are talking denigration, and say, Tom, for heaven's sake, you are really out of order here. Why is it OK to slag off - en masse, and with no discrimination - songwriters who think for 5 minutes about what they're doing and are interested in how melodies work, when anyone who slagged off DJs, hip-hop producers, Geri Halliwell's publicists, or whatever, would be machine-gunned at 200 paces? And how would you like it if I said something like 'All computer programmers from Oxford are boring bastards?'

OK, refinement of my comments - drawing attention to 'songcraft' is perhaps the parallel of what I was talking about in the pop thread i.e. drawing attention to producercraft. Whether this is a reason to talk more about songcraft or less about producercraft is up to the individual reader.

I've now even written about Lloyd Cole on FT to assuage your ire.

And while I'm not exactly happy with my job, I'm not a computer programmer, so you can abuse Oxford computer programmers as much as you like.

Shocking attitude Tom. First they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I said nothing. Then they came for the freemasons, but I was not a freemason so I said nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, so I said nothing. Then they came for Dani Behr, and said 'She's over there, hiding in the cupboard'. etc.

Tom:

>>> drawing attention to 'songcraft' is perhaps the parallel of what I was talking about in the pop thread i.e. drawing attention to producercraft.

I think I understand this - in the pop thread you were saying it was maybe a (slightly) bad thing for people to do that, right? In fact, if memory serves, you were saying that it was a way of denying emotion (or rather, a way of talking that didn't really do justice to emotion); so you're saying that talking about song-craft has roughly the same effect?

But then this -

>>> Whether this is a reason to talk more about songcraft or less about producercraft is up to the individual reader

- has me a tad stumped.

Naturally and predictably, I would rather talk more about the former and less about the latter, at least insofar as the latter means the kind of producers that interest you. But to be honest I'm still not sure I understand this comment.

>>> I've now even written about Lloyd Cole on FT to assuage your ire.

You mean FT exists?

>>> And while I'm not exactly happy with my job, I'm not a computer programmer, so you can abuse Oxford computer programmers as much as you like.

Hey, everybody! We can abuse Oxford computer programmers as much as we like! Who wants to start?

There is a bigger issue here, somewhere, about the way that certain ways of talking about music - which concern sound, texture, atmosphere, rhythm, technology, plus contexts and reception - have, on one hand, provided a tremendous enrichment of the critical vocabulary (visible, I guess, in a lot of what people write on FT / ILM), but have also displaced a sense of 'the song' as a unit of attention, or even a belief in 'the song' as an autonomous entity (I think I mean: analytically relatively autonomous from the other things I just mentioned). While I think the enrichment is (like I just said) terrific, I feel out on a limb in terms of conceptions of the song, because in my world 'the song' is still the primary unit of thought about music, and I have what might - probably pejoratively - be called a 'Platonic' sense of it. As I have in part said before, the only alternatives are musicology proper (to which I am inadequate) and earnest lyrical analysis (which I have argued in the past is largely inappropriate and should, indeed, be integrated into a more holistic sense of what's going on in a musical track or situation). So I still think that something is missing from the critical vocabulary.

I need to think this through more.

Mark S, and everybody else, will be unsurprised to hear that I don't know what 'Get Your (Ur, was it?) Freak On' (?) is.

First TH says,

>>> Two phenomena have recently violated the wholeness of the Song. Dance music and DJing is one. DJs generally playing tracks that are explicitly meant to be shut off well before the song ends, and begun well after it's started. The songs are relational, and not sufficient unto themselves. [etc]

I don't doubt that this is true, and that you have described the situation very well. But it doesn't affect my 'argument' - I mean, my view of what, for my purposes, a song is - because I am not really interested in that kind of music.

>>> The second 'ting, which is still as yet a bit unformed in my mind (so take me apart please) -- is that clearly, somewhere along the line, most pop artists have REALLY started paying attention to production detail.

Again, this is probably right, and is well-observed. But once again, I really don't think that it affects my conception of the song one way or another. You can write a song, then stick any number of details on it (in a titchy and unknown way I have done that myself) - the song remains the song.

>>> I think this begins roughly when pop artists became expected to write their own songs, be "original." ... I guess what I'm proposing is that once the expectation was set that studio recordings of pop musicians were to be original, authentic, sui generis, it stood to reason that the sonic texture (which people were just starting to notice as hi-fis and headphones became more common) must be as well.

Hm - you seem to be equating the moment when people had to *write their own songs* with the moment when bands had to *have their own sound* (roughly speaking). I don't really see why these two should necessarily be the same at all. That's partly because I view writing a song and forming a sound / tinkering in the studio as two different things; partly because I can imagine distinctive sounds being applied to any number of people who did not write their own material. Your overall point about a trajectory towards distinctive sounds seems right - I just don't quite see the link with songwriting.

>>> None of this really argues that the sonics and lyric significance of a song can't be holistically balanced.

Well, to repeat: I am not particularly talking about *lyrics*, which I tend to view as the poor relation among the parts of a song. Perhaps I shouldn't. Stevie T has argued very well, in the past, for the ongoing importance of lyrics on pop records.

>>> I think Get Ur Freak On does this very well, actually.

Again - don't know what this is.

>>> But I think the historical moment when a song could be complete in and of itself (am I demagoguing you pf? or not understanding?) has passed, and the body really is violated with all kinds of glitter paint and textural nipple-piercings.

No, I don't think you are misunderstanding me; and you put your case beautifully. But I think that I disagree with you quite strongly all the same. From my point of view, nothing has ever changed re. the integrity of 'the song'. If 'the song' has ever had any integral identity in and of itself, then it still does. From my point of view, it would be quite nice to think more about sonic textures and funny effects; but most of the time the only resources available are a pen, a sheet of A4, and an acoustic guitar that needs restringing. As a 'sonic effect', that gets rather samey; the 'effects', such as they are, had better be in the 'song'.

I was watching a 60 Minutes Australia piece on the band, and it was ... kinda stupid. Like, they keep talking about the magical chemistry of the new line-up. Well, duh. Nick has been there from the beginning, Mitchell Froom has produced or played on half their recordings, and Liam and Elroy are Neil's kids, so ... yeah. And then they keep referring to this as some sort of grand reunion, dismissing the previous reunion - which lasted five years and produced two albums - as "short lived." It has, however, assuaged a longstanding regret of mine, though. I interviewed Neil some years back, and I was struck by what a relatively dull subject he was, not at all what I expected. I figured it was my fault. But the more interviews I read and see with him, the more I realize that, no, it's really just him. Like, he dutifully does the rounds but (perhaps understandably) finds the whole thing something of a chore.

I like the new album, more than the last two CH albums.

I completely bounced off the last lineup (without ever putting in any effort, Hessie 4 eva), but this really does sound like a band. For obvious reasons, of course, but it does feel like it was worth sacking the last group for, instead of indulgent nepotism.

xp - that's something the core trio of the original band had: a spark between the personalities, and a dedicated jester, to make their press more fun than Neil's "I like to smoke pot at home with my wife and write songs, and there's not much to say about that" vibes

Yeah, otm. And re: the new lineup, I think it helps that Liam is really, really talented, as a writer and player, and not just a (more or less) hired gun like Mark Hart was. And Froom has been so integral to the band's sound that it makes sense that he would be, well, integrated into the band. Elroy ... I don't think Crowded House needs a particularly flashy drummer at this point, just a guy to keep the beat. I remember when Neil was touring his first couple solo albums, his group featured some ringers, like Lisa Germano and Sebastian Steinberg, but the drummer was just a guy doing what he needed to do to propel the shuffling lo-fi Froom/Blake studio vibe.

(btw, those first two Finn solo albums featured some cool contributors, from the aforementioned to Wendy & Lisa and Jim Moginie and, I just noticed, Tony Allen!)

Drummers on those tours were (or included) bloke from Radiohead, bloke from Creation band Arnold, and... Liam Finn.

Pretty sure it was none of the above! Liam would have been 19, so ... maybe, but I'm sure I would have remembered him being introduced. It was definitely not Phil Selway. Looks like Arnold toured with Finn in the UK in 1998, so he would have met their drummer, but no idea who that was. Made extra hard to search when your band name is a person's name.

Here's the Finn band at the time, 2002, doing one of my fave Finn songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHmdD4Qhr7c

I think the other guy in that lineup was Shon Sullivan, aka Goldenboy, who also played with Elliott Smith.

Arnold bloke was their lead singer too, I think, and returned for at least the 2001 UK tour.

Goldenboy was a frequent band member around that time, yeah, as was Johnny Marr.

Saw Finn in 1999 and 2000 and think Steinberg / Germano were in the group at least once, and am sure Liam and Jim Moginie were in 1999, but can't remember who drummed (though I think there was some instrument-swapping in '99).

(Also saw Neil & Tim with Nick Seymour and Don McGlashan backing them around 2005, and teenage Elroy miiiight have been drumming?)

((Also saw the Violet Femmes as a five-piece including Mogine in the '00s.))

Don't think Marr (or Selway) did more than the one-off live show or maybe two, but I could be wrong. I know Marr co-wrote a song on the first Crowded House reunion album.

Marr toured multiple countries, but played less than half of each show.

(At least partly to stay under the radar, so he could just enjoy playing and people wouldn't be buying tickets to see him, as you'd never know if he was actually getting up in that city.)

re interviews, several times I've had the impression that Neil has anger issues - if so he keeps a tight lid on it, which I speculate makes him a dull subject, but I remember stories about outbursts at audiences who talked during songs etc.

OK, listening to the new one again, it is of course absolutely lovely stuff, and it does sound pretty organic, but it doesn't really sound like Crowded House, or at least how that band used to sound. Nor does it really need to. When Finn put out those first two impeccably weird and knotty but of course still super well crafted solo albums I always felt it was him shaking off the shackles of commercial expectations. Not that he really had any at the point, or, you know, expected them, but his whole mode of writing seemed to shift, imo, applying his knack for melodies and hooks to stranger sounds and structures within the singer-songwriter pop mode. I like a lot of the two comeback Crowded House albums, but they felt like they were splitting the difference to me; in fact iirc at least the first one actually *was* intended as another Neil solo album at one point. Anyway, this one is much more relaxed, easing into the idea of a band in spirit even if it doesn't necessarily recall the specific band in name. Which is to say, a gifted songwriter who, yeah, sounds like he'd be just fine staying home to smoke pot with his wife, but if you need him to write some amazing tunes, he's down with that, too.

I'm not familiar with Liam's work, is it worth delving into?

I really liked his first solo album I'll Be Lighting, and loved the one-man-band shows he was doing around then. But then, like his dad, he kept doing all these one offs and EPs and collaborations and I got distracted.

*checks discography* I haven't listened to a whole new Liam record in twenty years *ossifies promptly*

2000 Betchadupa EP by Betchadupa
2001 The 3D EP by Betchadupa
2002 The Alpabetchadupa by Betchadupa
2004 Aiming For Your Head by Betchadupa
2007 I'll Be Lightning
2009 Champagne In Seashells EP by Liam Finn and Eliza Jane
2010 Barb by Barb (band including Connan Mockasin and EJ)
2011 FOMO
2014 The Nihilist
2018 Lightsleeper by Neil & Liam

lol, so I wasn't wrong that pretty much everything he did was under a different name or with different people.

He also plays and sings and writes (and sometimes produces) on most of Neil's records this century, and is on 20 Crowded House Mk II live albums from 2007 (inc two in Chicago)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/neil-finn-interview-crowded-house-dreamers-are-waiting-fleetwood-mac-1180529/

I saw him with Crowded House here, because he was in the band at the time. Also opened.

That Rolling Stone interview is actually pretty good for once.

Don't know much about this band beyond the '80s hits - but a song from their last album just came on a mix ("Sweet Tooth"), and I had to check out what was playing, like it immediately caught my ear.

i loved time on earth and especially intriguer. no idea they even put out a new `crowded house` record (and totally missed the discussion here last summer, obviously). gonna check it right now! thanks for the word.

yeah, this is really good! on first listen, i like it at least as much as intriguer and more than time on earth. kind of some wilco-esque vibes throughout, and holy schitt "love isn't hard at all" is pretty solid — damn good stuff.

(also discussion upthread made me put it on and akm otm— "weather with you" is delightfully overproduced)

(note to self: relisten to more old school crwoded house. they fucking jam.)

(crwoded house fucking jams, too. but i meant crowded house. nothing but fucking jams.)

so i'm going to back to intrguer since i didn't realize there was a deluxe edition and this song is amazing. apparently only ever played live?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU0AgLvmgQI

"the only way to go is forward"

"Don't Dream It's Over" is ageless. I still can't believe a song this taut and wise peaked at #2 in America during the Bon Jovi era.

That '80s pop landscape where Boomers and their kids crossed paths was pretty interesting. As a teenager of course it seemed normal to me because what did I have to compare it to, but the result was a bunch of us grew up with these very mature grown-up songs by mature grown-ups, as part of our adolescent soundtrack. "Don't Dream It's Over" is a prime example. I like plenty of contemporary pop, but apart from maybe Adele I don't feel like that's really part of the atmosphere now.

I’ve thought about that, too – stuff like Graceland, Sting, Tracy Chapman, etc. saturated the pop landscape when I was a kid, and how that kind of “adult”-oriented pop largely disappeared from the mainstream after the ’90s.

(to say nothing of slightly “aging” but top-of-their-game icons like Springsteen, Fogerty, et. al)

The problem was, offal like "Change the World" lingered.

mature grown-up songs by mature grown-ups

Worth noting that Neil Finn wasn't even out of his '20s yet when "Dream" was a hit. He's just a naturally talented great songwriter and has been since he was a kid. Imagine being brother Tim, taking your little brother into you band when he was just 19 or so, and then little bro starts cranking out stuff like "I Got You" and "Message to My Girl." And then gets huge with his own band, which occasionally deigns to include Tim. (Though I will rep for the two Finn Brothers albums, which are great.)

But related to what tipsy said, it's kind of remarkable how much top 40 from the '80s is now considered MOR, music for grownups, when of course it was being made for and purchased by young folks. I mean, MTV Spring Break 1987!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAN14_XejIY

(Though I will rep for the two Finn Brothers albums, which are great.)

co-sign.

This may be of interest:

Well, it’s taken an absolute age to get to this announcement, so come share our joy. The next release on our @needlemythology label will be the FIRST EVER vinyl issue of The Finn Brothers’ dreamy 1995 masterpiece FINN. But that’s barely the start of it… (1/11) pic.twitter.com/VH5CnoY6nI

— Pete Paphides (@petepaphides) May 31, 2022

"Don't Dream It's Over" is ageless. I still can't believe a song this taut and wise peaked at #2 in America during the Bon Jovi era.

Mournful organ lines too.

True, it’s the “Whiter Shade of Pale” of its time.

Chamberlin! And in the case of "Dream," a nod to Bach's "Air on a G String," by way of Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale."

lol

R.I.P. Gary Brooker

"Pour le Monde", from the late-era album Time On Earth, might be their best Beatles pastiche:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96Afkkgas4

Heard an interview with Steve Earle decades ago at this point, and he cited Neil Finn as a writer who sounds like the Beatles without sounding *like* the Beatles. Related, there was some dude on Twitter some time ago that was extolling the songwriting prowess of "Neal Finn," and Jason Isbell chimed in with just "First of all, i ..."

And just because:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sije12JaKdA

These guys were, predictably, great last night. What a salve. It's got to be both a blessing and a curse that Neil Finn writes so many great songs. They played a couple of brand new ones, too, one that he joked he wrote the day before, practiced on the bus, and perfected by the time they hit the stage, then muttered "if only it were that fucking easy ..." Yeah, no shit, your fault for making it look easy! Got a couple of deep cuts, got the two best known Split Enz songs, got some quality goofing around, even got a bit of Patrick Hernandez’ 1978 disco track “Born to Be Alive""

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFSWh2jzKeQ

have we solved the controversy over the bridge in "Weather With You"

what's the controversy?