Song Exploder - Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Crowded House formed in 1985 in Melbourne, Australia. They’ve released eight albums, including their most recent one, Gravity Stairs, which came out last month. But on their very first album, they had a big hit with "Don’t Dream It’s Over."Crowded House made “Don’t Dream It’s Over” with Grammy-nominated producer Mitchell Froom, who they went on to work with multiple times. For this episode, I talked to frontman Neil Finn about how the song was first written, and how it developed with his bandmates and collaborators in the studio. And we talked about the profound connection people have had with the song over the years.For more, visit songexploder.net/crowded-house.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Crowded House formed in 1985 in Melbourne, Australia. They've released eight albums, including their most recent one, Gravity Stairs, which came out last month. But on their very first album, they had a big hit with Don't Dream It's Over. When I was a kid, my older sister had a mixtape of her favorite songs that she'd made by taping them off the radio, and we used to listen to that one tape over and over again. Don't Dream It's Over was a big fixture on it.

She and I used to try and imitate Neil Finn's accent when we would sing along. Crowded Housemade Don't Dream It's Over with Grammy-nominated producer Mitchell Frum, who they went on to work with multiple times. For this episode, I talked to frontman Neil Finn about how the song was first written and then how it developed with his bandmates and collaborators in the studio. And we talked about the profound connection that people have had with the song over the years. My name is Neil Finn And I am the lead singer of the band Crowded House

My brother Tim Started an amazing band when I was about 14 Called Split Ends My brother was nearly six years older than me So I was watching what he was doing at university And you know just absolutely transfixed by it And I wanted to be part of it And then Phil Judd

The other songwriting partner left the band I didn't expect to be asked to join split ends as young as I was. I was, you know, 18 years old. But Tim rang my mother to make sure it was okay if he asked me to join the band, son to mother courtesy. And she said, yep, then Tim rang me and yeah, I got the shock of my life. The band Split-Ens continued for seven years after I joined. Towards the end, Tim announced to us that he wanted to go off and have his own experience of music and of life. Then I was faced with the choice of, well, do I keep going in this band as a lead singer? But it just seemed too intimidating and I wanted

to strike out. Paul Hester was Splend's last drummer. Paul was an incredible drummer. I loved playing with him. We discussed the possibility of forming a new band. We had gone all out to find a bass player. We found Nick Seymour in that process who impressed us by dancing around the control room as he played on our new demos. And so I went to my brother's house one day. Paul was living in my brother's house in Melbourne and he had invited a whole bunch of people over which I was not into socialising that day. So I went and hid in the music room and played my brother's piano. Yeah, the song just emerged at that point. It's quite a fertile stuff. for me to be melancholy when I'm writing,

because the songs I like have melancholy tinge, so I suppose I need to be in that state. I was contemplating a few things that young, really young men don't think about, you know, your place in the world, what's really valid and what's important. I had a young family at the time, or a young son, and, yeah, navigating, getting up in the night

with a new band about to start. I had the ability to be able to go again, you know, to start something. So I was determined to try and do the right thing on all fronts, you know, trying to apply the right level of passion and commitment to my music and trying to be a good human being at the same time. It's not always compatible. Later that day, I went home and went to my little music room

where I had a four-track recorder at that point, little cassette four-track and made the demo of the song. It became a guitar song. I had a delay, a Roland Space Echo in my room, so I just put everything through it, including the guitar there, obviously. And I created a little snare track by tapping a matchbox with my finger. Home demos often have some degree of intimacy about them

that's almost impossible to recreate in the studio because you're sort of discovering a song at the same time as performing it just after you've written it. So you've got this sense of extra yearning because you're going, I think this is great, I think this is great, and I'm going to make it sound great. So I don't know, there's some real force of will applied to demos that give it unique atmosphere. I played it to my wife. She's usually my first audience, so I've got something I like.

I'm always greatly reassured by her grooving to it. She's a very good dancer, and I have a vague memory of her hips starting to move, listening to it. That's her way of telling me that it's a great song. I do remember taking it to rehearsal a few days later and we knew it was good but it really didn't sound good at rehearsal at all we couldn't figure out how to translate the song into a band arrangement it's hard to translate a matchbox snare drum into a full drum kit but the song really emerged in its record form

when I got together with Mitchell Frum he was really young in that whole field of production but I really liked him and he had some good ideas. I got together with him very soon after making that demo and he actually did immediately respond to Don't Dream It's Over. He was the first person to sort of pick that out and say, wow, that's a really special song, that one. He had a little setup in his shed out the back

with a blaster box that he'd record on to. Mitchell played a little really subtle pad in the early parts of the song. he was playing a Hammond and I played guitar with him it was you know really surprising to me to have these new angles suddenly put in front of me that I would never have come up with

one being the Hammond organ solo which I'd never have dreamed of I'd never even come close to a Hammond organ up to that point and I thought there's something a little more universal about the sound of this track now we recorded at Capital Studios we were a young band we hadn't really figured out

how to be a band yet Mitchell I don't think was that sure that the band was capable of doing the things that he thought the band should be able to do and in that early period I had my doubts as well

nobody was that sure going into making the record how this was going to turn out the day before we recorded Don't Dream it's over we had shuffle on the record called now we're getting somewhere a shuffle is a very difficult

thing for a lot of bands to do well. And Mitchell was not at all convinced that the band knew how to do a shuffle properly. And so Mitchell brought in Jim Keltner and Jerry Schiff. Jim Keltner played drums for Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Simon and Garfunkel. And Jerry Schiff was in Elvis Presley's band and played bass for the doors. These guys are legendary session musicians. He ended up a really anxious day because Paul and Nick were feeling quite overlooked, rejected by having other musicians come in. But those guys was such an incredible presence in the studio and Paul and Nick ended up just being overjoyed to be there and see how that went down and it made a huge difference. However, the next morning,

I think Paul and Nick, probably a little sad because it was like, well, that was a great day, but we weren't the band for that. So don't dream it's over, took on a slightly sadder aspect than we had played it at rehearsal. I mean, it's a beautiful feel and there is sadness in there. Those guys were contemplating their future. I just heard a whisper of my vocal in the drum track. Yeah, we were all in the same room. Paul was just over here to my left. He had the kind of feel where his hi-hat would match my guitar strumming perfectly.

And that isn't the case with many, many drummers. Nick's entry to Don't Dream is a very signature thing for him. I dare say he could probably get into a restaurant by singing that bass line. I'm Nick Seymour. You know, do-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Nick was a wild card. He was sort of adding a little funkier element to the bass than what I was used to. He'd always come at a song in a different manner, which was the reason we hired him.

But sometimes I'd have to sort of, you know, temper his enthusiasm. You know, hey, settle down a bit there now, Nick. Now I'm towing my car. There's a hole in the roof. My possessions are causing me suspicion, but there's no proof. I was really happy with that whole verse. I'm telling my car there's a hole in the roof. My possessions are causing me suspicion, but there's no proof that to me conjured up that feeling of you gather possessions around you in your life.

And they seem really important, but they also can become burdensome and weigh you down and make you distracted from what the real stuff is. And, you know, when they start to break down, you feel like the world's falling apart a little bit. that's where the real truth is. In the paper today, tales of war and of ways, but you turn right over to the TV page. I loved the sound of double-tracking electric guitar. Suddenly you lifted out of the reality of just being one guy in a guitar

and it gives it a slightly fantasy kind of sound. That's Tim Pearce playing the electric guitar, flourishes. Mitchell brought a friend of a friend, is not knowing whether I was capable of playing delicate lead lines. That was a beautiful touch. I'm happy with the vocal and I'm pushing it quite a bit. When the world comes in, they come, they come.

I'd have to decide I'm going to hit those notes. You can't be half-hearted about them. I would routinely lose my falsetto in those days. early in a tour because I'd be pushing my voice so hard and it made that song very difficult. I had to give the falsetto to Paul on a few occasions. I said, you just got to sing dream. And I'd get both he and Nick to sing it on stage

because there was times on stage that I would go, hey now, hey now, don't it's, I'd lose it completely. It wouldn't be able to sing that high note. So, yeah, I've created a little monster for myself. Hey now, hey now. I was aware it had a double edge to it. It had a slight sadness inherent in it,

but it also had a hopeful chorus of continuing on. Don't let the negative thoughts, the tyrants, the oppressors, don't let them win. But at the time when the record was about to come out, the prevailing wisdom was you have to have an upbeat song for a young band. So people weren't considering Don't Dream It's over is certainly not as a first single. They tried two or three songs before that,

none of which really worked in any major kind of way, but there was a woman at Capitol called Paulette McCubbin who was a junior promotion staff person, but she absolutely adored the record, and she made it her mission to ring all the stations, you know, in smaller markets, and hounded them to play the song. And actually that's where our initial success came

through secondary markets and started to perform really well. some of the big stations then cottoned onto it. And I remember we flew into LA not long after that, maybe two or three weeks later. And in the car from the airport, the radio was on and I heard it on the radio. That made me realize that it was on its way. It's had a lot of big moments in its life. Don't dream it's over. There was a particularly profound moment which is captured on video.

The band was breaking up. We decided to call it quits. and we had an audience of maybe 150,000 people on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. They assisted very intense feeling attached to that performance. There's a very poignant shot of Paul shedding tears as we were singing Don't Dream, it's over. So, you know, I'll always remember that one.

And somehow the song has seemed to be resonant and appropriate for people in a number of different occasions. Ariana Grande sang it in Manchester when they were mourning the loss of a lot of people at one of her concerts and Bono and Edge just performed it in Las Vegas recently as a response to world events and to the loss of Alexei Navalny and it continually surprises me where it turns up

and who finds their way into singing it, you know. It's a very interesting process, songwriting because I haven't really figured it out and I can honestly say I don't know what I'm doing most days, which is not something I deliberate over. I don't think, oh, I've got to write something that's going to mean something in 30 years' time. It's not like that. It's never that deliberate. It's a really wonderful thing about having songs become part of people's life story.

And I'm eternally grateful for that connection. I can't fully explain it. I'm really grateful. It's also a great mystery. Coming up, you'll hear how all of these ideas and elements came together in the final song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 20. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishykech, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists.

And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists. including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album

with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's Don't Dream It's Over by Crowded House in its entirety, or

visit SongExploder.net. You'll find links to buy or stream Don't Dream It's Over, and you can watch the music video. We also put up links for you to check out Crowded House's new album, Gravity Stairs, which is out now. This episode was produced by Craig Ely, Theo Balcom, Kathleen Smith,

Mary Dolan, and myself. The episode artwork is by Carlos Salerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more for me, you can sign up for my newsletter,

which you can find on the Song Exploder website. You can also follow me and Song Explorer on Instagram, and you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.