Fragments of the new Crowded House album are leaking from the control room of Roundhead Studios and wandering the halls. Arriving from a meeting elsewhere in the building, Neil Finn – black jersey, black jeans, black framed glasses in one hand, silver hair impressively as bird’s-nest as ever – hastens to close the doors to the sound before sitting down with the Listener.
The album, the band’s eighth studio effort, Gravity Stairs, is actually finished. A preview copy suggests it’s the best Crowded House album of their two 21st-century reunions. But today, it’s going through more tweaking because Apple Music needs a Dolby surround-sound mix for its “Spatial Audio” streaming format. Finn makes a grumpy noise about who is paying for the extra mix, although he’s probably on mates’ rates with the studio manager.
Across the main room from where we are talking is the Steinway grand, at which Finn was seated a few nights earlier for a live-streamed show, a tag team of voices including himself, Reb Fountain, Finn Andrews, old mate Jimmy Barnes and Barnes’ Auckland-based daughter Eliza-Jane “EJ” Barnes.
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