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You couldn’t have dreamed up a better send-off than the one Crowded House received when it broke up in 1996.

The beloved Australian pop band said goodbye in front of 120,000 fans at a show on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. Fittingly, they signed off with their biggest international hit "Don’t Dream It’s Over."

Apparently, it’s not.

This month Crowded House reopens its doors with a new album, Time on Earth, and a world tour. It is a reunion, even in a season full of them, that few fans could have predicted for a number of reasons.

"We did break up in rather spectacular fashion," says lead singer and songwriter Neil Finn with a laugh. Following four lavishly praised albums and major success just about everywhere but the United States — save breakthrough hits "Don’t Dream" and "Something So Strong" — the band split amicably after a decade together.

The final show was especially celebratory since it marked the return of original drummer Paul Hes-ter, who had bowed out just prior to the band’s last tour. Farewell to the World was released as a DVD in November 2006.

"We said at the time possibly the best thing we ever did was that we broke up," says Finn of that ebullient twilight performance with co-founders Hester and bassist Nick Seymour and latter-day keyboardist Mark Hart. "Somehow there’s a strange logic to it. Crowded House was always a band that did things in a little bit of a back-to-front, slightly stumbling-along manner, so the fact that our farewell concert DVD came out just before we got back together seems somehow right."

The final chapter in the Crowded House story appeared to have been definitively written, however, in 2005, when Hester took his own life.

Yet it was the drummer’s death that sparked a reconnection between Finn and Seymour, who, in the immediate aftermath, transformed a Finn solo show in London into a tribute to their good friend.

That spark began to burn brighter when Seymour joined Finn in the studio to work on tracks ostensibly for Finn’s next solo release. "Once I played them with Nick they started to develop a Crowded House sense to them," says Finn, who had enjoyed a fruitful solo career since the band’s demise. The duo’s creative and personal camaraderie made Finn realize how much he’d missed being in a band.

The decision to reform was made. Hart was recalled to duty and drummer Matt Sherrod, most recently timekeeper for Beck, signed on as a full-time member. The quartet then went into the studio and recorded four more tracks with producer Steve Lillywhite to solidify the band sensibility of Time on Earth.

"It was the excitement about being a band, for everything that means, not being just a brand name," says Finn. He’s on the phone from the New York offices of the band’s new label, ATO Records.

Unlike some of its peers who split in acrimony, Crowded House has reconvened with an eye to the future. For Finn this tour and album are not a short-term plan to reap rewards on the strength of nostalgia.

"I’m not knocking anybody for wanting to earn money from music but it was never a motivation. And as you rightly point out, we will have to do at least four times better than I’ve done solo for me to make any money, and that remains to be seen," he says with a laugh.

Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, a longtime friend who co-wrote a track on Time on Earth, had an inkling this might happen. "Having been around Neil a lot I know there’s always remained a fondness and respect for Crowded House. It didn’t seem like a closed book," says the guitarist, who himself missed band life enough to have recently joined alt-rocker Modest Mouse. "There’s a lot of fun in being in a band. I think Neil and Nick have a good musical and personal empathy and I can hear it on the record."

So can other fans. "He’s just so damn consistent," marvels Eric Pulido, guitarist for indie rocker Midlake. A fan of Finn’s songwriting, Pulido saysTime on Earth holds up well to previous releases. "It’s beautiful and that’s a hard thing to come back together and put out a record like this."

While some of the album’s more sorrowful moments, and of course the title, would seem like references to Hester’s passing, Finn, at 49, says he is just naturally examining the passage of time. And his ability to wed hummable melodies to the most melancholy sentiment remains intact. "She Called Up" is as exuberant a song about getting bad news as exists. The moodier "Silent House," a track co-written with the Dixie Chicks that appeared on their Grammy-winning Taking the Long Way album, laments the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s disease with a soothingly optimistic refrain.

Lillywhite says that Hester’s specter did not hang over the proceedings. "He was mentioned a couple of times but only in positive terms. We’d all want to be thought of in positive terms; no one wants the living to worry too much about the dead."

Finn understands the worry some fans expressed about the band reforming without Hester, to whom Time on Earth is dedicated. The drummer was an integral part of the band’s sound and a lively, comic presence in concert, but Finn feels strongly about what the band can still do.

"I look around me when I’m onstage and I’m really enjoying the company and performing with these people and I don’t want for anything in that moment," says Finn. "It’s not that I don’t miss Paul. He was a great friend and it was an incredibly terrible thing that happened that I will probably never really reconcile in my whole life. But it’s not going to affect the passion or the enjoyment that we can get out of music and the sense of positivity and good will that we can generate as a band. That’s me paying the ultimate respect to him." — Nielsen Entertainment News Wire


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