“Fall At Your Feet was written in Osborne St [Finn family residence in Melbourne], or the chorus was. It had a different verse that went, ‘Fly away little bird, fly as fast as you can, don’t get in the way of this approaching man because he’s insane...’”

“It was a convoluted one, that one. We knew the chorus was really strong. We were lacking a good verse for it, and I happened to be jamming one day with the band in the studio and we were playing an old piece of mine, which became the verse of that song. Mitchell Froom jumped on it and said, ‘That’s it,’ and I finished the lyrics on the spot and we had it within about two hours. It had a good energy about it.”

“Woodface was the third album I produced with Crowded House. I remember listening to the first batch of demos and there was this piece of music that started nicely but it was very vague sounding, very spacey. Then the chorus came in and it just completely knocked me over. It was so beautiful – the lyric and the melody and the chords were all there, but the rest of the song didn’t do that service. I called Neil and said, ‘That may be the best thing you have but you need to raise the bar on the verses. It needs to be more direct.’

He wrote something else for it and when we got together for pre-production we decided we’d got it. But when we went into rehearsal with the band it was underwhelming. It was much more uptempo because they felt they should be as rocky as they were onstage. When we went to Los Angeles to cut the basic tracks we thought we had it. We went to do overdubs in Australia and started to work on each song, but when we put a vocal on Fall At Your Feet it just wasn’t good. The problem with making records is that oftentimes you fall in love with the good things and forget about the other stuff. It can get really confusing. The chorus was such a beautiful piece of music, and it was so depressing to hear this rock version. The emotion just wasn’t there.

We were all getting a little stressed out, and so this idea came up of just having a very free day at the studio. I don’t want to get real specific about it, but anyone could show up in any kind of drink or drug state, do whatever they wanted. The day started kind of late and wild and immediately everyone got on different instruments. Neil was playing drums a lot and Paul Hester, who unfortunately is no longer with us, had some hysterically funny stream-of-consciousness rants [eg I’m Still Here.] It was a tragic musical day but it was really fun. We needed to clear the air. We spent six or seven hours goofing around, and right before we left the studio Neil started playing something. I was like, ‘What is that? It’s really beautiful.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s something I wrote when I was 17.’ I started thinking about it and said, ‘Is it possible that that would go with the chorus of Fall At Your Feet?’

So the next day we tried it and all of sudden it was the easiest thing in the world. It just sounded inevitable. The feel of the verse was the perfect feel for the chorus. We did it as simply as possible. I think Neil kept some of the words from the 17-year-old kid’s song, and on the spot made up the beautiful bridge, and pretty much the whole song was done in a day. Tim [Finn] was in the studio next door, so he came in and sang that high part on the bridge, just screamed it out – that was another ‘wow’ moment. Suddenly everything was all happening at once, and I was so happy!
 For a song that sounds so simple, it was as if this curse was hanging over it. Usually you’re best off bailing out. Fortunately, it was one of the rare ones where all that perseverance paid off.”