About the album

"I've never recorded an album in three weeks. But deadlines are a musician's best friend" - Neil Finn

Talk about piling on the pressure. There's a news crew in the studio where several well-known musicians - among them, Johnny Marr, Wilco, members of Radiohead and Lisa Germano - have just arrived after flying in from the other side of the world. And even though Christmas is a fine time to find yourself in New Zealand, that doesn't detract from the enormity of the task at hand. Or the onerous sense of responsibility that you, as the man who invited them over here, would feel about it all. Having come up with the idea, it would have been surely enough to send Crowded House frontman Neil Finn into a minor tailspin. Except that, as he explains, he had got all of that out the way before everyone started to arrive. "I started to panic about a month or two ago. I thought, 'What is this? Is this just an ego thing, to get all these people in and, you know, have a bit of a wank?'" But it was Neil's son Liam - now a formidable recording artist in his own right - who told him to calm down. "He said, 'But why wouldn't you?! If you could, why wouldn't you do something like this?' And I thought, yes - that's a good enough answer. If you get some musicians that you really admire and you know they're good people, and their families are cool as well, why wouldn't you get them out for a Christmas holiday and hang out and have some fun?"