How do 20 musicians who've never worked together before record an album of original material in three weeks? First, you get Crowded House’s Neil Finn to invite you to the wild west coast of New Zealand. Make it for right around Christmas time, the heart of southern hemisphere summer, and have Finn invite not just you, but your whole family. Ask everyone to bring a song. "We need songs," Finn would've pointed out. "We're recording an album." But no one does, of course, because artists are more human than humans, and thus are more easily distracted, are lazier, are more prone to procrastination. But it doesn't matter because there is a deadline. Record the album, then play the shows. Don't want to let your mates down, so write something good and then learn to play it. Because we're not doing this for fun, nor for a nice subtropical vacation, but for Oxfam. So we want it to be good, so people will buy the album and come to the shows so we can make some money and give it all away. This exact scenario didn't happen just once, but twice. The first 7 Worlds Collide collaboration was in 2001. Seven years later, 7 Worlds Collide Again brought together Finn and his various offspring with Johnny Marr (The Smiths' guitarist), Lisa Germano, Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien and drummer Phil Selway, Sebastian Steinberg of Soul Coughing, and all of Wilco. Throw in a handful of New Zealand's top singer/songwriters, and you do indeed have a chance of making a sizable donation to Oxfam. The decision to "record" the studio process—meaning "shoot," as director Simon Mark-Brown points out—wasn't made until a few days before the musicians started arriving from the frozen north. We're fortunate to have this document of the creative process and of people getting along, egos aside, to make good music. |
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