Time On Earth - Musical Style

Musical Style

According to Neil Finn, "It (Time on Earth) doesn't sound like any one particular Crowded House album, but it has elements of Crowded House... in as much as Nick and I make a sound together when we play and always did. I think there's a lot of heart and spirit in the album which is connected with the loss of our dear friend Paul but also an attempt to try and make sense of it and move forward. And as such, it seemed the most obvious and best way to do that was to be playing music again with each other, Nick and I. I want to be in a band and what other band could it be." Crowded House's leader, Neil Finn has indicated that, as the album began life as a solo project, its sound is generally different to Crowded House, though similar in parts, indicating that no one album by the group sounds like this one. As the album is dedicated to Hester and attends to his death, much of the album has a mournful tone, however this has been received well by critics, with some indicating that "fortunately, Finn is a master at expressing ambiguity, (both) lyrically and musically". Finn has said of the song "People Are Like Suns", that "Part of it is the idea that people burn brightly and then they fade out. Also, when I wrote it, I was reading Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, which begins with a man on his balcony watching his plane go down, so the first lines borrow something from that image."

The song "Pour le Monde" ("For the World" in French) was inspired when Finn was in Paris and observed a demonstration march protesting against the war on terror, with the chant "Pour le monde pas pour la guerre", which translates to "For the world, not for the war" (which is then sung in English directly after the French on the song). Seymour adds that the song contains "a lot of nobility and integrity" and that when they have performed the song it "really does stand upright". The last song recorded for the album, "Transit Lounge", is written about time spent in various transit lounges around the world, particularly Singapore and Bangkok.

Lyrically, Andy Strickland of Yahoo! Music asserts that the album's song "English Trees" shows Finn's "brilliant weaving of a tale of loss and yearning marks him out as up there with the very best songwriters working today" and of the album's musical structure as a whole, comments that it is a "collection of songs that reflect Finn's usual palette of singalong pop ("She Called Up"), achingly fine ballads ("Pour Le Monde"), and darker, more ambient sounds ("A Sigh")". Jessica Letkemann of Billboard points out that to those unfamiliar with Finn's solo work expecting the album to resemble a prior Crowded House work would be surprised, insisting that "Gone are the more overtly '80s top 40 flourishes". Bud Scoppa writes in Uncut Magazine that the album's extremes are portrayed in its first two songs, "Nobody Wants To", which he describes as " the prevailing melancholy mood, as Finn's slide guitar hovers like a solitary seabird over a vocal laced with regret", and "Don't Stop Now", in which "Finn explores the metaphorical possibilities of the GPS, seeking "something I can write about… something I can cry about"".