What was the next step? Well, once Nick and I decided that it felt right, we rang Mark Hart in L.A. because we wanted him to be part of it again as well. Then the three of us agreed that if we were going to be a band in more than name only, the most important thing was an absolutely brilliant drummer. So we started to audition drummers.

How long had it been since you'd auditioned anyone? I've only done it one other time in my life, and that was when I was in Split Enz [before forming Crowded House]. We auditioned drummers and found Paul Hester, so it was effective then, and I trusted it this time. We actually cast the net a little wider than last time. In fact, once it became known that we were looking for a drummer, we had a lot of inquiries and a lot of people putting their hands up; we ended up playing with about 50 drummers in five cities.

How'd you decide to go with Matt? He had a wonderful presence in the room, and he played the drums just right. He also didn't know a lot about Crowded House. In some ways, he was free of any burden of living up to anything; he just came in and played really unself-consciously. It sounded like something fresh.

There's an overall freshness to Time on Earth that differentiates it from a lot of reunion records. Many times, the music of reunion albums gets bogged down in an attempt to uphold a band's legacy. It feels like that to me as well. Maybe it was the way we came upon it; we were making music before we were thinking about being a band, you know? We weren't burdened by it.