180. Song Nos. 2,669-2,671: “Don’t Dream It’s Over”
Crowded House: Recurring Dream, 1996 (orig. 1986); Neil Finn & Friends: 7 Worlds Collide: Live at The St. James, 2002; Neil Finn & Paul Kelly: Goin’ Your Way, 2013

This is the fifth time I’ve written about Neil Finn’s music here but it’s really the first time a Crowded House song got to revel in any of that longstanding fondness. For being a pop-music standard everyone seems to know (I once accidentally played this song out loud instead of into headphones during a first-period photo class and a darkroom full of half-awake high school seniors immediately and unironically breathed “Oh, I LOVE this song!,” much to my shocked delight), it’s fitting that it was also the first time I unknowingly fell hard for Neil Finn’s songwriting.

For being as culturally omnipresent and internationally adored as this song is (and increasingly if not endlessly rebirthed as everything from sweetly charming to outright amazing covers), it’s a song that I heard a million time before its prominent use in the original (and, ahem, vastly superior) “The Stand” miniseries finally got my tweenage attention. I was briefly obsessed with it but, thanks to my younger self’s absolute rubbish follow-through, never got around to pursuing it with any real gumption.

Then, of course, an originally unrelated musical goose chase a few years later eventually led me to Neil Finn’s solo work and, from there, the circuitous resolution of a fondness shrouded in completely unnecessary mystery for way too long ended with one wildly overdue, forehead-smacking wallop of equally annoyed and overjoyed enlightenment. With such a limited catalog of that solo work to devour back then, I snatched up anything I could on the periphery, especially side projects and live recordings, but never really delved that much into Crowded House’s offerings—blame it on a general aversion to ’80s music. The exception, of course, is the causal fan’s best friend: a very-best-of compilation album.

And Recurring Dream really is a lovely collection of songs that I have listened to up and down the East Coast and across two decades. It, like so much of the music I loved as a teenager, fell out of frequent rotation as my tastes changed and expanded but it is like the surviving pair of lovingly battered Chucks from an era that increasingly sheds new light on how easily even the most cynical realists can be tempted to romanticize the growing pains of youth for their retrospective innocence: It’s a relic from a time when I could throw everything I could into loving things like music and equating that with a developed personality, and that kind of nostalgia is a special kind of seductive.

What I really love about Recurring Dream, though, is how it casually drops “Don’t Dream It’s Over” just a few tracks into its still-unspooling musical gifts, letting rip those unmistakable chords a mere 13 minutes into a 70-minute highlight reel. It is the song everyone knows and the song everyone can sing along to for at least a lyric or two. It’s the song everyone’s sticking around for. It is a there-will-be-no-more-encores declaration (like in 7 Worlds Collide), or at least a late-set anchor that guides you toward the show’s winding-down swan song (like Goin’ Your Way). But Recurring Dream banks on the next 14 songs being worth the price of admission, and it’s absolutely spot-on. There’s a lot to love on this musical sampler.

But “Don’t Dream It’s Over” really is just in a league of its own. It deserves the global fanfare. It is a beautiful song and it lends itself to all the ways live performance after live performance breathe new life into an old standby. As an intimate performance, the newer Goin’ Your Way version remains truer to the modern classic’s studio sound; as a full-band, star-studded ensemble’s coda, the 7 Worlds Collide version is a collective exhale before goodbye and good night that is so fully fleshed-out that its ruminative tenor lands with a demonstrative, effective thump.

It’s not always easy to find a personally significant foothold in a song as immensely popular as this one is, especially one that was already well situated in the canon of easy listening background noise well before your time, to the point that it’s just as likely to waft from freezer-aisle loudspeakers as a nearby car’s muffled speakers or the soundtracks of other popular media. That kind of shared societal affinity and familiarity always runs the risk of reducing a great song to something blandly inoffensive in its universality, denying it the emotional significance and poignancy that makes it so good in the first place. Having ridden two different waves of discovery to “Don’t Dream It’s Over” restores some of the personalization that well-known songs can be robbed of, sure, but it also imbues an ’80s hit with the nostalgia of early ’00s problems, and there is something increasingly quaint and admittedly innocent about growing up alongside an internet that was still more mystery than malice and still allowed for the thrill of the chase through a largely untrodden digital thicket.