Following an especially prosperous first year for the Pajama Club, Sean Donnelly - one quarter of the Finn family’s bolt-from-the-blue outfit - is found embracing a well-deserved break. Donnelly has time enough to enjoy the holiday season before another run of dates - this time for Laneway Festival - the band again poised to impress fans and snare new audiences.

This latest chapter in the Finn family legacy is owed to a seres of innocuous endeavours between Neil and his wife Sharon. Evenings spent in fine wine and sleepwear evolved into something more, impromptu in-studio jams soon giving rise to a project with very real potential. Once the pair began to develop their craft, Donnelly was roped into the process, assisting in bringing the Pajama Club project to fruition.

“The way I got involved was that Neil just played me the jams. He was curious to hear what I thought of them. I thought they had a lot of potential. He asked if I wanted to help him produce one or two tracks and see how it went, so that’s how it proceeded,” Donnelly explains. “I took some material away and messed around with it at home, brought some things back in, he was pleased with the results and we moved on from there.”

Donnelly’s role in the Pajama Club follows a prolific career, the Kiwi with claims to his own band (SJD), producing credits and numerous collaborations. Donnelly’s expertise has ranged from electronica, to pop-rock and even soul, branching out in spite of modest beginnings as a young musician. “I was very much of the self-taught mold. In fact, not even particularly taught - I just picked up things and messed around with them. That’s informed the sort of music that I make.”

Donnelly would eventually strike gold with his penchant for experimentation. “I didn’t release an album until I was in my 30s and even then, it was only because I had done stuff and somebody else said, ‘Actually, that’s pretty good! We’ll take that off your hands and play it on the radio!’ So, really, left to my own devices, I would still be sort of messing around doing stuff myself I think.”

Donnelly continues to relish the experimental approach, his role with the Pajama Club affording a similar sense of adventure. “I love it if I can just get in there and chuck in a left-field idea or whatever, but it’s great whatever the role,” he explains. “It’s great to play as part of the band, being there in the studio, throwing ideas around. I guess another thing I really enjoy is the construction of the music.”

In the context of Neil Finn’s illustrious career, the Pajama Club sees the Te-Awamutu-born icon throw caution to the wind this time around, with an anything-goes approach. “You can hear it too,” Donnelly affirms, speaking of the album’s unprecedented direction. “There’s a lot of play involved - just enjoyable messing around and following an idea through to its conclusion no matter how strange it might be and doing it relatively critic-free, if you like.”

“There were initial aspirations, certainly, but nothing was cast in stone,” elaborates Donnelly on the creation of the self-titled release. “No matter how experimental (the record) actually sounds, I think there was a different, experimental vibe. Neil was doing things that he hadn’t necessarily done before in that kind of format. It still has tunes and has words, but the modus operandi was trying things out.”

Midway through 2011, the Pajama Club would play a series of east-coast dates to effectively road-test their material, curious punters scoring an early taste of recordings to come. “Those Australian shows were our first shows,” Donnelly recalls. “It was up, it was rough, it was ready and raw and there is a sort of rough rawness to the sound still.”

Now, months on, the Pajama Club are set to seize a brand new platform, progressing from Australian club interiors to an outdoor event of increasing notoriety: the prestigious hipster-hub, Laneway Festival. Beyond this impending run of dates, however, one has to wonder what the future has in store for the Pajama Club. With more Crowded House work on the cards and so many other creative avenues Neil could entertain, does the project have legs beyond this self-titled release?

“Neil seems to think of it that way,” Donnelly muses. “He hasn’t used it as a vanity project or a side project or whatever - it’s something he genuinely wants to do and enjoys. I think he wants to do more, I think he’d like to do another album. To some extent it’s going to relate to how it gets perceived. I think it will happen, but just how quickly it happens will be another thing entirely. It will be contingent on reaching an audience and maintaining an audience.”

Pajama Club will be appearing at Laneway Festival this January/February.