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David Crosby with Michael League, Becca Stevens and Micelle
Willis “Here If You Listen” (2018)
Glory/Vagrants
Of Venice/1974/Your Own Ride/Buddha On A Hill//I Am No Artist/1967/Balanced On
A Pin/Other Half Rule/Janet/Woodstock
‘A
consul is wisdom and it comes with age’
Well, this is up-to-date isn’t it AAA fans? After so
many years of reviewing albums half a century old it’s a surprise to be writing
about a record only a few days old – and to have the review out in our new
patent-pending totally awesome new e-book ‘Change Partners’ in under a week!
Had this review been written, say, back when our website started in 2008 I
would have been shocked. David Crosby, of all people, stretching our timeline
with a new album? What’s the gap between his solo albums normally – twenty
years? Fifteen in a productive period? However Croz has come to dominate the
CSNY catalogue in the last decade or so and is on something of a creative role,
with this his fourth album in six years during which he’s actually made more
albums of new material than even Neil Young! Who would have thought that back
in the 1970s?
In many ways that extra spurt of creativity has been
a mixed blessing. There’s an absolutely first-class album scattered across
those three albums (‘Croz’ ‘Lighthouse’ ‘Sky Trails’) and Croz has deservedly
won back many of the critics who mistakenly wrote him off decades ago. However
to these ears each album sounded slightly empty, two or three tracks short of
being the fully developed consistent record that Crosby needs to knock the
musical world’s socks off. Each album had an excess of something: ‘Croz’ was
very poppy and machiney, ‘Lighthouse’ very empty and blissed out and only on
parts of the Steely Dan-ish‘Sky Trails’ did Crosby feel like he was truly
firing on all cylinders. The good and I have to say rather astonishing news is
that, against all odds, our CSN book and our collection of online articles ends
on a high: though defensively titled ‘Here If You Listen’ is at last an album
that goes somewhere new while satisfying much of his old fan-base. This album
isn’t ‘too much’ of anything; instead it mixes the pop, the new age and the
jazz of his recent offerings and gives us a bit of all three of them. It feels
like a ‘full’ album at last, with most tracks coming with full tunes and lyrics
that don’t just repeat themselves to death or fade out to nothing partway
through.
The recording this album most reminds me of though
isn’t any of the last three albums at all but a youtube oddity that was around
for such a short time I would have put it down to one of those occasional
AAA-related hallucinations I get sometimes after writing too many words
(usually after writing about the weirdest Neil Young albums). Around 2010
Crosby got together with the a capella group ‘Venice’ to record a most haunting
version of [13] ‘Guinevere’. The recording didn’t go down well with the few
fans who heard it and who considered it too stately and slow and the song was
pulled from youtube with such suspicious haste (without appearing on record)
that I can only guess someone on one half of the project had second thoughts.
However to my ears it was a revelation: Croz has such a purist voice that had
his life and tastes worked out differently you can imagine him in some madrigal
choir. In terms of Crosby’s own recordings it sounds most like the guest
appearances Croz used to make on Art Garfunkel records, a world where that
purity and austerity shared by the two singers comes up against a crazy world
out to harm it (see ‘Breakaway’ and particularly ‘Watermark’). What with the
collaborative, acoustic and confessional feel this record is a dead ringer for
Art’s ‘Everything Waits To Be Noticed’, easily Garfunkel’s greatest achievement
without Paul Simon being attached in there somewhere. It sounds not unlike the title track of [471]
‘Sky Trails’, in other words. However that’s just one element of the sound:
like CPR but more so his new friends Michael League (of Snarky Puppy), Becca
Stevens and new singer Michelle Willis
(a Canadian singer-songwriter also linked with Snarky Poppy and best known for
guesting with Iggy and the Stooges) all have a background in jazz. This of
course suits Crosby who once used to channel John Coltrane and Miles Davis
while in The Byrds and who tends to make even his simplest songs more
interesting thanks to unusual, quirky guitar tunings. Oddly on past LPs,
particularly ‘Croz’ and ‘Sky Trails’ this had the danger of coming out
anti-jazz, with rigid and mechanical backing tracks of the sort you get from
performers who don’t instinctively know each other yet but all reach for the
safest cliché in tandem. Thankfully this team know each more now and don’t
succumb to that problem on this album anywhere near as much. The other good
thing is that what I feared was going to be a huge jazzathon has been tempered
by some good old fashioned folk. All but two of the recordings here are
acoustic, so no more Steely Danathon jamathons. There’s a sense, much like the
first CSN album, that the whole band could have turned up on your doorstep and
busked the entire record for you had you wanted them to. Having re-listened to
‘Croz’ again the other week I can’t tell you what a joy that is. Sticking all
these three elements together (Madrigals, jazz and folk, with the occasional
pop chorus for good measure) all adds up to a sound we’re not used to hearing
from any of CSN before and which genuinely breaks new ground. The extremes of
the atonal jazz is softened by the austere simplicity of the madrigals and of
folk. The dullness and familiarity of the Madrigal is made more exciting by the
jazz. The earnestness of the folk is made more playful by the jazz chords. It’s
a fascinating hybrid, recalling the days of The Byrds when that band used to
dabble in multiple genres all the time.
Or indeed Joni Mitchell, David’s ‘discovery’ and one time girlfriend who he
continues to reach out to in her ill health with a surprise revisitation of her
song ‘Woodstock’ at the end of the album, forty-eight years after Crosby once
sang a supporting harmony vocal to Stills’ lead.
This creates a bigger sea-change in feel than you
might think given that we’ve had elements of all these sounds in Crosby’s sound
for a long time, if never done quite like this. The bitter fire of Croz’s usual
writing has been tempered by the new arrangements into a calmer, more
reflective feel that thinks its way through life rather than merely feeling it
(by coincidence or otherwise, taking a break from writing this paragraph I see
that Crosby has re-tweeted a statement saying more or less that, by the Dalai
Lama). This isn’t the same Crosby of even a couple of years ago when he was
angry at Nash (for remarks in autobiography ‘Wild Tales’), angry at the current
crop of politicians, angry at the turn towards the right and away from
democracy and ecology and everything the hippie movement once stood for, angry
at the would-be musicians of the modern era who count their influence by the
jewellery they can afford and the people they hang out with rather than the
bands they are inspired to start. Crosby is, at last and against the odds,
acting his age. Throughout the whole album he barely raises his voice above a
whisper, doesn’t wail about the state of the world or whine for years gone by.
Instead this is the sound of a man who has seen so much come and go he knows
that the world will survive somehow, even if we are ‘balanced on a pin’ with
everything fragile. This feels like an album made by an old philosopher up in
the hills (Mount Tamalpais?) detached from the world and looking down on it. In
many ways its like a magic spell – as long as we stay in Crosby’s world of
rational, helpful loving we can keep the Earth safe and use this album as our
meditative quiet space to get back in touch with what humanity should be all
about. After puzzling this other I think I finally get why this album ends with
the otherwise out of place bragging of ‘Woodstock’, for this album is about how
each of us is stardust, ‘fuel for the fire’ of life that is a shared
responsibility between all of us but which too many of us duck for those who
talk louder, act bigger and pretend to know what they’re doing. We are all
rockstars, it’s just that some of us haven’t found the right notes to play in
life’s great symphony yet.
Crosby’s observational eye is put to good use on
this album as he moves away from the personal to the universal. Instead of love
songs or personal outrage this is a world where everyone is in a daze, confused
as to the direction the world is suddenly turning in. Album highlight‘Vagrants
Of Venice’ is, despite the specific title, more a song about how Croz and co
see the same look of confusion and listlessness wherever he travels around the
world. Everyone is getting by, trying to stay occupied, with one eye over their
shoulder waiting to be uprooted and displanted all over again. ‘Buddha On A
Hill’ is a rare Crosby song that tries to give answers, but notably they’re not
his – the writer is, you sense, straining as much as everyone else for the tiny
voice of sanity he feels must be out there somewhere if only the world would
stop making noise and shut up and listen to it. ‘Ego is the fever’ runs ‘The
Other Half Live’, the most obviously CSN song here, as Crosby longs for the
good and the kind, the meek and the mild, to have a go at running the planet
for a change over the greedy and the mad.
‘I Am No Artist’ starts off as a Crosby confessional: he has nothing
burning to say, no solutions to give us, not even much hope to offer, but still
he writes because it’s the only way he knows how to make sense of the world.
Even that song, though, quickly changes into Crosby watching the world at
large, realising that he isn’t actively part of the world so much as an
observer of it, asking questions of how it was put together that other people
are too busy to seek themselves. In context even old warhorse ‘Woodstock’,
revisited in older sadder clobber, sounds like a guiding light to how great the
world could be, if only we stop being mean to each other. This is no longer, though,
a hippie dream for the baby boomers to ride; their time for dreaming is over as
Crosby takes care to lay a paper trail for those who come after to pick up on
if they care enough to steer the world away from madness. His music and wisdom
is here if we listen, indeed.
‘I’ve been thinking about dying – and how to do it
well’ is the line of the album that’s got fans talking (buried away at the end
of ‘Your Own Ride’) but it’s a fleeting moment of the self in an album that’s
more about watching the world go by and trying to understand how it works
still, even all these years on from when Crosby first asked the question.
Nevertheless that thought crops up a lot as Crosby watches his nearest and
dearest fade from this life one by one (Joni’s illness seems to have hit him
particularly hard). Balanced On A Pin’ is about fragility, of how easily the
world gets set out of balance and how it matches Croz’s own sense of mortality
as his thoughts drift, unwilling to turn these fleeting fears into anything
concrete unless they take over. Even for a writer whose stared death in the
face so so many times (particularly in the CPR era) it’s a brave, brittle song,
doing the old Crosby tradition of putting the unsayable into words nobody else
would ever dare speak. Only ‘Janet’ sounds as if it belongs to the ‘old’ Croz
who was too busy to have time to listen quietly and reflect on his own
mortality, one last gasp attempt to sum up what life was like when chasing
women was what made him live. Now, as he faces death, it’s the quiet inner
calmness that comes over him and gives this album a feeling of stillness that
even the new agey ‘Sky Trails’ didn’t have.
Many reviewers and more than a few fans think that
Crosby must have changed his sound so drastically because of the musicians he
hangs around with now. That clearly has something to do with it – Croz barely
appears on the album’s bluesy musical sore thumb ‘Janet’ for instance and
sounds badly out of place when he does. Croz has talked at length too about his
different writing technique for this album, with all four writers in the same
room for every song and throwing bits in (as opposed to CSNY who tended to
re-shape songs their own way in their own time, usually Stills after everyone
else had gone home). You can tell – this
is a fluid album that feels as if it hasn’t quite set yet, where every song
could have gone in a different way and where everyone involved is slightly
holding their breath, waiting to see if their mass improvisation will result in
something useable or cacophony. It is, in a way, the sort of thing Crosby-Nash
were doing at their live peak, but on new songs rather than old ones. Somehow,
despite their different ages and backgrounds and the fact that most of their
work on the last two albums was dreadful, ‘The Lighthouse Band’ (as they’ve
become known) sound so close together musically and spiritually that you
couldn’t hold a piece of paper between their voices or ideas. Now, obviously
there’s been more than a bit of overdubbing here – my cynical side knows that
this recording technique is a trial and error that ends up with more discarded
ideas than useable ones. And yet this album feels like everyone really is there
in the same room at the same time doing more or less the same thing. The fact
that this album was made in a month (though to keep costs down as much as
inspiration) still hints I think as to how easily this project came together.
Croz, after all, wasn’t expecting to make another record – this one just sort
of arrived as a bonus off the back of ‘Sky Trails’, the title track setting the
tone for a whole new way of writing that piqued his interest.
However as if to prove that Crosby has always been
waiting to make music like this we also get the fascinating inclusion of two
separate pieces of Crosby’s similar acoustic jazz recordings from aeons ago.
Titled after their years of recording ‘1967’ and ‘1974’ as if to prove a point
about how long this potential so7und has been dangling in the wind, neither
extract has been bootlegged before to the best of my knowledge and both seem
obvious candidates for ‘Voyage’’, the Crosby box set that rounded up no end of
oddities like this. Unfortunately this backfires a little. Both pieces are
nuggets of such pure Crosbyness with the spirit of the more adventurous moments
of ‘If I Could Only Remember My Name’, that they show up the faults of an album
even as good as this one. Crosby doesn’t need anyone else to make music and his
ba-ba-bas set to rhythmical structures that seem to be forever evolving and
mutating somehow sound deeper than even the deepest set of lyrics on this
album. After being starved of these sorts of songs we used to get regularly for
so long ([414] ‘How Does It Shine?’ in 2005 was the last) it’s a welcome return
for the pure instinctive musician Crosby is. Even though the older of the two
is already more than half a century old (and dates back to the immediate
aftermath of ‘Eight Miles High’ when Croz was still a twenty-six-year-old Byrd)
they still sound timeless. Perhaps that’s why Croz and band choose to remake
‘1974’ as a postmodern song about second chances, of the need to write even
when no one is listening as David addresses his subconscious.
So, if you’re here to pay for what you listen, what
do you get for your money? On the downside Crosby still hasn’t written a single
song as brilliant or as memorable as those in his old days (Lighthouse’s [461]
‘The Things We Do For Love’ is still the closest on that score). Much of this
album sounds unfinished, as is often the way for albums that are improvised
rather than carefully considered. The harmonies of Crosby’s new friends, while
sublime more times than they are awful, don’t quite cut the mustard if you’ve
been brought up on CSN and heard across a whole album doing much the same thing
without many dynamic changes on first
hearing this alb8um might well leave you feeling underwhelmed. This record is
well worth pursuing with though: unlike the other entrants in Croz’s recent
quartet this is an album that works almost all the way through (only ‘Janet’
letting the side down, as indeed her character does in the song) and is the
best one-album mood piece in the CSN catalogue since CPR took flight twenty
years ago. Though the new collaborators do sometimes take over when you just
want to hear Crosby sing, David’s fingerprints are all over this album – from
the oddball guitar tunings to the hummable melodies to the poignant lyrics
about digging deep and fighting evil to that still pure voice that shines like
a lighthouse, undimmed by the years even when singing about how they lie heavy
on his shoulders. This isn’t quite the comeback album I’ve been longing for –
it lacks variety and what with the old hummed songs and Joni cover tune needs
an extra couple of moments of magic to become truly first class. However this
album breaks such new ground and delivers exactly the sort of album the world
needs right now in these troubled times and sounding like a genuine extension
of Crosby’s catalogue while breaking new ground. Not bad for a musician who
turned seventy-eight shortly after making it and proof that this creative roll
is far from over. Though we write this at the end of our book – and in all
honesty there will only be at most half a dozen more review to write at AAA
speed before our deadlines for our books overtakes us – would that other
records out there has a soupcon as much forward thinking and timelessness as
this record does. Believe me Croz, more albums like this one and I will be here
to listen whenever you have more to say because nobody tells the truth quite as
beautifully or poignantly as you. An unexpectedly brilliant return to form.
‘Glory’ is a brave place to start for any album.
We’ve never much had a female sound on a CSN-related recording before – a few
Stills duets with Brooks Hunnicut on a bootleg, Neil’s duets with Nicolette
Larson and that’s about it. Here though Becca and Michelle dominate the sound
from the first on a track that doesn’t obviously feature any Crosby hallmarks.
Here the lyrics are as jazzy as the music, elliptical and opaque like a haiku
stretched across a few extra syllables. The main theme of the song, though, is
very Crosby. Most of life is hard and beyond your control, but the trick to
making the most of life is to embrace those fleeting moments that are special
and which give you hope to survive until the next ones come along. Crosby
spends the first verse alone, trying to grab at the chances that slip through
his hands like sand before passing the song over to Michelle for lines about
being weathered by life while trying to protect your soft insides. Crosby isn’t
one for declarations of love normally but the last few years of precious
stability with wife Jan have changed that (again, who would have guessed back
in the 1960s that his would be the longest lasting CSNY marriage or that such a
lothario character would get married at all?) Here he vows, uniquely for CSNY,
to be there for the one he loves and that if he can’t prevent them from
suffering life’s meanness then he can at least protect them, promising to be a
‘suit of armour’ and a ‘witness’ to just how unique they are and how hard they
try to make life work. The most affectionate moment is when Crosby drops his
usual sweetness and explodes out of nowhere, howling to wife Jan that ‘you
won’t lose me!’, even if across the rest of the album that’s a thought that
crosses his mind a lot. Crosby has always been good at seeing things people
usually ignore – the waitresses, the protestors, the war veterans who hate
their job – and he’s often at his best singing the praises of ordinary people
who are actually quite extraordinary. So it is again here, as he returns to the
scene of [173] ‘Carry Me’ by taking everybody good and decent and lifting them
above the hardships of the world. It’s a moving sentiment, but I must confess
that this is the one song on the album where I would rather have heard Crosby
alone. His writing and harmony voices are rather overshadowed by his three
heavy friends and even the Michael League guitarwork doesn’t seem that
compatible with his own for once. The song structure too is rather slow and
ponderous, sucking you in slowly in a CPR rather than CSN sense, but there’s a
good and moving song here if you’re prepared to dig for it. That’s especially
true for the haunting rise and fall call of ‘Glory’ where Crosby is small and
vulnerable, shouting out his pleas in the face of what sounds like the ebb and
flow of the universe giving and then taking away at regular intervals.
‘Vagrants Of Venice’ is, at least this first week of
release, the song from the album that’s most got to me. Surrounded as he is by
the extra verses, nobody else but Crosby could have written this song which has
his fingerprints all over it. It is, reportedly, a science-fiction song of what
might happen to Venice in a hundred years after some ecological disaster –
although it sounds more than that to me.
I think I’m right in saying that even at CSNY’s peak Croz never
travelled around the world as much as he does now – a necessity in many ways
thanks to the lower money all musicians receive for their work in the modern
world and the, err, wild lifestyle he once lived in the 1970s and 1980s. This
gives him a fairly unique perspective: he’s travelled the world regularly
across fifty years but more so lately. He’s used to seeing things now he would
never have noticed back then when he was a rockstar: the refugees in every
major town who aren’t just the people who could never get a living of every age
but the victims of a recession that’s dug deeper than most, claiming the ‘book
born’ who thought they could escape misery with an education. Venice, once one
of the most romantic and glamorous spots round the world, now seems like
everywhere else touched by this level of suffering, with ‘endless aiming’ from
people desperate for a solution but unsure where to seek it. Crosby watches the
people and the hopelessness of what they do, a woman on a rooftop whose garden
seeds fall dead on the beaches a metaphor for all the good kind work he sees
that’s just a drop of infinitesimal nothing compared to the great aching hunger
he sees around him. This is a world where no one has time for arts or fineries
in life, as he watches orphans gather round a burning antique painting that
once would have been priceless but now without buyers is just another source of
heat. ‘They have forgotten how music lived here’ Crosby sighs with real
passion, a world where for the first time he feels as powerless as anyone else
because music doesn’t have the same resonance anymore. The recession has now
lasted so long he sees a whole generation used to it, accepting it as their lot
forever. Everywhere Crosby sees a world
struggling to get by, struggling to live from day to day and nowhere has
escaped that nagging feeling of loss. The song quietens down for the line about
how ‘its all very peaceful now’ and even on a record full of still calmness it
stands out. However that’s not what Croz wants. He wants us to be angry, to be
fighting, to be demanding better, to be using that energy he sees and which
CSNY always built on - but CSNY aren’t here and nobody knows quite what to do
with that feeling anymore. A lesser writer would have made this song a sobfest
(it sounds very like the lyrics Phil Collins wrote for Croz to guest on in the
1990s), but Crosby watches it with as much of a dispassionate eye as he can, as
much a helpless orderless victim as everyone else he sees. The song too isn’t
slow so much as muted, with a very Stillsy bluesy riff that you sense is about
to explode into anger but never actually does, the song rattling away to an
awkward sudden stop mid-note. It’s a highly impressive song this one, a real
composition for our times and all it lacks to be a first-rate masterpiece is an
extra middle eight or change to something to make it really soar. Even so, my feeling
that Nobody – not even Ray Davies – can match Crosby at his peak observing
state remains and this is a truly impressive piece of work.
It’s hard to imagine that the basic track of ‘1974’
would have been recorded somewhere around the time of the aborted CSNY comeback
‘Human Highway’ and the mega tour where the quartet beat The Beatles’ nine year
record by playing to the most people. The song is simple and humble, more like
the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra Sessions bootleg of 1971 when a new song
seemed to fall out of Crosby every time he picked up his acoustic guitar. The
opening hummed verse was as far as Croz ever got back then and its very him –
another writer (such as Nash) would have taken the bright breezy chords and
made a pop hit out of it. Another writer (such as Stills) would have gone
instead for the big bold bluesy chords the song develops into. Crosby uses his
initial ideas a launchpad for a more complex song altogether, one whose chords
second guess us all the way through, changing chord rhythm tempo and structure
and running away in the distance, as if delighted at catching out our ears
desperately trying to work out where it will go next. Personally I like my
Crosby nuggets pure and I would have left it right there, but Crosby’s new pals
help him finish it forty-four years later. The melody is a logical extension of
where Crosby was going anyway, softening and simplifying the awkward changes
without losing the essence of the song. The lyrics, though, are again unique in
the Crosby canon, a postmodern treatise on why he sits down to write at all.
‘If you don’t like the story you’re in, pick up your pen and write it again!’
he tells us, before realising that he isn’t writing his own story so much as
picking up on the voices he hears ‘crying in the street’, ignored and
abandoned. Comparing his music to a seed, Crosby has it flying out of his pen
beyond his control and out into the world, hopeful that it will land somewhere
where people will recognise and identify with it (this verse is half of the
reason the album is given the rather odd name it is). An odd finale has what is
presumably Crosby’s subconscious (sounding awfully like Becca Stevens) telling
him that even though people have longed stopped listening to him he ought to
carry on anyway and write what he wished he had said when people were. What’s
odd about this concept is that people listened in the 1960s and 1970s partly
because Croz was part of a youthful generation offering a new alternative way
of doing things that didn’t rely on greed or power, the single biggest reason
why the 1960s music scene has continued to resonate across the ages. The year
1974 was arguably the last time that people looked to CSNY for answers, coming
out in their millions to see their reunion tour that summer and the last time
the music business treated their return as if it was a really big deal. It’s as
if by writing this new lyric now to an unfinished song from then Crosby is
trying to return to the last point in time where CSNY could conceivably, at a
push, have made a difference to the world. It’s as if he’s going back in time
to finish off a most promising song carelessly discarded and tick his younger
self off for not paying enough attention. However good music lasts forever and
Crosby’s ideas were always so far away from what everyone else in an era was
doing that the tune remains as gloriously invigorating and exciting as it would
have been at the time. While I’m not sure the new lyric quite works, the
concept is fascinating and the original idea strong enough to be a winner no
matter how late we finally got it.
‘Your Own Ride’ is back to the cryptic end of
Crosby’s canon, a set of his own lyrics put to music by Bill Lawrence, another
member of Snarky Puppy. It’s a song about what makes us fly – and what makes us
crash, written around ‘Crosby*Nash’ time for Crosby’s sense of his son Django
growing up and experiencing memories of his own upbringing. Byrd Crosby built
his own flight on truth and love, the ‘real’ things that though he can’t say make
sense of life to him. Fear, though, plagues him ‘the creator of rage’ and only
age and wisdom has allowed him to see how much it holds him back. I’m intrigued
who ‘they’ are but Crosby says that people are always watching and can see all
the choices we make, when we decide to stand up to evil and when we become that
evil. This very CPR-ish philosophical tome isn’t quite in the first tier of
Crosby classics and its tune is all too obviously written around a pre-existing
lyric. However it very much has its moments, especially the loud middle eight
which takes us by surprise when the album’s sweet arrangement and production
values drop to just Crosby at full soar. This verse has him admitting what
keeps him up at night and scares him the most: his death. While his peers
retire and do farewell tours Crosby refuses to do things the easy way. He wants
to stand up to his worries and tells us that it’s a ‘matter of honour’ that he
should carry on the CSNY tradition of standing up to the bullies, even if with
his dwindling audience the best he can hope for is to ‘clear a path’. While the
rest of the song is a bit vague and wishy-washy by Crosby standards this last
section of the song really leaps out at you for its bravery and commitment. It
is, after all, oh so Crosby to go raging into the dying of the light while
trying to make the most of everything he’s learned and do something his
audience can be proud of. Though titled ‘Your Own Ride’ and the song from the
album least like Crosby’s natural style this is, I sense, the most
autobiographical Crosby piece on the album and it sounds like something that’s
been on his mind for a long time.
‘Buddha On A Hill’ continues the new wave meditative
feel of much of ‘Sky Trails’ as Crosby tries to get the world to shut up and
listen to the wisdom and direction he feels is out there somewhere trying to be
heard. He gets glimpses of it when he just stops and listens – from the ocean,
from the sunlight, from love. It’s a fleeting thought that doesn’t care about
gender, race or age and is open to everyone with a mind open enough to hear it,
a whole alternate means of living our lives without people losing out to fund
someone else’s greed. The song gets a bit weird in the middle (‘My love its
hungry, hawks above circling’) but till then sounds very much in keeping with a
long line of Crosby songs that stretch right back to The Byrds. In a sense this
song is a more ‘normal’ version of ‘Mind Gardens’, with its hermit who lives
out of the way and knows more of the world than we do – even the chiming
Rickenbacker guitars for the first time in decades recall Roger McGuinn at his
most freeform. This lyric is the other source of the album title and it is
perhaps the most effective use of these four voice on the album. Crosby, now at
full strength, doesn’t sound vulnerable at all as he holds his ground as the
Buddha while his three friends intone that he’s ‘here if you listen, here if
you listen’. The melody, meanwhile, is pure Crosby, hopping around the major
keys like a pixie, dropping for an eerie minor key full of shadows and goblins,
turning into intense rock akin to a wizard before blissing back out for the
verses like a fairy of joy. The result is impressively psychedelic from someone
who says he doesn’t really take drugs anymore and sounds like exactly the sort
of thing young hippies thought their charges would be making in the 21st
century with more technology available to them. Critical as I am of League’s
guitar playing (hardly up to Jeff Pevar or David Lindley, never mind McGuinn or
Stephen Stills) his brief bluesy solo is also spot on, full of mystery and
wonder. The song started off as a riff with the chorus (‘Buddha on a
hill…smiling’) was reportedly written by Crosby while still asleep and
listening to the others working on the backing track away around him, [216]
‘Shadow Captain’ style, leaving them scrabbling for a pen to write them down.
Another of the album’s success stories.
‘I Am No Artist’ protests Crosby next, though it
appears that this is mostly a Becca Stevens song (well, it didn’t really sound
like a Crosby title did it?!?) What this song really means, though, is that the
narrator is not a ‘celebrity’ as its really a song about being the equal of
everybody he sees, not someone on a pedestal up high separate and immune to the
pressures of life. We have seen several hundred times over on this site now
that being rich and famous isn’t what people think it is when people get there:
Noel Gallagher especially spent five years of his creative life longing for it
and twenty-five since wishing he had never had it. While it saves one lot of
problems, it opens another. For Crosby, presented with the song as a nearly
finished piece of music, it must have struck a chord. He lives a simple life,
in a tiny cottage and a battered second-hand car which is all his past run-ins
with the law and the IRS allow him. While other musicians hide behind a cult of
silence he’s out there on twitter day after day answering the same old
questions, sharing his secrets behind his same old struggles. This song is then
right down his path –although some lines aren’t as relevant as others. We have
seen elsewhere, especially on this album, how the need to create still burns
within him so it seems odd to hear him start the song with the revelation that
he has ‘no true desire’ to get off his chest anymore. The lines about being sad
and lonely aren’t really very Crosby either, even if the line about the hill he
passes being ‘scattered with leaves’ recalls [51] ‘Song With No Words (Tree
With No Leaves)’. I suspect that Crosby had little to do with this song,
although there’s one line that’s very him when a fan comes up and asks for
wisdom – only for Crosby to instead ask to get wisdom from them because they
seem much more clued up into what is going on! A jazzy set of chord changes
again surprises us and catches us off guard, ever changing in a world that’s
evolving at such a rapid rate that nobody truly has any insight into how it
works. Though far from the best track on the album this is another highly
thoughtful piece of music with much to say.
‘1967’ started life as a series of chords taped
somewhere around the Byrds’ ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ period that Croz had
forgotten about. Asked to dig out some tapes by his new friends for the album,
the others were struck were by how well this improvised piece of music seemed
to fit with the new music they were making and they changed very little to it
except the harmonies that arrive near the end. Sounding not unlike [88] ‘Kids
and Dogs’ crossed with [55] ‘Tamalpais High’ with the riff from [199] ‘Dancer’
thrown in, it is about as Crosby as you can get. I’m amazed that, with all the
CSN/Y box sets and rarities collections out there, not to mention the amount of
Crosby solo albums that needed extending down the years, that its creator never
dug this tape out again. Though we don’t know how many tapes of improvising
Croz has, this is certainly the earliest dated of that pure instinctive
jazz-folk blend he does so well, scat-singing over chords that couldn’t be
written by anyone else, a full four years before his earliest examples of the
genre started cropping up on ‘If I Could Only Remember My Name’. Crosby scat
singalongs can be roughly divided in half between expressing pure joy and pure
misery; this is one from the former half, full of sunshiney sweetness and a
delight in being alive. Though I could have done without the modern overdubs at
the end that just get messy and don’t seem to fit at all (they sound like ‘what
are you fighting for?’ and ‘expression’), this second go at someone else
finishing Crosby’s tapes (after Nash and Young took on [53] ‘Music Is Love’)
suggests that even after his death we might still be getting little nuggets of
delightful music like this. Far too good to leave in the vaults for fifty
years.
After all ‘Balanced On A Pin’ is yet more revealing
discussions about just how feeble Crosby is feeling at seventy-eight. Though
unlike ‘Your Own Ride’ he never mentions his own death directly, that’s what
Crosby says he was trying to convey with this song of delicacy and doubt as he
imagines himself a bubble about to burst on a pin at any time. A lovely
mournful guitar lick is the best on the album and fittingly Croz performs most
of this song about feeling helpless alone. Crosby starts getting feisty,
telling us that we all have choice about the lives we ‘navigate’ and how they
turn out – but not the ending, which isn’t chosen by us. Reflecting CPR style
on what he’s learnt in this life Crosby tells us that he mostly remembers ‘love
stories’ and that ‘I love love’. Returning to the theme of flight that crops up
in this album (has he been re-listening to The Byrds?) Crosby tells us not to
be afraid to fly – that while we don’t know when the landing will come or if we
will crash, the flight is worth it. He feels that life gets tougher at the end,
that ‘the connection all comes apart’ as he prepares for the next world instead
of living in this one, but Croz still holds his nerve, this lovely song
recalling lots of past acoustic classics about feeling lost and helpless, from
[160] ‘Homeward Through The Haze’ to [93] ‘Where Will I Be?’, the music the
perfect summary of a rootless restless soul searching for a resolution on a
chord that never arrives and instead keeps bouncing the song back into the air.
When the ending does come, ending in a cascading round of ringing Michael
League guitar notes, it’s less triumphant than exhausted, collapsing gratefully
on the chord that will finally offer rest. My guess too is that Crosby has been
paying close attention to his old partner, with this song his own more personal
weary take on Nash’s triumphant [457] ‘Encore’. It’s a worrying song for fans
who have grown up with Crosby through thick and thin to hear, but an important
and courageous song for all of that, drizzled with just the right amount of
mischief and mystery.
CSNY are, to their detractors, the very definition
of male chauvinism. The groupies on tour, the casual way they walk off with
each other’s lovers, the agonising love songs wondering why their beloved
others just won’t do what they’re told. For many Crosby is the worst, songs
like Byrds refugee [14] ‘Triad’ wondering aloud why man and woman should choose
one partner their whole lives when they can have more. ‘Other Half Rule’
started out as League’s song and he duly sings the first verse, but Crosby has
been quite adamant about how much of this timely feminist lyric he wrote.
Promoting the album he talked about how this song was about wanting to get rid
of the male patriarchal society and hand everything over to the women, the
‘other half’ of the globe who even with all the many great societal changes of
the 20th century and beyond still have barely a foot in the door of
power and politics. After talking about how women in power tend to be closer to
his way of thinking, with an emphasis on education and environment Crosby
chuckled, ‘after all, they could hardly do a worse job than us could they?’
This song is, alas, slightly hackneyed, the boys starting off singing until the
girls take over while the lyrics are what CSNY detractors claim all their music
represents, sloganeering without really understanding. Nevertheless, even this
relative ‘failure’ has some terrific moments. The sighing melody which starts
off so sweet and ends up so sinister, with a hazy crazy guitar riff that’s
quite angry and catches you off guard. The sad lamenting guitar riff which
sighs over the top of a particularly macho part below it (which in CSNY days
would surely have been played by Stills) is the perfect accompaniment for the
lyrics about one half of the world following while despairing. The manic ending
where just as you think the song is spent it suddenly explodes into fury, a
wild cascade of jazz voices all haunting each other in the darkness, offering
suggestions that no one else hears. The very ominous threatening tone of the
song works really well, rescuing a song that lyrically runs out of things to
say before the end of the opening verse. This is, too, a very timely song for
the #metoo generation and it makes perfect sense that, whatever his wayward
past, its Crosby who realises the weight of the movement long before most of
his male peers.
The album’s real weakest link though comes near the
end with ‘Janet’. This is a Michelle Willis song she was working on for her
solo album when she played it to Crosby and he begged to use it on this album,
calling it one of the best songs on the record. I’m really not at all sure I
agree – this song’s sultry badass sound is completely at odds musically and
thematically with the rest of the album and the sudden switch to pure jazz
after nearly a whole album of skirting around it loosely feels like falling
into a trap and using Spice Girls music right at the point when the credits
were rolling after a soundtrack of Beatles. Things get worse because this song
makes no sense, its central line of ‘Janet, what you gonna do with it?’ odd,
especially as the verses are almost stupidly simple (‘Oh Janet, she took your
man’). Michelle still hasn’t admitted, even to her co-singers, what this song
is really about – and unlike some of Crosby’s more esoteric material it’s just
not interesting enough as a song to bother with. Admittedly the recording
rescues the song somewhat: its obvious, after most of an album of note perfect
singing, that the band are letting down their hair and having fun and Crosby’s
Stillsian gospel whoops might not fit but are a lot of fun. However this song
should have stayed a Michelle Willis solo track or ended up as a B-side, as it
has precious little to do with Crosby and nothing to do with the rest of this
album. ‘Janet’ is also, if you hadn’t already noticed, one of the hardest names
to rhyme with in the English language. Oddly the band don’t even do the obvious
here (‘planet’).
The album ends with a re-make of [32] Woodstock,
partly here as a kind ex-boyfriend trying his best to keep Joni’s music in the
limelight after her illness took her out of the public eye and partly because
this was the CSNY re-arrangement that everybody went nuts for on tour. You can
kind of see why: Joni’s writing is much more in keeping with this band’s style
than most of Croz’s past music and it’s fun to hear him shrugging off the 4/4
rock changes Stills added for the ‘Déjà vu’ album back in 1970. Crosby has of
course never sung the lead p[art on tape before, just the harmony, so it’s
rather a shame that he hands so much of the song over to the others to sing,
even if their four-part harmonies are indeed pretty electrifying when they all
sing together and Becca rather steals the show on the second verse. However, strong
as this remake is, in context this song makes me unbearably sad. What was once
a moment of triumph for a whole generation, written by Joni in envy at having
not been allowed by her manager to play the festival (he’d double-booked her
with Dick Cavett’s chat show a day later), has now become a song of loss and
how far we’ve fallen. This song, more than any other in the book, represents
the hippie dream, the idea that we are all made up of cosmic atoms and can
shape our own destiny, pulling together to go back to Eden. On this album
though the world is a mess and everything has gone wrong, the hippie spirit
long since dormant and waiting to be resurrected. The timid way this song is
sung, even the acoustic setting (actually more traditional to Joni’s original)
sounding as if Crosby now doubts himself and all he stood for ever coming true.
The difference between the two versions is that in 1970 CSNY lived and breathed
this song and in 2018 it is a distant memory, a history lesson, left here in
the vain hope that it will encourage future ages to finish off the job the band
themselves tried so hard to do. If this is the last song any of CSN release
(and hopefully it won’t be, what with Crosby’s creative roll and Nash’s 2016
renaissance) then it’s a sad way to bow out, a tombstone for what the band were
aiming for – on an album that more than ever comes with evidence of how far
short CSNY came.
It is, however, not their fault. CSNY always tried
their hardest and if friction and disagreements got in the way then that’s what
happens when four opinionated people who all want the best for the world and
each other get together then, hey, I’d rather that than a generation of
boy-bands being told to say the same thing in every interview. Yes we lost some
music along the way and – who knows – maybe we lost the hippie dream along with
them because the world only changed for the worse when they slipped from grace
somewhere around the late 1970s. However, each one of them has always continued
to stay true to the music their whole lives through and Crosby, especially,
still has so much of the same groundbreaking rule-breaking spirit that kept him
going all those decades. Musicians at 78 aren’t meant to albums like this one,
with a whole new band, a whole new sound and the same old tireless search for a
better life in a world that sucks but could easily work so well for all of us.
Crosby remains the musician, more than perhaps any other, that I look up to to
tell me the truth and he has never let me down – yes there have been a few
ropey albums here and there, but I knew this album was coming one day, I just
knew. No this record isn’t perfect, it runs out of steam badly near the end,
needs a rocker in there to shake things up and the plain white album cover with
hideous neon lettering gives ‘Live It Up’ new competition as the worst album
cover in this book. However this is another important album of a sort that only
Crosby could give us and it is his best work for ever such a long time (1998?),
almost getting it right all the way up to the end. Glory indeed. We are here
and listening Croz – and those who aren’t are missing out.
A reminder that 'Change Partners - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To CSNY' will be available in ebook form on Thursday!
A Now Complete List Of CSN/Y and Solo Articles Available To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:
'Crosby, Stills and Nash' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-29-crosby-stills-and-nash-1969.html
'Deja Vu' (CSNY) (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-34-crosby-stills-nash-and-young.html
‘Stephen Stills’ (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/stephen-stills-1970.html
'If Only I Could Remember My Name' (Crosby) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-45-david-crosby-if-only-i-could.html
'Songs For Beginners' (Nash) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-46-graham-nash-songs-for.html
'Stephen Stills II' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-48-stephen-stills-ii-1971.html
‘Graham Nash, David
Crosby’ (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/graham-nash-david-crosby-1972.html
'Stephen Stills-Manassas' (1972)http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-51-stephen-stillsmanassas-1972.html
'Wild Tales' (Nash) (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/news-views-and-music-issue-75-graham.html
'Stephen Stills-Manassas' (1972)http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-51-stephen-stillsmanassas-1972.html
'Wild Tales' (Nash) (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/news-views-and-music-issue-75-graham.html
'Down The Road' (Stephen
Stills/Manassas) (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/stephen-stillsmanassas-down-by-road-1973.html
'Stills' (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/review-65-stephen-stills-stills-1975.html
'Wind On The Water' (Crosby-Nash) (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-67-crosby-nash-wind-on-water.html
'Stills' (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/review-65-stephen-stills-stills-1975.html
'Wind On The Water' (Crosby-Nash) (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-67-crosby-nash-wind-on-water.html
'Illegal Stills' (Stills)
(1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/stephen-stills-illegal-stills-1976.html
'Whistling Down The Wire'
(Crosby-Nash) (1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/david-crosby-graham-nash-whistling-down.html
'Long May You Run' (Stills-Young) (1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-33-stills.html
'CSN' (1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-70-crosby-stills-and-nash-csn.html
'Long May You Run' (Stills-Young) (1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-33-stills.html
'CSN' (1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-70-crosby-stills-and-nash-csn.html
'Thoroughfare Gap'
(Stills) (1978) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/stephen-stills-thoroughfare-gap-1978.html
'Earth and Sky' (Nash)
(1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/graham-nash-earth-and-sky-1980.html
'Daylight Again' (CSN) (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/news-views-and-music-issue-131-crosby.html
'Daylight Again' (CSN) (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/news-views-and-music-issue-131-crosby.html
'Right By You' (Stills)
(1984) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/stephen-stills-right-by-you-1984.html
'Innocent Eyes' (Nash)
(1986) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/graham-nash-innocent-eyes-1986.html
'American Dream' (CSNY)
(1988) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/crosby-stills-nash-and-young-american.html
'Oh Yes I Can!' (Crosby)
(1989) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/07/david-crosby-oh-yes-i-can-1989.html
'Live It Up!' (CSN) (1989) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/news-viedws-and-music-issue-104-crosby.html
'Live It Up!' (CSN) (1989) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/news-viedws-and-music-issue-104-crosby.html
'Stephen Stills Alone'
(1991) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.nl/2016/09/stephen-stills-alone-1991.html
'A Thousand Roads'
(Crosby) (1993) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/david-crosby-thousand-roads-1993.html
‘After The Storm’ (CSN)
(1994) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/the-final-review-crosby-stills-and-nash.html
'CPR' (Crosby Band) (1998)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/cpr-david-crosby-band-1998.html
'Looking Forward' (1999) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/crosby-stills-nash-and-young-looking.html
‘So Like Gravity' (CPR,
2001)
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/cpr-just-like-gravity-2001.html
‘Songs For Survivors’ (2002) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/graham-nash-songs-for-survivors-2002.html
‘Songs For Survivors’ (2002) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/graham-nash-songs-for-survivors-2002.html
'Crosby*Nash' (2004) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/news-views-and-music-issue-21-crosby.html
‘Man Alive’ (S) (2005) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/stephen-stills-man-alive-2005.html
'Deja Vu Live' (CD) (2008) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/news-views-and-music-issue-1-crosby.html
'Deja Vu Live' (DVD) (2008) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008_09_21_archive.html
'Reflections' (Graham Nash Box Set) (2009) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/news-views-and-music-issue-22-graham.html
'Demos' (CSN) (2009) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/news-views-and-music-issue-41-crosby.html
'Manassas: Pieces' (2010) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/news-views-and-music-issue-52-manassas.html
‘Carry On’ (Stephen Stills Box Set) (2013) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/stephen-stills-carry-on-box-set-2013.html
'Croz' (Crosby) (2014) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/david-crosby-croz-2014album-review.html
'CSNY 74' (Recorded 1974 Released 2014) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/crosby-stills-nash-and-young-csny-74.html
'This Path Tonight' (Nash) (2016) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/graham-nash-this-path-tonight-2016.html
'Lighthouse' (Crosby)
(2016) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/david-crosby-lighthouse-2016.html
‘Sky Trails’ (Crosby)
(2017) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/david-crosby-sky-trails-2017.html
The Best Unreleased CSNY
Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/csny-best-unreleased-tracks-news-views.html
Surviving TV Appearances (1969-2009) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/csny-surviving-tv-appearances-1969-09.html
Non-Album Recordings (1962-2009) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/crosby-stills-nash-and-sometimes-young_6.html
Live/Compilation/Rarities Albums Part One
(1964-1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/crosby-stills-nash-and-sometimes-young.html
Live/Compilations/Rarities
Albums Part Two (1982-2012) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/crosby-stills-nash-and-sometimes-young_20.html
Essay: The Superest Of
Super Groups? https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/csny-essay-superest-of-super-groups.html
Five Landmark Concerts and
Three Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/csny-five-landmark-concerts-and-three.html
Nice post thankss for sharing
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