Crosby, Stills & Nash

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    Graham Nash Has a Few More Songs Before He Goes

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    At 81, the singer-songwriter admits his time could be short, especially after losing David Crosby. But in the meantime, he’s got plenty to say and sing.ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Graham Nash was slow to smile on a recent Wednesday afternoon, sitting in early spring sunshine on the porch of a cafe near Washington, D.C.The night before, the 81-year-old singer-songwriter had bounded onto the stage of the folk bastion the Birchmere, and wooed the sold-out crowd with his tunes that long ago became generational standards, like “Teach Your Children” and “Military Madness.” He shared the songs and candid stories of longtime pals like Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell, landing expertly practiced punch lines.But he’d awakened in the daze of emotional hangover. Exactly three months had passed since the January death of David Crosby, his best friend and closest collaborator since they first harmonized together in August 1968, at the Laurel Canyon cottage that Nash would soon share with Mitchell. “It is like an earthquake,” he said, his English accent softened by nearly 50 years in California and Hawaii. “The shock was terrifying. Then I see his face, and it makes me really sad.”The day’s aftershock stemmed from a video tribute Nash recorded for Neil Young and Stephen Stills to use at an autism benefit. It was another unwelcome opportunity to contemplate all that Nash and Crosby left unsaid during the prior decade, as the pair traded barbs in the press, left an album with Rick Rubin unfinished and rarely spoke. In early January, Crosby emailed Nash to say he wanted to talk, then left a voice mail message telling him he wanted to apologize for, as Nash remembered, “all the stupid things I said about you and, particularly, Neil.” After Nash set a time, Crosby stood him up. Three days later, he was dead.Nash, left, and David Crosby in 1976. The two bandmates and close friends had fallen out of touch before Crosby’s death in January.Jorgen Angel/Redferns, via Getty Images“David was a very interesting couple of people: He was generous, funny and the most unbelievably great musician. On the other hand, he could make an entire room feel bad with two words,” Nash said, making his way through the first of three lunchtime lattes. “I wanted to remember the good music we made and the great times we had, let that satisfy you. But he’s gone.”Nash is now a member of the rarest class of living rock legend — old enough to have witnessed the genre’s genesis and eager to talk about his wild days, but also inspired enough by his current work to rave about new songs. This year alone, he has reunited with a childhood chum, the Hollies co-founder Allan Clarke, for the sentimental and charming album “I’ll Never Forget,” singing backup on most songs. And on May 19, Nash will release “Now,” 13 tracks about American unrest and the renewal inspired by his third marriage and a move to New York.Still, several of his favorite former musical partners, like Crosby, the drummer Jim Gordon and the multi-instrumentalist David Lindley, have all died since January. He knows his life’s work is increasingly a race against mortality.“I tried to be the best husband, the best friend, the best musician, but I’ll never make it,” he said. “I’m still healthy, but so was David. I could drop dead in the middle of this conversation.”“I wanted to remember the good music we made and the great times we had, let that satisfy you,” Nash said of Crosby. “But he’s gone.”Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesNash’s life story reads like a rock ’n’ roll fantasy. He was raised working-class in Salford, near Manchester, and first heard hints of the stateside musical revolution by pressing his ear to his bedpost on Sunday nights. As his parents listened to Radio Luxembourg downstairs, the sound traveled through the wooden beams of their close quarters, sparking his imagination.“My mother and father didn’t tell me to get a real job because music’s not going to last,” he said by phone during an earlier conversation from his East Village recording and photography studio. “My mother always said to me, ‘Follow your heart, and you will always make the right choices. Life is just choices.’”Already playing the proto-rock of skiffle, Nash skipped school to score tickets to see Bill Haley & His Comets with Clarke, days after his 15th birthday. The duo soon beat the Beatles (before they were the Beatles) in a talent show. Three years later, they stalked the Everly Brothers to their hotel, where they received the encouragement they needed to start the Hollies. (“Keep doing it,” Phil Everly said in the rain. “Things’ll happen.”)The Hollies’ suave R&B covers and bittersweet originals made them pop sensations, part of the Beatles’ global sea change. During their first U.S. appearance, they shared a bill with Little Richard and the young guitarist he scolded for upstaging him, Jimi Hendrix.But soon after his father’s 1966 death, Nash tired of the group’s strict parameters. When he first sang with Stills and Crosby in California, he knew his future lay in its libertine lifestyle. He fell in love with Mitchell. His mother didn’t realize he had left the Hollies, his first marriage and England altogether until a copy of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s debut LP arrived, a chart-topping postcard home. The split blindsided Clarke, especially because Nash refused to tell him directly.“I really believed, in my mid-70s, ‘I’m coming to the end of my life. It’s all finished,’” Nash said. “I wanted to wear my heart on my sleeve, as I try and always do.”Daniel Arnold for The New York Times“He was my brother, really, and he had gone and fallen in love with someone else,” Clarke said, shrugging in a video interview. “I had a family, and I was devastated. What was going to happen to me now?”That ceaseless need for reinvention — bordering perhaps on an obsession with relevance — has threaded together Nash’s career and life. He indulged drum machines and synths for his lampooned 1986 album “Innocent Eyes” (perhaps not coincidentally, his final solo album for 16 years). He used augmented reality for a prescient but lambasted high-tech concert series a decade later. A zealous photographer and art collector, Nash was an early adopter of fine-art digital prints, an enduring side enterprise.He was a self-professed cad during his first marriage, ultimately leading him to Mitchell. He has always believed he should have proposed to her in the early ’70s, but she worried he wanted her to play housekeeper to his rock star. (“Am I going to tell Joni Mitchell not to write?” he scoffed, loudly, in the cafe. “Get real here.”) In the half-century since they split, he’s never forgotten to send her birthday flowers.But for the final eight years of his 38-year marriage to the actress Susan Sennett, he was not in love, something he said they both acknowledged. In 2014, he met the artist Amy Grantham, four decades his junior, backstage at a Crosby, Stills & Nash show during one of their final tours. In that first moment, he realized happiness was again possible. He told Sennett about the attraction, and they split two years later. Sennett died soon after Nash and Grantham’s 2019 Woodstock wedding.From left: John Sebastian, Nash, Joni Mitchell, Crosby and Stephen Stills onstage at the Big Sur Folk Festival in September 1969.Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesIn the acrimonious annals of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Nash generally seemed the best-adjusted, least controversial member. He quit hard drugs relatively early and devoted decades to charity. For some, his divorce and remarriage represented a heel turn. But, he reiterated, it was worth it.“I’ve never been upset with any major decision I have made,” he said, noting that he did regret missing his parents’ deaths. “I have enjoyed my life and made some incredibly correct decisions for me. I hope to be going on for a few more years yet.”After a lifetime of restlessness, “Now” feels remarkably content, as if Nash has slipped into a favorite old overcoat to find a cache of new tunes stuffed inside a pocket. There are political jeremiads that decry “MAGA tourists,” plus a next-generation hymn that echoes “Teach Your Children.” He wrote “Buddy’s Back,” a glowing celebration of the Hollies forebear, for Clarke; they cut different takes for their respective albums, joyously closing a broken boyhood circle.Love songs for Grantham shape nearly half the album, gentle and guileless tunes that glow. “It Feels Like Home” is “Our House” recast for the East Coast, Nash walking through the door to find “the answer to a prayer.” He apologizes for lashing out during “Love of Mine,” a true-to-life mea culpa after Grantham told him to stop clogging Manhattan sidewalks. “Now” unspools in hard-won tranquillity.“I really believed, in my mid-70s, ‘I’m coming to the end of my life. It’s all finished,’” he said. “In many ways, Amy saved my life. I wanted to wear my heart on my sleeve, as I try and always do.”As Nash relaxed on that sunny porch, he pulled up the sleeves of his black T-shirt to reveal three tattoos. There was the Hindu god Ganesha below his left shoulder, his ex-wife below his right. He lingered longer on his left forearm, where the black ink of the vegvisir, often called the “Viking compass,” was fading.“It’s so I don’t get lost,” he said, lifting his gaze and grinning. “But it might be upside down, so who knows?”Daniel Arnold for The New York Times More

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      David Crosby’s 15 Essential Songs

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      The singer and songwriter, who died this week, created music that helped define an era and stretched across generations. Listen to six decades of tracks that tell the story of his career.A streak of otherworldliness ran all the way through David Crosby’s long, complicated life in music. It was in his voice, a reedy, quavering high tenor that could sound like he was pondering every line he sang. He was also happy to dissolve that voice, and the ego it implied, into shared vocal harmonies: with the Byrds, with Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young) and with his 21st-century group, the Lighthouse Band.There was otherworldliness, too, in the hovering harmonies he loved: the hypnotic modal patterns he picked on guitar and the ambiguous jazz chords that could lead in multiple directions. While Crosby, who died this week at 81, sometimes touched down in topical songwriting — a role he described as being a “town crier” — more often his lyrics were full of what-ifs and reflections on time, consciousness and eternity.In the 1960s, Crosby was a prime mover in the Los Angeles music scene that spun together folk, rock, country and psychedelia. He was a founding member and a secondary but innovative songwriter in the Byrds. He was an integral part of what became the Laurel Canyon coterie of songwriters in Los Angeles, and he also forged connections to psychedelic San Francisco.Crosby’s personal life was calamitous enough in the 1970s and 1980s — cocaine and heroin addiction, prison time, medical crises, financial ruin — for him to chronicle it in two older-but-wiser autobiographies: “Long Time Gone” and “Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It.” Throughout his career, close musical collaborations gave way to harsh acrimony.But his music told different stories. Shaped by the upheavals of the 1960s, his songs held crosscurrents of freedom and disorientation, of seeking and disillusionment, of yearning and alienation and, later, of seasoned reflection. In 2014, at 72, he restarted what turned out to be a prolific solo career with “Croz,” the first of five studio albums he released in the next seven years; there were live recordings, too. His voice, amazingly enough, held up for his final creative surge. It sounded gentle and selfless, humbled and purified by time.Here, in chronological order, are 15 songs spanning David Crosby’s six-decade career.The Byrds, ‘I See You’ (1966)Is it a love song or a rush of hallucinations? Written by Crosby and Jim McGuinn (who would later rename himself Roger), “I See You” shows their shared interest in Indian music and John Coltrane’s jazz. They sing about “Warm sliding sun through the cave of your hair” over a galloping backbeat, with early hallmarks of Crosby’s songwriting: a modal drone in the verses, a meter shift to change things up.The Byrds, ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ (1967)Crosby sings with bittersweet patience about the pain of love gone wrong, as drums tick along and guitars entwine. But there’s a twist; he’s actually talking himself into taking another chance.The Byrds, ‘Mind Gardens’ (1967)An artifact of psychedelia’s experimental heyday, “Mind Gardens” is a parable about protection and openness, with an Indian-tinged vocal line rising above a multitracked, droney web of guitar picking: acoustic and electric, picked and sustained, running forward and backward and completely reveling in disorientation.The Byrds, ‘Triad’ (1968)In one of the disputes that led to Crosby leaving the Byrds, the band recorded his taboo-testing song about a ménage a trois — “Why can’t we go on as three?” it asked — but refused to include it on “The Notorious Byrd Brothers,” an album that marked the Byrds’ turn toward country-rock. The song would emerge anyway: first with the Jefferson Airplane, later on “4 Way Street” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Long Time Gone’ (1969)Written after the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, “Long Time Gone” seethes with bitter frustration, from its ominous organ chords to Stephen Stills’s gnarled guitar fills. There’s open desperation in Crosby’s voice as he exhorts, “Speak out against the madness/You’ve got to speak your mind if you dare.”Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Wooden Ships’ (1969)Crosby had a lifelong fondness for boats. Writing with Paul Kantner (of Jefferson Airplane) and Stills, in “Wooden Ships” he offered a grim but hopeful post-apocalyptic scenario. Survivors from opposite sides of a war, who don’t even know “who won,” share their meager supplies, deciding they can be “free and easy” on the water.Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Guinnevere’ (1969)“Guinnevere” was Crosby’s supreme enigma. The lyrics compare an unnamed “milady” to the adored but absent Guinnevere, who “drew pentagrams” on the wall and “had green eyes like yours.” Crosby, Stills and Graham Nash harmonize over two electric guitars picking modal chords, hinting at fleeting syncopations and suddenly declaring, “She shall be free.”Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ (1970)Boomers can remember when the length of a man’s hair signified a political allegiance. While Stills and Neil Young set up a lead-guitar duel behind him, Crosby sings with his most intense near-rasp, feeling paranoia — “like lookin’ at my mirror and seeing a police car” — but deciding he was “letting my freak flag fly” anyway.Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ‘Déjà Vu’ (1970)“Don’t you wonder what’s going on down under you?” the members of this supergroup harmonized at a key moment in this wonderfully complex musical and verbal construction. Guitars, harpsichord, drums, scat-singing and vocal harmonies ebb and flow through the song, all delivered as if it were simple and homespun.David Crosby, ‘Laughing’ (1971)In 1971, Crosby released his perfectly atmospheric solo debut album, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” backed by members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane as well as Joni Mitchell, who joined the backup harmonies on this song. Crosby sings about a failed spiritual quest — finding “only reflections of a shadow that I saw” — and Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel guitar floats above him as he finds acceptance.David Crosby, ‘Orleans’ (1971)In this elaborate miniature, an eerie chorale of vocal harmonies carries the names of places in France; then guitar counterpoint takes over, sketching a melody just once before letting it fall away.David Crosby, ‘Holding On to Nothing’ (2014)There’s more than a hint of Crosby’s lifelong admiration for Mitchell in “Holding On to Nothing,” with its calmly strummed, eccentric chords and asymmetrical melody. From “Croz,” which was his return to making solo albums after 20 years, “Holding On to Nothing” meditates on time, longing, depression and persistence, feeling like “a stranger just passing through.”David Crosby, ‘The Us Below’ (2016)In a song from “Lighthouse,” the album that inaugurated Crosby’s years of collaboration with Michael League of Snarky Puppy, Crosby gazes at the vast distances between stars and wonders, “Why must we be eternally alone?” But gradually, layer by layer, guitar patterns and vocals waft in and interlock, suggesting that we’re not.David Crosby, ‘Curved Air’ (2017)Even in his last years, Crosby was trying new approaches. “Curved Air” — written with his son James Raymond — is briskly percussive and rhythmically unpredictable, with flamenco-like handclaps and a bass line that talks back to him. The lyrics wish for “a little traction here/A little solid ground,” yet as the melody hops around, Crosby is entirely sure-footed.David Crosby, Michael League, Becca Stevens and Michelle Willis ‘Balanced on a Pin’ (2018)Written with the members of the Lighthouse Band, “Balanced on a Pin” contemplates fragility and mortality: “Landing’s the hardest part/The connection comes apart,” Crosby sings. For much of the song, his only accompaniment is the picking of a lone guitar, suspending his voice above the inevitability of silence. More