Crosby Nash

Graham Nash, Crosby & Nash, David Crosby

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 10, 2004)
• Original Release Date: August 10, 2004
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Sanctuary Records
• ASIN: B0002IU97Y
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #93,012 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Long time compatriots and bandmates David Crosby and Graham Nash have joined forces yet again to release the oddly named Crosby/Nash 28 years after their last studio effort, Whistling Down the Wire. This double-disc is certainly worth the wait, despite the fact that most of the 20 songs are profoundly introspective and tinged with an elegant melancholy and sense of regret for an idealized past. To their credit, after four decades, Crosby and Nash are still in perfect voice, and remain graceful foils for one another, although some of the songs don't do justice to their prodigious talents. A handful are without focus and seem to be impressions in search of a hook, save the lovely, ethereal "Lay Me Down" (penned by Crosby's son, James Raymond) and the rather esoteric '60s throwback "Luck Dragon," with its elegant space jam ending. Nash's contributions are a bit more prosaic, and seem to be autobiographical ruminations about middle age, except the chilling environmental cautionary tale, "Don't Dig Here" and haunting post-9/11 song, "Half Your Angels." But the disc really comes alive when the duo shows their old ire, "They Want It All," a clear potshot at corporate greed and politics, and a wrenching read of "My Country 'Tis of Thee." --Jaan Uhelszki

Rolling Stone
"...the immaculate, high-altitude harmonies glazing this two-cd set...is with elegant optimism...and perfect harmony...3 stars"

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Prayer for Grace in a Dark Time, August 13, 2004

By	Stephen Silberman "writer, Wired Magazine" (SF, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

While nobody was looking, David Crosby and Graham Nash have recorded one of the most powerful, poignant, and musically solid albums of the year. A couple of songs here -- "Lay Me Down" and "Jesus of Rio" -- stand up with the very best work of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, but this album is not a hollow nostalgia exercise by a couple of quaint relics of the Woodstock Nation. Instead, it's a master class in songwriting and performance from two artists who have retained their integrity and commitment to innovation even after decades of being ignored or ridiculed by the mainstream press.Hearing this album in the era of George Bush is like discovering that a wilderness area that was supposed to have been paved over to build another Wal-Mart was somehow spared and is thriving with new life.

The last few CSN/CSNY projects have seemed enervated and oddly plastic, but "Crosby/Nash" charges into new musical territory while retaining the smart soul-searching lyrics, melodic exploration, and exquisite harmonies that made these guys so beloved in the first place. Some of the credit for the freshness of this album belongs to the band, which includes Crosby's astonishingly talented son James Raymond on keyboards, the very fine young guitar player Jeff Pevar (respectively, the R and P of Crosby's underrated band CPR), and under-the-radar guitar genius Dean Parks, who provided the witty, stinging guitar lines on Steely Dan classics like "Haitian Divorce." The presence of drummer Russ Kunkel and bass player Lee Sklar -- the celebrated rhythm section on dozens of albums by the likes of James Taylor and Jackson Browne -- reaffirms a continuity with the duo's earlier work, but even Kunkel and Sklar sound reinvigorated here. This is not your mother's singer-songwriter album, but beefier and more muscular, as befits a funkier age.

"Jesus of Rio," co-written with Pevar, is one of the most moving and majestic performances of Nash's career, featuring an uncredited backing vocal from James Taylor and a luminous Bill Evans-esque solo introduction by Raymond. Like several of the songs on "C/N," its central theme is what Crosby calls, in another song, "quiet grace" -- the redemptive power of love and mindfulness of the small, precious, transitory glories of existence ("for every human is holy to someone") . The prevailing mood of this album -- as expressed in songs like Crosby's "Through Here Quite Often" -- recalls a poem by William Butler Yeats:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Other strong songs on this album include Marc Cohn's lovely "I Surrender," and Crosby and Raymond's hip and slinky "Luck Dragon," featuring a lyric written at a CSNY end-of-tour party. "Don't Dig Here" and "They Want It All" face corporate greed and environmental squandering head-on, and Nash's "Half Your Angels" is a haunting tribute to the children who died in the Oklahoma City bombing that seems even more resonant in the post-9/11 era.

The album is perhaps one or two songs too long: "Penguin in a Palm Tree" in particular is almost a self-parody of a wealthy rockstar navel gazing in Lahaina, and a couple of other Nash songs seem overly coy and slight. A stunning lyric penned by Crosby in the mid-70s, "Samurai," is sung with admirable power but marred by tight-sounding vocal overdubs. Still, almost all of the tracks here bristle with new power and glow with seasoned wisdom while retaining the core musical values that made these guys the soul and conscience of popular music for 30 years.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Of This Year's Best CDs So Far, August 15, 2004

By	Scott Garside "alanjamesscott" (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What a beautifully recorded and sung album! My God, these guys sound as good as they did back in the seventies! Sure, their voices are a bit lower now and maybe they can't hold the notes quite as long, but this is as excellent a collection as anything else they've done. Kudos to fantastic instumental accompaniment by James Raymond, Dean Parks, Jeff Pevar, Lee Sklar and Russ Kunkel! And the songwriting is consistently powerful as well--"Lay Me Down," "Don't Dig Here," "Jesus Of Rio," "Milky Way Tonight," and "Live On (the Wall) are instant classics. If there's anything to criticize, it's the length of disc two, which is just about 29 minutes long, but, no matter, I would've gladly shelled out the $20 if they'd put the whole thing on one cd. This is definitely one of the year's best releases so far!

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What a Treat, August 16, 2004

By	Benjamin C. Leonard (South Bend, Indiana United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The boys are back and this time without Stephen Stills, but with all the members of David Crosby's band CPR, which includes his son. You could almost call this album CPR&N. It's been a long time since Crosby and Nash have recorded as a duo. They have their own blend that is for sure, different than CSN or CSNY. While I applaud anything they do with Neil Young; sometimes Stills drags them down. I never use to feel this way. I was a big Stills fan at one time; but Stephen has lost it, especially vocally. This effort between the two of them is the best thing I've heard in years from any combination of CSNY. They showcase what they do best, strong songwriting, especially lyrically and still gorgeous harmony. This includes strong contributions from CPR. I think they needed this to reastablish themselves as relevant artists; and to those that said they had lost it. There is no shortage of material either. There are 20 cuts with no filler. If you have followed these guys at all through the years, pick this one up and you will be in for a real treat.