The 1967 lyrics that Graham Nash still loses sleep over: “The words weren’t deep”
A collaboration forming between any two of the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in the late 1960s would, by itself, have been a joy to behold. Put three of them together, and it would have been sublime. Get all four together in a room, and there’s an overabundance of talent being thrown around.
Of course, a lot of these matchups did happen, and the fact that I’ve been able to refer to them as their collective band name only goes to show just how impactful the four of them managed to be as a quartet, even if their output as a four-piece ensemble was limited to just three sparsely separated albums over the course of almost 30 years.
Whoever it was that found themselves working alongside each other, it was evident that magic could be woven, and the quality of the records that are attributed to some sort of configuration of this illustrious supergroup is sublime across the board, each in its own way.
Even without each other, they’ve all had a considerable amount of success, whether operating as a solo artist or with the backing of a band, and that’s down to having an exemplary level of songwriting talent shared between them.
However, one of the foursome didn’t necessarily feel that way until he’d become acquainted with the rest of the group, and that some of his earlier work without the aid of the other three was lacking in certain areas despite having achieved plenty of notoriety.
Graham Nash had been a member of the British invasion hitmakers The Hollies until 1968, becoming one of the last bands from this explosion to achieve success in the States, but upon reflection, he felt his songwriting chops lacked a sense of maturity that he wouldn’t develop until later on. During a 2018 interview with People, he disputed the strength of what he’d done as the primary songwriter with the band, wincing at the fact that the band’s 1967 hit ‘On A Carousel’ was plagued by terrible lyricism.
“When I was in the Hollies, I learned how to write a melody that you wouldn’t forget if you heard it a couple of times,” he admitted, “but the lyrics sucked. ‘Riding along on a carousel.’ Come on. I love it, but the words weren’t deep.”
He continued, arguing that there was a significant gulf between his lyricism in The Hollies and what he’d end up writing in the 1970s and beyond. “When I came over to America, and I started working with David and Stephen and Neil and Joni,” he said, referring to Crosby, Stills and Young, as well as the group’s close friend Joni Mitchell.
Adding, “I noticed what words they were putting to their melodies and I realised that I would have to get serious about songwriting. I knew I could write melodies, but it was only after I came to America that I really got into changing the way I wrote songs.”
It’s evident that his songwriting took on a completely different tone when he joined forces with David Crosby and Stephen Stills for their first album as a trio, and with the help of other prominent songwriters running in the same circles, he would be able to further hone in on this talent that he believed he was being held back from while in the UK and performing with The Hollies.
