The 1996 song David Crosby called “so good” no one can ignore
David Crosby never once picked up an acoustic guitar, trying to think of what would make a great single.
He liked the idea of searching for new sounds that no one had heard before, and that usually involved him trying to find different chords that would have been found nowhere near the Top 40. Nothing he did was meant to be necessarily commercial, but every so often, a songwriter would come out of the woodwork that even the charts were willing to give the time of day to.
If you look at Crosby’s track record, though, he wasn’t known as one of the most prolific hitmakers in either of his bands. Roger McGuinn clearly had that style covered when working with The Byrds, and even in Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Graham Nash was usually the one who could be counted on to write a great single. And when listening to Crosby’s solo career, his eclectic brand of rock and roll suited him fine on his own material.
He didn’t mind taking cues from non-pop genres like jazz to find what he was looking for, and the lion’s share of his solo records were all about trying to capture a feeling that pop songs couldn’t. He had already studied what everyone from Miles Davis to Joni Mitchell had been doing when working on their classics, but that didn’t mean the charts had time for that brand of songwriting, either.
Crosby knew that the pop sphere had turned a corner after the 1970s, but even in the advent of MTV, there were still some fantastic players coming out of the woodwork. Stevie Ray Vaughan had shown everyone what blues could be, even in the era of glamour, and industry veterans like Leonard Cohen were still finding time to make perfect tunes well into the 1980s, but Crosby was shocked to see the singer-songwriters re-emerging in the early 1990s.
Tracy Chapman had broken that door down for plenty of people when ‘Fast Car’ made it big, but a songwriter like Shawn Colvin was enough to blow everyone else out of the water. The early 1990s aren’t really known for being a fertile time for music before grunge hit, so having a song like Colvin’s ‘Sunny Came Home’ on the radio did give Crosby hope for what the next generation would sound like.
It wasn’t the most complex song in the world, but someone who actually had something to say was more than he could have ever asked for, saying, “Every once in a while, there’s an aberration, a crack in the pavement. Somebody like Shawn Colvin will have a hit like ‘Sunny Came Home,’ because it’s just so good, that it slides in between all of the meaningless, tasteless, cardboard cut-out crap.”
And while the rest of that genre got swallowed up the minute that Kurt Cobain became the biggest name in the world, there were still earnest singer-songwriters out there if you were willing to look for them. Things got a bit more sleepy-sounding when Norah Jones came to the forefront, but Colvin was carrying on the tradition of great story songs that would eventually be taken up by people like Fiona Apple when she started to talk about her own struggles from behind her piano.
So while the charts weren’t the most respectable place in the world for Crosby, it was people like Colvin who showed that they at least had some sense. There was nothing that could get in the way of a song like this, and Crosby was going to be the biggest cheerleader he could be for these kinds of songs when they appeared out in the wild.
