The one band David Crosby called the best writers in history: “Nobody better”
David Crosby spent his entire life searching for the greatest songs that he could find.
Even though some people would have been happy to make a half-decent tune that would last throughout the ages, Crosby was out there trying to search for the lost chords that would make people turn their heads and wonder how the hell someone could have even thought of that. A lot of that came from him studying some of the best, but he also felt that there were singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell who had him beat by a mile.
Mitchell was already in a world of her own whenever she was making her classics, but Crosby was more interested in the mechanics of her writing half the time. Her strange tunings were what turned his head, and the way that she weaved together her melodies with some of the greatest poets of all time was enough to put her in the same conversation as the greatest musicians of the 20th century, never mind simply rock and roll.
Crosby did have a great deal of respect for other lyricists like Bob Dylan, but the number-one rule he had was knowing whether or not those songs were going to sound great whenever they were played live. With all due credit to Dylan for his lyrics, it’s not like he had a show-stopping voice by any stretch, and there are more than a few times where The Byrds transformed some of his songs to the point where they could be played on the radio and resonate a lot better than the original did.
But when Crosby, Stills, and Nash formed, Crosby had finally been set free from the pop formula. He didn’t need to worry about making a sure-fire hit every time he walked into the studio, and a lot of his favourite artists were feeling the exact same way when they wrote their iconic tunes. People like Michael McDonald and Stevie Wonder were only making music for themselves as they got older, and from where Crosby stood, Steely Dan was making the kind of music the gods could be proud of.
And that kind of quality was intentional by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Neither of them were concerned with leaving the human elements whenever they made their records, and every single piece of their repertoire needed to be perfect if it was going to end up on a record. They could be more than a little bit harsh and push their bandmates to the absolute brink to get what they wanted, but Crosby knew it was all worth it to get some of the most heavenly pop tunes ever created.
Until the day he died, Crosby still felt that people like Fagen and Becker were among the best teams to come out of the mainstream, saying, “Donald Fagen [is] one half of the best pop writing team in history. Absolutely the best. Who’s better than Steely Dan? Nobody. I don’t think anybody has touched that level of work.” And from a purely musical perspective, it’s hard to really argue with where Crosby is coming from.
If you look at the mechanics behind a lot of what Fagen and Becker were writing, half of it feels like some of the most sophisticated rock and roll ever created. It might be easy for people to talk trash about how the whole thing sounds like yacht rock or music for dads across the world, but when listening to an album like Aja, there aren’t many parts on those songs that could be more perfect, whether you’re talking about Larry Carlton’s solos on their tunes or Steve Gadd delivering a clinic in how to make a drum solo sound massive.
And given the fact that the band has earned fans from all walks of life, it’s no wonder that they are still considered one of the greatest to ever do it. They were born to make music the same way that legends like Duke Ellington were, and if you look in 100 years, there are never going to be any other groups that could hold a candle to the kind of progress they made in only a few short years.
