David Crosby - 2019 - Musician - Michael Stokes

Credit: Far Out / Michael Stokes

The best songwriters of the century, according to David Crosby

Tue 14 July 2026 22:00, UK

David Crosby always needed to have a good song in front of him to get to where he needed to go.

He was a master at arranging harmonies when working off of what the rest of Crosby, Stills and Nash were doing, but if nothing moved him when he was working on a record, it didn’t take him long to fall out of love with what he was doing and try something else. But all of his songs were only done in service to making tunes that his heroes would have been proud to have written themselves.

But Crosby’s heroes have changed a few times depending on what he was focusing on at any particular moment. Some of his earliest memories were him getting immersed in the sounds of jazz, and even if he had a lot more to offer when he had an acoustic guitar in his hand, nothing stopped him from going back to the old Miles Davis albums and seeing what other pieces of his discography needed some work.

If he was going to play rock and roll, though, he wanted something more than playing the blues. He had a great deal of respect for what a band like The Rolling Stones were doing, but if you compared them with the songs that The Beatles came up with, there was no contest. The Stones were in it to be a great rock band, while the Fab Four had turned themselves into one of the single most exciting bands out at the time.

Then again, each member of The Beatles had each other to play off of, and it was a whole different ball game when Crosby heard what Bob Dylan was doing. Dylan was the kind of wordsmith who shook people up from the first time they heard him, and he was going to do everything in his power to try to make something that could stand the test of time, the same way that old folk singers did.

Crosby didn’t initially get what Dylan was after at first, but when he started looking back on the best songwriters, he felt that Dylan deserved a spot next to Joni Mitchell as one of the finest writers he would ever see, saying, “He is a fascinating guy though. (There are) a number of things (I admire in Bob). He’s a brilliant lyricist, and the fact that he continues to try his level best to write stuff that will make you think, make you feel. Or both at the same time. He’s one of the two best songwriters of the century, I would say. Bob and Joni Mitchell.”

But if you look at what Dylan was doing, Mitchell took the same thing and went even further. Dylan was always going to be held back slightly by his voice, but when you listen to Mitchel sing in that beautiful voice, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else who could sing like that and write such gripping songs.

All of her tunes were like fine oil paintings whenever she was finished, and when you look through her discography, she never settled for anything less than perfect. Each of her records was another extension of what she could do, and by the time she went into jazz territory, she started flexing her songwriting muscles in a much different way when she worked with her greatest session players.

Crosby could still look on in amazement at what both of them could do, but even if he was no match for their style of songwriting, he could at least make tunes that came anywhere close to them. Because if he had a tune that had Mitchell’s respect for melody, and the kind of poetry that Dylan had in every song, he would have been one of the most satisfied men in the music industry.