Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young pick their favourite CSNY songs
One of music’s original supergroups, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, have delivered some of the finest songs to date. In one of the world’s most fleeting examples of musicianship breeding marketing prowess, the band’s forging of talents was driven purely by its artistic connection. Even before Young joined the band in 1969, the harmonic prowess Crosby, Stills and Nash showed on their self-titled ‘69 album was almost transcendental, nodding towards the idea that their voices were destined to be sung with one another.
So when the formidable Neil Young joined the ranks shortly after, the charts quivered at the sound of the Lauren Canyon four-piece tuning their guitars. But Young’s arrival into the band wasn’t a pre-empted recipe for success. A carefully balanced dynamic existed within the band up until that point. While Young was indeed talented and a proven collaborator of Stephen Stills, Graham Nash had reservations about upsetting the current sonic balance:
“I was the only one reluctant to bring Neil into the band,” Nash told Record Collector News in 2014. “And the reason was that we had spent the last few months making this incredible record (69’s Crosby, Stills & Nash) and developing this beautiful harmonic sound, right? I said, ‘I can’t commit to this until I meet Neil. I gotta sit down with this cat. I wanna know who he is. I wanna know if I can go on the road with him. I wanna know if I want him to be a part of my life.’ And, that made sense to them.”
After a successful meeting, CSN added the Y, and the rest was history. The stunning Deja Vu followed the year after and saw the four-piece release some of their most iconic songs to date: ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ and ‘Deja Vu’ in particular, showed how their signature harmonies could be coloured in the lines of a much darker, edgier framework.
As Nash explained: “It was a different band when Neil joined”. He continued, “Not a lot of people understand that. They think it’s just an added voice. But it’s not. It’s an added attitude. Neil brings a sharper edge. I was gonna say a darker feeling, but I don‘t mean that in a negative way. He brings this edge to us that we don’t have. And, of course, you have to take into account his ability to play lead guitar against and with Stephen…Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are a completely different band than CSN.”
Despite their legacy hinting towards a simpatico sonic relationship, the band’s four members represent different elements of the CSNY legacy. While most songs share their vocals somewhat equally, the standout songs of each respective artist distinctly hint at a soundscape in which they prefer the band to exist—namely, Young is the only artist picking a song from their catalogue that showcases his prominent contribution.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s favourite CSY songs:
Graham Nash – ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’
It’s somewhat fitting for Nash, the original questioner of the band’s expansion, to look back on a CSN track with the most fondness. Opening their ‘69 debut album Crosby, Stills and Nash, ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’, it’s a definitive CSN track of harmonic playfulness.
Jangly guitars and vocal adlibs float through several changing sections before the head-bopping crescendo led by the beautiful three-part harmonies takes the track off onto the stratosphere. It’s a subverted epic, running for over seven minutes but having the disposition of a three-minute radio pop favourite that epitomises the sort of dreaminess that CSN began with.
Speaking to Rolling Stone about the song, Nash said: “I remember so deeply the moment that Stephen played that song for me. I wondered what planet he was from. I mean, I was a songwriter, but this was very different. First of all, it was seven-and-a-half minutes long. Secondly, it went through four distinct musical changes and by the time he got to the end of that, we said, ‘Wow, good lord, what a great song’”.
He continued, “I think it was a perfect song for our voices. And it had to be the first thing that you heard because it was so exciting to us. We always felt that if you put a record on and you listen to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” I don’t think you’re going to get up and take the needle off the record”.
Stephen Stills – ‘4+20’
As CSN’s only previous collaborator with a soon-to-be joining Neil Young, it’s somewhat fitting the Stills is the only other member to pick a track from the CSNY era. But while it’s part of a record featuring Young, the track is really anything but collaborative. A finger-picking acoustic ballad that foregrounds the tenderness of Stills’ voice, it tells the story of mortality through the lens of an 84-year-old man whose life has experienced nothing but poverty.
It’s arguably CSNY at its most tender, which inspired a creative decision to strip back its composition and refrain from mobbing it with layer upon layer of vocal harmony. “They told me they wouldn’t touch it,” Stills said of his band member’s decision to abstain from singing on the track. “So it always stood alone.”
In David Browne’s 2019 book Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Nash noted how Stills’ original take told the tale of the old man with such nuance. Stills apparently tried to record a second take to correct the unintentional gulp between the words “I” and “embrace”. But, Nash and Crosby pushed for the gulp to remain, saying “It was so human and on such a human song,” he continued “We convinced Stephen to use the first take.”
David Crosby – ‘Delta’
The bohemian heartbeat of CSNY, David Crosby’s songwriting style, has always reflected the turbulent hedonism of the ‘60s. Whether it’s singing in spirited defiance to cutting his hair or writing whimsically psychedelic melodies in ‘Guinnevere’, he brought a necessary sense of shade to the CSNY dreamscape. But his standout track from the band is perhaps one of their most expansive and, in some ways, a truly uncharacteristically Crosby track. ‘Delta’ from their 1982 album Daylight Again is a sweeping piano ballad that platformed Crosby’s painful vocals about his struggles with substance abuse and agoraphobia.
In what is surely now a personal anthem of defiance, it’s a track that feels like the embodiment of camaraderie, with his bandmates’ harmonies acting as a unified pledge of defiance to his personal struggles. And the genesis of the song very much mirrored that sentiment.
Talking to American Songwriter, Crosby revealed Jackson Browne gave him the confidence to complete ‘Delta’: “It’s possible that this is the last song I wrote. I was in a pretty terrible state at the time, which you can tell from the song; it sounds lost. Jackson Browne came by the house where I was. I didn’t have a piano so I just sang him what I had and he said, ‘Jesus, that’s a really good one David, you need to finish that.’ I was in the middle of a downhill slide involving freebase cocaine.”
He added: “I didn’t especially want to go outside because I didn’t want to bother with anything except taking more drugs, but Jackson really insisted and brought me to Warren Zevon’s house where there was a piano. He sat me down at that piano and pulled this song out of me. Whenever I wanted to get up to go to the bathroom and take some more dope, he would say ‘No, no, finish the song,’ and he kept me there until I did it. Now when we sing it, I thank Jackson for helping me get it out.”
Neil Young – ‘Ohio’
As Graham Nash explained, Young brought an edge to the CSNY soundscape. With a furrowed brow, Young plugged the band in and created a composition that allowed them to engage with the more political topics this track addresses. CSNY had established itself as the era’s most prolific vocalists, and they had a willing and engaged audience upon which essential messages could be shared.
Referencing the abhorrent 1970 Kent State Massacre, Young paints a vivid picture of police brutality that threatened the sanctity of democratic protest. He explained: “It was really like the folk process at work. You know, that was really like music as news. It’s still hard to believe I had to write this song. It’s ironic that I capitalised on the death of these American students. My best CSN&Y cut”.
More than just a political anthem of the free-spirited 70s, it’s a track laced with both anger and tenderness, in what remains not just a standout for CSNY but one of Young’s finest musical moments.
