David Crosby on the artist too good for the pop charts: “Too deep”
Most listeners are coming to the pop charts for one very specific thing. As much as it can be fun to be surprised whenever the radio comes in, a lot of what enters the charts tends to either be something that’s fairly safe or tasteful enough to satisfy everyone, even if it’s not the most sophisticated thing in the world. Some artists have been able to throw the charts for a loop every now and again, though, and while David Crosby came from the era where radio changed every single day, he knew when he was looking at someone making hits on their own terms.
By the time that Crosby got midway through Crosby Stills and Nash’s tenure, though, it wasn’t clear whether he cared about any type of music anymore. He could still play to his heart’s content in certain spots, but by the time the 1980s started, it wasn’t clear whether he was going to end up as a rock and roll casualty or not, usually being found going on serious benders and serving prison time for his actions.
There were still ways for him to make a dent in the charts, though. For all the damage he put on his body, his ears never left him, and watching him nurse himself back to health at the end of the decade restored a lot of fans’ faith in Crosby as a musician. But by the time the 1990s started, the only member of the supergroup that held any staying power was Neil Young.
After all, grunge was built on the kind of ramshackle production that the Canadian icon had helped create, and when Pearl Jam started citing him as a major inspiration, records from Freedom to Harvest Moon sounded like lost artefacts from a rock and roll legend. That didn’t leave a lot of room for people like Crosby to thrive like they did in the 1970s, but sometimes, that nostalgic bug finds its way onto the pop charts.
While Crosby was still making folk-rock experiments, Norah Jones brought adult contemporary into the 2000s and made it look easy. Compared to every single record up for Grammy Awards in 2003, Come Away With Me may as well have been a bulldozer clearing everything in its wake, with casual fans appreciating tunes like ‘Don’t Know Why’ and older fans latching onto the soft-rock/jazz stylings that she would put into her songs.
Despite standard singers like Michael Buble garnering attention later that decade, Crosby knew that what Jones was doing was on another level than the typical pop schlock, saying, “Norah Jones is a breath of fresh air. Norah Jones can sing and play. She’s got some talent. I was totally ecstatic that that girl got noticed because she’s wonderful. Her hit, another aberration. You won’t see it again, because she’s not what they want — too deep. She’s a real human being; she has real stuff to talk about.”
And as time has shown, Crosby was a bit more accurate than most people wanted to admit. Jones has certainly paved the way for even more jazzy singer-songwriters to come up behind her, but while the Grammys have always been nice to her, she’s not exactly breaking new ground on the pop charts and giving any of the other pop princesses a run for their money in the 2020s.
But that shouldn’t really be a knock against her, either. She has still carved out a place in pop culture usually reserved for the titans of classic rock, and even if she never has to trouble the pop charts, anyone collaborating with her has reached the point where they start to grow into true songwriters.
