The first “passable” song David Crosby ever wrote
The late legend David Crosby enjoyed a career of several prominent chapters, each with its respective merits. Following his formative tenure as a member of the psychedelic folk-rock band The Byrds, Crosby embarked on a voyage teeming with collaboration, marked by particularly fruitful friendships with Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills.
Crosby’s most successful and long-lasting occupation was as one-third of Crosby, Stills and Nash, who toured on and off for half a century. The supergroup welcomed Neil Young, Stills’ former Buffalo Springfield bandmate between 1969 and 1971, for a particularly memorable spell, during which the band was called Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
Although Crosby, Stills and Nash remained active for several decades, their collective career was fraught with hiatuses, usually triggered by acrimonious relationships within the band. The creative differences and petty jealousy mainly lay between Crosby and Nash, but the pair, fortunately, began to bury the hatchet just before the former’s death in January 2023.
As The Beatles demonstrated, it’s challenging to maintain friendly relations within a band where multiple songwriters try to squeeze their material onto each album. In a 2000 interview, Crosby revealed that, over the years, he had amassed hundreds of songs, many of which hadn’t yet seen the light of day.
“I’ve written so many things,” he explained. “When you’re in a band, they got tossed in with everybody else’s songs. And no record company wants to release as much music as I’m ready to. It’s a struggle, man — but I just keep writing and keep creating, and one day, hopefully, everything that I want to will come out.”
‘Deja Vu’, ‘Guinnevere’, ‘Laughing’ and ‘Wooden Ships’ are some of Crosby’s highlight songwriting credits from his most productive spell with CSN(Y), but his lyrical talents had been established in the mid-1960s alongside Jim McGuinn and Gene Clark in The Byrds.
Amid a flurry of covers, one of which being the UK and US number one cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, the core trio, began to exercise their songwriting muscles. Although he had made several compositional compositions while recording the Byrds’ first three albums, Crosby’s songwriting talent was first realised in 1967’s Younger Than Yesterday.
Most memorably, he co-wrote ‘Renaissance Fair’ with McGuinn and received solo writing credits on ‘Mind Gardens’ and ‘It Happens Each Day’. Crosby’s proudest song on this album, however, was ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’. Although it was recorded for the band’s fourth album, Crosby had written it just before forming The Byrds in 1964.
In a 1995 interview with Steve Silberman, Crosby said he felt a special connection to ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ as “the first actually passable song that I wrote”.
What makes ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ so significant in Crosby’s catalogue is not its chart position or cultural footprint, but the confidence it represents. The song carries a restraint and emotional subtlety that would become hallmarks of his later work, favouring atmosphere over immediacy. Even at that early stage, Crosby was leaning toward the introspective and the harmonically adventurous, qualities that would define his contributions to both The Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash.
In hindsight, his affection for the track feels less like nostalgia and more like recognition. It marked the moment he realised he could articulate something personal without leaning on collaboration or cover versions. For an artist who would go on to write some of the most enduring songs of his era, ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ stands as the quiet beginning of a voice that would echo across decades of American music.
Listen to ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ by The Byrds below.
