The five records David Crosby said were among his all-time favourites
After a tortuous and highly praised career spanning six decades, David Crosby passed away in 2023. Behind him, he left a legacy of beautiful singing and songwriting and a history of high-profile collaboration. After his big break with The Byrds, Crosby was lucky enough to stumble into the life of Joni Mitchell, through whom he became close with Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash.
Most music fans remember Crosby for his transformative folk-rock work as a member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash. With the latter, undoubtedly the most successful and long-lived of his associations, Crosby made some of his finest songwriting contributions, including ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ and ‘Guinevere’. These two classic songs perfectly represent Crosby’s lyrical outlook, the former pertaining to world peace and the latter to romantic pursuit.
As a folk rock purveyor, first and foremost, Crosby’s voice is best recognised with the accompaniment of gentle acoustic stylings or choppy blues licks. If he stood at the musical vanguard with The Byrds in the late 1960s, he never seemed particularly fussed about keeping up with the times. The 1970s brought us early experimental electronic music and punk, leading towards a synth-pop takeover in the 1980s, but Crosby and his associates seemed happy to stick to what they knew.
Although Crosby didn’t necessarily move with the times, his tastes always ventured far beyond the limits of folk-rock. Speaking to Guitar World not long before his death, Crosby revealed that his record collection is actually outweighed by an abundance of jazz and classical records. He feels that his love for jazz helped to make his singer-songwriter material stand out. “I’m usually trying to tell a story of some sort, and I think it has to do musically with the fact that I like more complex chord structures and progressions,” he said. “I did listen to a lot of jazz, and so I like dense, unusual chords.”
With Crosby’s jazz collection and proclivity for complexity in mind, it’s no surprise that he was never particularly moved by punk rock music. While Ramones and Sex Pistols got their kicks sneering to an energetic youth in the 1970s, Crosby could be found reclining with some records by his favourite jazz fusion band, Steely Dan.
As a longtime Steely Dan fan, Crosby eventually befriended frontman Donald Fagen, who contributed a songwriting credit to his 2021 album For Free. Fagen wrote most of the lyrics for Crosby’s song ‘Rodriguez For A Night’, a funky jazz-fusion number. “We love Donald. We loved Steely Dan,” Crosby said, discussing the song. “Aja and Gaucho are both in my top ten for life.”
Released in 1977 and 1980, respectively, Aja and Gaucho are the final two albums Steely Dan released during their classic era. The albums’ high production values and Fagen and Walter Becker’s associative ostentatiousness may have alienated the punks, but Crsby knew a good record when he heard it. In a 2021 conversation with Spin, Crosby said of Aja: “Stunning writing. Stunning production, stunning singing, outstanding playing, but songs. Unbelievable goddamn songs. It’s too good. They’re all fantastic.” Similarly, he praised Gaucho for somehow topping Aja in terms of songwriting. “Best goddamn writing anybody was doing or has done. Nobody’s topped it,” he said.
Sadly, Crosby failed to name the other eight albums in his “top ten for life,” but he did over another three. He puts Aja and Gaucho “up there with Blue [Joni Mitchell], Heavy Weather [Weather Report], and Kind Of Blue [Miles Davis].” Of Weather Report’s 1977 fusion masterpiece, he said, “It’s one of the best jazz albums that anybody ever made,” a descriptor often reserved for Davis’ Kind of Blue.
Although Crosby was a fan of jazz for most of his life, he began to embrace the style in his own musical output in the late 1990s and 2000s. In the mid-1990s, he reunited with his long-lost son, James Raymond, a musician and composer with a shared passion for jazz. The father-son team formed the jazz-rock band CPR in 1997 and continued to collaborate for the remainder of Crosby’s life.
David Crosby’s favourite albums:
- Steely Dan – Aja
- Steely Dan – Gaucho
- Joni Mitchell – Blue
- Weather Report – Heavy Weather
- Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
