Snarky Puppy: the band David Crosby thought the world should listen to
You can be hugely influential to several future generations of artists, but that doesn’t always equate to being able to understand what those who are taking your place in the spotlight are up to. In the case of David Crosby, he often found himself struggling to find a reason to love modern music.
Towards the end of his life, Crosby could frequently be found online running his mouth off at modern music and refusing to understand why people would move on from what he considered to be true artistry that was prevalent during his heyday. His outspoken nature amused many fans and vindicated their opinions, but at the same time, he found himself making enemies of those who were championing 21st-century inventiveness, giving him a divisiveness that he appeared to relish.
That being said, he often ran his mouth off at his contemporaries, wondering why they’d do things a certain way or calling them outright obnoxious or talentless. His disdain for Jim Morrison and The Doors was highly publicised, and isn’t something that Crosby would ever choose to let lie in his later years, and even his former bandmates in Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young weren’t safe from his vitriolic rants.
For someone so inventive as a songwriter, it’s rather surprising that he could be so narrow-minded, and while there are many people with whom Crosby did manage to develop strong working relationships, there was always the underlying worry that his demeanour would eventually get in the way and create a hostile environment.
However, there has to come a point where you have to accept that something just ticks all the right boxes for you, and during the 2010s, Crosby found himself falling in love with a rather unusual act that seemed to be operating in a far different manner than everything he’d made a name for himself for.
Crosby never stopped making music, and in 2016, he found himself working with Michael League, the bandleader of Texan jazz fusion outfit Snarky Puppy. With League offering up his production services for Crosby’s Lighthouse album, it transpired that the perennially hard-to-impress songwriter had finally found a rare example of something modern that had successfully captured his attention and made him feel positive about the direction that music was heading in.
Their collaboration came about through Twitter of all places, with Crosby having been particularly active on the social media platform due to how easy it was for him to express his opinions there and pick fights with anyone who didn’t see eye to eye with him. However, rather than immediately dismissing the jazz band, he found himself developing an infatuation with them, and proclaimed in a 2019 interview with Relix that they were the embodiment of everything that modern music should be.
In a remarkably positive tone, Crosby noted: “When you do run into the right energy, when you run into people who want to create really good music, you’ve gotta treasure every second of it, man, and go for it as hard as you can. It’s just not a common thing. Snarky Puppy made me smile, and I couldn’t hold still. I was having too much fun. And that’s when I fell in love with them.”
It’s perhaps not the sort of collaboration that you would have ever thought of Crosby falling into, but it worked a treat for both him and League, with the duo managing to combine their disparate influences and produce something glorious in spite of the stark generational gap between them.
