The best singer David Crosby said everyone ignored: “A great writer”
There was no way of separating David Crosby from his music, no matter what state of mind he was in.
Plenty of artists might enjoy spending time on the road and in the studio, then going home and never thinking about music again. But until the day he died, Crosby was always looking for something new to work on or stumbling across the next strange guitar tuning that made him sound otherworldly whenever he sang. For all the great music he gave us during his lifetime, though, making your way through every one of his albums wasn’t always smooth sailing.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash may have been the funnel for all the members to make their best work, but even when looking at their biggest records, Crosby wasn’t always in the best state of mind. He was going through one of the greatest losses of his life after making Deja Vu, and while that did result in him trying to hold on to his sanity on If I Could Only Remember My Name, the rest of his career looked like it was going to play out like every other rock and roll casualty story that rock documentaries can’t get enough of.
Crosby wasn’t afraid to do as many dangerous drug-fuelled stunts as he could back in the day, but even through his haze, he could always tell when he was listening to someone who was going to last forever. Joni Mitchell was the best songwriter that he had ever heard, and even after being inebriated for days on end, there was nothing that could pull him away from a singer like Stevie Wonder whenever he came on the radio.
But before Neil Young could reform Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young again after Crosby sobered up, the former Byrds singer needed to make sure that he wanted it anymore. Anyone would have been too scared to go back to their old ways for fear of relapsing, but after years of going through some of the most uninspired sessions he had ever been on, Crosby could still appreciate what the new school had to offer.
Bonnie Raitt had already helped him rediscover his love for music, but Shawn Colvin was the one who really made him turn his head. She wasn’t getting the same kind of attention that every other songwriter was getting at the time, but Crosby knew that her way of inhabiting her songs and recreating these gutwrenching stories would have been enough for him to listen to her for the rest of his life.
And if Crosby wasn’t going to be able to make her one of the greatest rock and roll artists on his own, he was going to do everything that he could to make sure that the rest of the world didn’t ignore her talent, saying, “I still love Shawn Colvin, she’s a great writer. It’s very sophisticated stuff, like Joni Mitchell. There are people who can grasp it and there are people for whom it goes right over their head.” But when looking at Colvin’s career, a lot of her songs may have been what the world needed but at the wrong time.
I mean, think about this for a second. This was the era when the alternative revolution was about to get underway, and while there was still room for Colvin among the Tracy Chapmans and the Bonnie Raitts of the world, the genre was already becoming known for more legacy artists than anyone that was trying to challenge the norm or do anything new with the format.
So while Colvin may be a critical darling in the same way that someone like Lucinda Williams is, Crosby wasn’t going to let her fall by the wayside. He knew that she was one of the most phenomenal writers that he had ever heard, and he would have been happy to see her get even a fraction of what any number of the other cookie-utter songwriters of the 1990s were getting out of their shows.
