The four songs Graham Nash wished he had written: “Songs like that I really like”
The very first time I listened to Crosby, Stills & Nash’s debut album, I listened to the opening track twice before making it any further.
Yes, I know how sacrilegious an admission this is on two counts. Firstly, it shows that yes, I did listen to it digitally for the first time, which I’m well aware is an inferior medium to do so. But worse than that is my tampering with the natural evolution of the tracklisting, and therefore preventing myself from experiencing the unfiltered greatness of the entire album. I know all of that, and I’m eternally apologetic, but ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ felt like the best song I had ever heard, and so I had to play it one more time.
Seven minutes later, I realised what I had done, as I finally got over the opening track and allowed the album to take its natural course, wherein Stephen Stills’ feel-good epic slid into a song that Graham Nash had delivered for the band: ‘Marrakesh Express’. It was fun and buoyant and continued in this atmosphere of camaraderie that I so endlessly enjoyed on the album’s opening track.
By the time I had finished the record, with another of Nash’s tracks, ‘Teach Your Children’, I was under no illusions that I had just listened to a masterclass in songwriting, from start to finish. Together, these three musicians were penning tracks that would be the envy of musicians all over the world, with unmatched vocal harmonies.
However, over 40 years on from its release, when I was a teenager in the, let’s face it, bleak landscape of early 2010s alternative music, the album sounded truly mindblowing, but in 1969, the year of its birth, it was one of many groundbreaking albums that lucky music fans could listen to. In that very year alone, Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin II and David Bowie AKA Space Oddity were all released, and so there were many songs for each musician to envy, and that’s not taking into account what came in the entire preceding decade.
So it’s no wonder that despite penning those iconic songs from the Crosby Stills & Nash debut record, Graham Nash still looked outward at his contemporaries and wanted to rival the songs they were writing.
When asked what songs specifically they might be, he labelled two heavy hitters from fellow 1960s icons, stating with “‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ by Bob Dylan is one and ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys”. Dylan was truly prolific in the ‘60s, but that latter choice from The Beach Boys stakes a fair claim at being titled the greatest song of all time, and so Nash’s envy is unsurprising.
He continued, labelling another song from the brilliant ‘60s and one from two decades later, stating, “Another one is ‘Don’t Give Up’ by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. I’ve recently been playing ‘Old Friends’ by Simon & Garfunkel off the Bookends album, too. Songs like that I really like.”
The truth is, though, Nash’s envy is rooted in a calm appreciation, for he knows that his place in the conversation of cultural importance is confirmed. Because, on that 1969 album, along with many others, he too has written songs that have become the source of great envy for artists then and since.
