The one Crosby, Stills and Nash that was never finished: “Can we get away with that”
Every artist has those musical ‘what-if’ stories that will never fail to haunt them whenever they make a new record. Pete Townshend always had to deal with what made Lifehouse fall apart, and even the late Brian Wilson had to wait years before he got something resembling the aborted album Smile from back in the day.
But if there was one thing that was perfectly clear about Crosby, Stills, and Nash, it was that they were lucky to be making music together in the first place.
While every member of the band was big enough to have a solo career of their own, it was understood that nothing that they ever made was meant to be permanent. They were all simply independent artists that happened to put their material on the same record and sing gorgeous harmony lines next to each other, so it’s not like they were trying to build a career from the word go.
When they all harmonised on the song ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’, though, there was already some magic in the air. Anyone in their right mind would have traded any of their musical talent to be able to make something sound that seamless, and when they eventually got around to making their first album, it was a breeding ground for them to experiment with anything and everything they could get their hands on.
There were definitely the vocal arrangements that Crosby had taken from his time with The Byrds, but the real dynamo was Stephen Stills, playing nearly anything with strings on it throughout the making of the first album. They would try everything from different tunings to layered guitars to get the sound they wanted, but even they knew when to admit defeat when they got to the wrong song.
The only problem was that it was the song that brought all of them together in the first place, saying, “[‘You Don’t Have to Cry’] was too short, so I told Stephen, ‘Just sing it twice.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You think we can get away with that?’ ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said. ‘When you get to the end, just start it over.’ So we did it like that, and it worked beautifully. I don’t know if anybody ever realised it, but it’s the same song twice.”
But that’s the key to great songwriting. Anyone would have discarded a song like this for being too short and thrown it out, but if it had the magic, it’s worth it to go around the horn one more time to soak up every bite of emotion. And judging by Crosby’s way of writing, it’s not like he wasn’t used to thinking outside the norm.
He was as connected with the sounds of jazz as he was with rock and roll by that time, so having this kind of unconventional structure behind a pop song was the closest thing to freeform that the genre could get. It wasn’t the signature verse-chorus approach, but it’s nice to keep people on their toes sometimes rather than doing what everyone expected.
There are plenty of people who go down this road that would be considered one of the laziest songwriters in the world, but the importance of any great writer isn’t about trying to cram every idea they can into a song. It’s sometimes about knowing when to take things out and when to realise that it’s better to work around a small foundation.
