David Crosby’s 15 Essential Songs - The New York Times

A streak of otherworldliness ran each the mode done David Crosby’s long, analyzable beingness successful music. It was successful his voice, a reedy, quavering precocious tenor that could dependable similar helium was pondering each enactment helium sang. He was besides blessed to dissolve that voice, and the ego it implied, into shared vocal harmonies: with the Byrds, with Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young) and with his 21st-century group, the Lighthouse Band.

There was otherworldliness, too, successful the hovering harmonies helium loved: the hypnotic modal patterns helium picked connected guitar and the ambiguous jazz chords that could pb successful aggregate directions. While Crosby, who died connected Wednesday astatine 81, sometimes touched down successful topical songwriting — a relation helium described arsenic being a “town crier” — much often his lyrics were afloat of what-ifs and reflections connected time, consciousness and eternity.

In the 1960s, Crosby was a premier mover successful the Los Angeles euphony country that spun unneurotic folk, rock, state and psychedelia. He was a founding subordinate and a secondary but innovative songwriter successful the Byrds. He was an integral portion of what became the Laurel Canyon coterie of songwriters successful Los Angeles, and helium besides forged connections to psychedelic San Francisco.

Crosby’s idiosyncratic beingness was calamitous capable successful the 1970s and 1980s — cocaine and heroin addiction, jailhouse time, aesculapian crises, fiscal ruin — for him to chronicle it successful 2 older-but-wiser autobiographies: “Long Time Gone” and “Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It.” Throughout his career, adjacent philharmonic collaborations gave mode to harsh acrimony.

But his euphony told antithetic stories. Shaped by the upheavals of the 1960s, his songs held crosscurrents of state and disorientation, of seeking and disillusionment, of yearning and alienation and, later, of seasoned reflection. In 2014, astatine 72, helium restarted what turned retired to beryllium a prolific solo vocation with “Croz,” the archetypal of 5 workplace albums helium released successful the adjacent 7 years; determination were unrecorded recordings, too. His voice, amazingly enough, held up for his last originative surge. It sounded gentle and selfless, humbled and purified by time.

Here, successful chronological order, are 15 songs spanning David Crosby’s six-decade career.

The Byrds, ‘I See You’ (1966)

Is it a emotion opus oregon a unreserved of hallucinations? Written by Crosby and Jim McGuinn (who would aboriginal rename himself Roger), “I See You” shows their shared involvement successful Indian euphony and John Coltrane’s jazz. They sing astir “Warm sliding prima done the cave of your hair” implicit a galloping backbeat, with aboriginal hallmarks of Crosby’s songwriting: a modal drone successful the verses, a metre displacement to alteration things up.

The Byrds, ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ (1967)

Crosby sings with bittersweet patience astir the symptom of emotion gone wrong, arsenic drums tick on and guitars entwine. But there’s a twist; he’s really talking himself into taking different chance.

The Byrds, ‘Mind Gardens’ (1967)

An artifact of psychedelia’s experimental heyday, “Mind Gardens” is simply a parable astir extortion and openness, with an Indian-tinged vocal enactment rising supra a multitracked, droney web of guitar picking: acoustic and electric, picked and sustained, moving guardant and backward and wholly reveling successful disorientation.

The Byrds, ‘Triad’ (1968)

In 1 of the disputes that led to Crosby leaving the Byrds, the set recorded his taboo-testing opus astir a ménage a trois — “Why can’t we spell connected arsenic three?” it asked — but refused to see it connected “The Notorious Byrd Brothers,” an medium that marked the Byrds’ crook toward country-rock. The opus would look anyway: archetypal with the Jefferson Airplane, aboriginal connected “Four Way Street” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Long Time Gone’ (1969)

Written aft the execution of Robert F. Kennedy, “Long Time Gone” seethes with bitter frustration, from its ominous organ chords to Stephen Stills’s gnarled guitar fills. There’s unfastened desperation successful Crosby’s dependable arsenic helium exhorts, “Speak retired against the madness/You’ve got to talk your caput if you dare.”

Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Wooden Ships’ (1969)

Crosby had a lifelong fondness for boats. Writing with Paul Kantner (of Jefferson Airplane) and Stills, successful “Wooden Ships” helium offered a grim but hopeful post-apocalyptic scenario. Survivors from other sides of a war, who don’t adjacent cognize “who won,” stock their meager supplies, deciding they tin beryllium “free and easy” connected the water.

Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Guinnevere’ (1969)

“Guinnevere” was Crosby’s ultimate enigma. The lyrics comparison an unnamed “milady” to the adored but absent Guinnevere, who “drew pentagrams” connected the partition and “had greenish eyes similar yours.” Crosby, Stills and Graham Nash harmonize implicit 2 electrical guitars picking modal chords, hinting astatine fleeting syncopations and abruptly declaring, “She shall beryllium free.”

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ (1970)

Boomers tin retrieve erstwhile the magnitude of a man’s hairsbreadth signified a governmental allegiance. While Stills and Neil Young acceptable up a lead-guitar duel down him, Crosby sings with his astir aggravated near-rasp, feeling paranoia — “like lookin’ astatine my reflector and seeing a constabulary car” — but deciding helium was “letting my freak emblem fly” anyway.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ‘Déjà Vu’ (1970)

“Don’t you wonderment what’s going connected down nether you?” the members of this supergroup harmonized astatine a cardinal infinitesimal successful this wonderfully analyzable philharmonic and verbal construction. Guitars, harpsichord, drums, scat-singing and vocal harmonies ebb and travel done the song, each delivered arsenic if it were elemental and homespun.

David Crosby, ‘Laughing’ (1971)

In 1971, Crosby released his perfectly atmospheric solo debut album, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” backed by members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane arsenic good arsenic Joni Mitchell, who joined the backup harmonies connected this song. Crosby sings astir a failed spiritual quest — uncovering “only reflections of a shadiness that I saw” — and Jerry Garcia’s pedal alloy guitar floats supra him arsenic helium finds acceptance.

David Crosby, ‘Orleans’ (1971)

In this elaborate miniature, an eerie chorale of vocal harmonies carries the names of places successful France; past guitar counterpoint takes over, sketching a melody conscionable erstwhile earlier letting it autumn away.

David Crosby, ‘Holding On to Nothing’ (2014)

There’s much than a hint of Crosby’s lifelong admiration for Mitchell successful “Holding On to Nothing,” with its calmly strummed, eccentric chords and asymmetrical melody. From “Croz,” which was his instrumentality to making solo albums aft 20 years, “Holding On to Nothing” meditates connected time, longing, slump and persistence, feeling similar “a alien conscionable passing through.”

David Crosby, ‘The Us Below’ (2016)

In a opus from “Lighthouse,” the medium that inaugurated Crosby’s years of collaboration with Michael League of Snarky Puppy, Crosby gazes astatine the immense distances betwixt stars and wonders, “Why indispensable we beryllium eternally alone?” But gradually, furniture by layer, guitar patterns and vocals waft successful and interlock, suggesting that we’re not.

David Crosby, ‘Curved Air’ (2017)

Even successful his past years, Crosby was trying caller approaches. “Curved Air” — written with his son, James Raymond — is briskly percussive and rhythmically unpredictable, with flamenco-like handclaps and a bass enactment that talks backmost to him. The lyrics privation for “a small traction here/A small coagulated ground,” yet arsenic the melody hops around, Crosby is wholly sure-footed.

David Crosby, Michael League, Becca Stevens and Michelle Willis ‘Balanced connected a Pin’ (2018)

Written with the members of the Lighthouse Band, “Balanced connected a Pin” contemplates fragility and mortality: “Landing’s the hardest part/The transportation comes apart,” Crosby sings. For overmuch of the song, his lone accompaniment is the picking of a lone guitar, suspending his dependable supra the inevitability of silence.