RIP David Crosby

David Crosby wasn’t easy to love. He harbored loveable qualities, traits that were offset by a barbed sense of humor that played as arrogance in his younger days and endearingly cranky in the last years of his life. No matter the era, he seemed to embody all the excesses of his generation, the quintessential Baby Boomer who was at all the right parties and all the right happenings and would never let you forget it. At his nadir in the 1980s, a decade where he’d serve time in prison and kick his addictions, he still flashed a grin that suggested he thought he got away with a prank: the squares would never know just what he had seen.

Crosby still grinned easily in his final decade but the smile wasn’t so smug. It was kind and generous and weathered, the look of a man whose good luck was frequently undone by misfortune, often of his own making. His appetites were prodigious, driving him to indulgence that didn’t quite square with the earnestness of his art. His songs were unguarded, sometimes bearing a corny sentimental streak. When the words wouldn't come, he'd simply sing the melody, unencumbered by lyrics.  

Vocal harmony was at the heart of Crosby's music throughout his career, a skill he learned in the Byrds and mastered alongside Graham Nash and Stephen Stills in their eponymous supergroup. Vocalists can't harmonize by themselves so it follows that Crosby was in constant search for new partners, singing with everybody from the Everly Brothers to Jason Isbell. Crosby may have been a consummate collaborator yet he found it difficult to maintain partnerships. He spent his life cycling through feuds with his Byrd bandmates and CSNY colleagues. When it came to a close on January 18, 2023 he was publicly estranged from Graham Nash and possibly Neil Young. It was difficult to keep track of the drama. 

Crosby occupied an inordinate amount of space in the music and tabloid press during the peak of his stardom in the 1970s and 1980s, a reflection of both the insanity of his personal life and his significance in popular culture. Crosby, Stills & Nash, the trio's 1969 debut, played a pivotal part in ushering in the sound and style of the "Me" Decade, a conscious maturation of folk-rock that led to confessional troubadours and slick L.A. studio rats. Crosby succumbed to the temptations of the latter aesthetic, piling up records that reflected the state of the art of studio craft at the expense of the actual song. The stretch of records he released on his own and with CSN(Y) during the late '80s and early '90s are particularly rough—clamoring, brittle productions that lack the sweet, supple allure of the admittedly patchy albums Crosby recorded as a duo with Nash in the 1970s. 

Then again, Crosby's creativity was slightly slippery. He contributed arrangements and encouragement, providing a catalyst for the exploration of the Byrds and serving as the bridge between Stephen Stills and Neil Young during tumultuous times. In both the Byrds and CSN, he didn't write often but his songs provided a gorgeous, bruised counterpart to his companions. "What's Happening?!?!," his first solo credit on a Byrds LP, drifts in a slightly sad fashion, a breeze that blows through "Everybody's Been Burned," his first masterpiece. These songs carry a sense of bittersweet regret, a sound he flipped inside out with "Triad," an ode to a ménage à trois that, according to Crosby, got him kicked out of the Byrds. "Triad" crystalized Crosby's unique position, how he occupied a liminal space between the counterculture and the mainstream, a trenchant hippie who believed he deserved his place in the spotlight. This duality is part of the reason why Crosby, Stills & Nash, Deja Vu, and If I Could Only Remember My Name, his lone solo album of the 1970s, are so bewitching: they float between ethereal and earthly planes. Crosby's embrace of rock stardom pushed him toward anonymous album-oriented rock during the format's peak but his essential hippie nature resurfaced in the 2010s, leading him to one of the more remarkable final acts in rock history.

Between 2014 and 2021, Crosby released five albums, nearly double the number of records he released between 1971 and 1993—a long twenty-two-year stretch where he only came up with three solo records. Crosby never was so prolific as a songwriter or record maker as he was during these last years. To an extent, his productivity was fueled by necessity—money was tight so he needed to keep working--but he certainly found inspiration working with producer James Raymond, along with Michael League, Becca Stevens, and Michelle Willis, veterans of the jazz-rock group Snarky Puppy who billed themselves as the Lighthouse Band. These regular collaborators helped Crosby create a set of lush, beautiful records where jazz, folk, R&B, and pop intermingle in familiar yet fresh ways; here, it's possible to hear Crosby's devotion to Steely Dan, a love that culminated with him collaborating with Donald Fagen on "Rodriguez for a Night," a 2022 collaboration worthy of Gaucho. 

Crosby's artistic resurgence coincided with his embrace of Twitter, where he posted as if it was a calling. With his cantankerous candor and humor, Crosby was one of the rare musicians who benefitted from constant posting on social media. It humanized him, showed that he mellowed with age, and provided some insight into his contradictions. He could be prickly but he demonstrated a deep, abiding love for music, as passionate for his lifelong favorites as he was for his recent obsessions. Crosby didn't suffer fools—he walked out on an interview with Scott Feinberg, irritated that he was didactically rehashing old history—but he no longer seemed satisfied with himself. He seemed grateful to be able to still find music "magical," imbibing his latter-day music with that same sense of gratitude and wonder.