(Credits: Far Out / David Gans)
Sat 30 August 2025 20:30, UK
Music has always been the perfect emotional release for people with rain in their hearts. There are thousands of ways that people can sing out their joy whenever they have a guitar in their hands, but when life can beat someone down to their lowest point, David Crosby knew that writing songs could be the best form of therapy.
Then again, things seemed to be looking up for a while after Crosby left The Byrds. The idea of him continuing to play second fiddle to the rest of his bandmates was never going to sit well with him, and even if he had great songs behind him, it wasn’t until he started singing alongside Stephen Stills and Graham Nash that he felt like there was potential. And when the supergroup’s first album dropped, Crosby seemed to finally have a home to test out whatever sonic experiment he could.
After Neil Young came in on the second album, Crosby was a much different animal. Gone were the mellow grooves that came on The Byrds’ albums, and in their place was a more organic atmosphere that made his songs sound ethereal. ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ is the epitome of a jam session throughout its runtime, but ‘Deja Vu’ is the kind of song that makes the listener feel like they’re floating on air half the time they hear it.
Everything on the business side was looking up, but Crosby was going through hell the minute that he got back home. He had already gone through a strained friendship with Joni Mitchell in the late 1960s, but when his girlfriend Christine passed away. There’s no way for anyone to shrug off that kind of pain, but in Crosby’s case, there was no other solution for him to deal with his pain than going into the studio.
Most professionals would normally never want to pick up their instruments again, but Crosby knew that he at least had a place that would get his mind off things once he made albums like If I Could Only Remember My Name, saying, “I was just trying to make it through. But it was healing in the sense that, during Déjà Vu and throughout If I Could Only Remember My Name, I was still incredibly sad about Christine. And I didn’t really have any way to deal with that. It didn’t fix it, but the studio was the only place that worked for me in my life. Everything else was tinged with her death. That feeling intruded into the studio sometimes too.”
While that might explain some of the downtempo material that turned up on Deja Vu, Crosby’s solo record is a great way for him to comparentmentalise everything. He had been through the kind of pain that no human should have to deal with, and while not every song is about his girlfriend, it’s easy to read between the lines and hear his broken soul slowly being put back together.
And it’s not like the rest of the world wasn’t listening to how Crosby was dealing with his sorrow. Looking at what Neil Young would be doing later down the road on Tonight’s the Night, a lot of that album’s raw pain and earnestness comes from him trying to sort through his emotions in between recording his tunes.
Any musician can talk about those uninspired times when they can’t think of anything to write, but whenever a tragedy like this happened, having that guitar in your hand or piano in the room is almost essential. Because if the music hadn’t been there, who knows how far Crosby might have sank?
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