Tag: crosby stills and nash

MIXTAPE: Denison Witmer and the Meaning of “Home”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

What does “home” mean?

Answering this question became one of the main themes in my lyrics over the last several years – especially on my new album, Anything At All. After touring consistently for the first 15-20 years of my music career, I finally bought a house in South Philadelphia. Ten years later, my family and I relocated to my hometown, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Before moving back to Lancaster, most of the places I lived felt kind of like a coat rack. Sure, most of my belongings were there, but I knew I’d be traveling again soon – things that felt centering or “home-like” to me existed outside of the confines of a space.

My current life is a lot different than that time. Now I am a husband, a dad of two young kids, a carpenter, and a part of my local community. I spend a lot of time trying to build a comfortable and consistent home life for myself and my family. My idea of what a home means is changing yet again. I’ve compiled a few songs that encompass the various meanings of “home” to me. – Denison Witmer

“Homesick” – Kings of Convenience

I think this is one of the best opening tracks on any album. The way the two guitars immediately start walking down the scale is captivating. My favorite lyrics are the last few: “A song for someone who needs somewhere to long for/ Homesick because I no longer know where home is…” It makes me think about the many days I’ve spent in headphones traveling in trains or tour vans, leaning my head against the window and listening to music that made me feel at home.

“Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War” (Original Acoustic Demo) – Paul Simon

I put this song on almost every mix I make. This is Paul Simon at his finest – just him and a guitar. In this story we follow Rene and Georgette Magritte as they reflect on the differences between their time in New York City and their lives in Europe during WWII. Ordinary moments like opening dresser drawers or window-shopping trigger memories of home.

 “Just A Song Before I Go” – Crosby, Stills, & Nash

Starting with a crash cymbal and leading right into a fuzzy guitar riff, this song has an instant warm vibe. I’ve always loved the way Graham Nash leans into writing about his life as a musician/songwriter. There’s a risk that it might not be relatable to a wider audience, yet he always finds a way to make the feeling universal. The lyrics “When the shows were over/ We had to get back home/ When we opened up the door/ I had to be alone…” connect deeply with me.

There were a lot of times on tour that I felt like I was turning into a ghost – passing through towns and people with no real sense of deeper connection or longevity. No real sense of home. Sometimes weeks would pass with mostly small talk and I would lose sight of who I was. Finally getting home, dropping my bags, closing a door behind me, and spending a week alone in silence was just what I needed to recoup.

“In Tall Buildings” (Live) – Gillian Welch

A lovely song written about returning to and centering your life around the things that really matter to you. I love the lyrics “When I’m retired/ My life is my own/ I made all the payments/ It’s time to go home/ And wonder what happened/ Betwixt and between/ When I went to work in tall buildings.” It’s a beautiful reflection on the things that we leave behind either knowingly or unknowingly when we get swept up in the paths our lives take. Gillian Welch’s vocal delivery is always beautiful. The way she can take any song and filter it through her own style with honesty and sincerity is incredible.

“A House With” – Denison Witmer

Yes, adding one of my own songs here. It fits with the theme. Mid-COVID lockdown, my wife and I got really into two things: birding and plants. We did everything we could to get birds to visit our yard. We did everything we could to green the outside and inside of our house. This led to hanging bird feeders all over the place and planting everything from shrubs to trees to lots (and I mean lots) of indoor plants.

This song started as kind of a joke. I often walk around my house playing a small classical guitar and making up goofy songs to make my wife and kids laugh. This song started that way — I was watching the birds on our feeder and naming them as I saw them, then I went from room to room naming the plants we have in our window sills. I recorded an iPhone voice memo and forgot about it. I’m not sure what motivated me to share it with Sufjan (who produced my new album and this track), but I think it was because I knew he is a fan of concrete nouns and words that are interesting phonetically. He ended up choosing this from the batch of demos I presented to him. I am glad he did, because it’s one of my favorite songs on the album.

Sufjan didn’t like the original lyrics of the last verse… I remember him saying, “In the first two verses you are telling us what you are doing and how it fills your heart, but you never tell us why. You should try to answer that question for yourself.” I rewrote the ending and it was at that moment that things clicked into place for me.

“Take Me Home, Country Roads” – John Denver

You can’t really go wrong with the earnest nature of John Denver. I love the lilting quality of this song – lyrics about longing juxtaposed against the happy upbeat sound. It’s a love song to a place. I have a lot of respect for John Denver, because he was always unapologetically himself. He talked about how he wanted to not just entertain people, but also touch them. I think he understood the magic of music and connection. Listening to John Denver also makes me think about my dad because he was his favorite musician.

Photo Credit: Lindsay Elliott

With His Son and Special Guests, David Crosby Finds His Way on ‘For Free’

Posted on by Editor

“I think I found my way.”

When a guy about to turn 80 sings that line, you take note. When that guy is David Crosby, who in fact turns that age on August 14… well…

“I don’t know if I would have sung it at any other time in my life,” Crosby says in a Zoom chat from his home north of Santa Barbara, California, where he lives with Jan Dance, his wife of 34 years.

But sing it he does, in the song “I Think I,” a highlight of his new album, For Free. With this, his fifth album in seven years (after just three solo albums in the earlier part of his career), he comes to his 80th in a remarkable creative run. It’s a strong collection featuring the fruits of several creative collaborations, mostly with his son, James Raymond. Among the guests are Michael McDonald on the shining opener “River Rise,” Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen on the jazzy, dark “Rodriguez For a Night” and Sarah Jarosz, with whom he duets on a gorgeously spare version of the Joni Mitchell song that gives the album its title.

It’s that line from “I Think I,” though, that speaks most profoundly to the state of his life. If you know much about that life, you understand. And you might greet those words with a sigh of relief. He certainly does.

“I do feel happy now,” he says. “The thing I love about the song the most is that it’s up. It’s, you know, happy sounding. Normally I record tortured ballads that go on for days. ‘The dog died’ or ‘my truck broke down.’ This is up and happy and positive and it just captures that mood that’s around. That’s a blessing for me. That’s a great thing.”

The life leading to this moment has been well-documented and much discussed. Most significantly, Crosby created some of the most bracing, beloved, and enduring American music of the past 60 years, first as a founding member of folk-rock pioneers the Byrds and then in the various partnerships with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and/or Neil Young. Along with the essential, indelible songs CSN(&Y) gave us, there was much discord and discontent and it finally blew up, apparently for good, in 2014, sparked in part by some unfortunate remarks Crosby made regarding Young’s personal life. And Crosby’s history is marked by his years of drug addiction and a consequent prison term and liver transplant — and, thankfully, recovery. This was all covered in Remember My Name, the unflinching 2019 documentary that brought him to some painfully heartfelt reckonings.

For better or worse, Crosby’s legacy is tangled up with groups and partnerships. Asked to untangle it, he turns thoughtful.

“A lot of the musical complexity and strangeness comes from me loving jazz and world music,” he says. “I mean, I like a lot of different kinds of music, man. I like bluegrass. I like blues. I like classical music. And that has influenced me very strongly. Particularly jazz, and particularly jazz keyboard players, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, people like that. They have had a very strong influence because they played those real dense, big tone, cluster kinds of chords. And I couldn’t do them in regular tuning on the guitar. That’s what made me start re-tuning the guitar into other shapes so that I could get those kind of chords. So the jazz thing really did stack me up differently.”

That influence has been a constant facet, all the way back to the Byrds (“Everybody’s Been Burned” is almost a template for the folk-jazz explorations Tim Buckley would make) and CSN (“Guinnevere,” with its floating harmonics, was covered by both Miles Davis and jazz flute player Herbie Mann).

These days Crosby is not focused on the past, although with last year’s 50th anniversary of the CSN&Y album Déjà Vu and the expanded deluxe reissue, he’s had to do more of that than he’d like.

“I always prefer when it comes to talking about me, I like it to be somebody else doing the talking,” he says.

He’s not focused on the future, either. He says that he likely won’t tour again and with tendonitis in both hands, he expects he won’t be able to play guitar anymore within a year — a great shame as his guitar playing, with its intricate jazz voicings and inventive tunings, is as stunning as his singing, if not as widely recognized.

He’s certainly not looking forward to his birthday.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” he insists. “Birthdays are not happy when you get old. No, no, no, no, no, no! We don’t celebrate. We mourn those.”

Yet he’s utterly bubbly celebrating the new album, as well as the four leading up to it, by far his most prolific stretch in terms of making and releasing his own music. It’s not often that we can say that about someone’s 70s, let alone someone with such a vaunted career packed with songs and albums cherished dearly by millions.

“Isn’t that weird?” he says. “It’s just completely bass-ackwards. But there you go.”

To what does he attribute this?

“I got out of CSN,” he says, never one to mince words. “It was, obviously, a wonderful band and we did a lot of really great stuff. But when it when sour, it went really sour. And it went sour very fast.”

It was rough, but the silver lining shines brightly.

“I don’t make anywhere near as much money,” he says. “But I’m making good music. And that’s kind of what they put me here to do, I think.”

Cue the title song, Mitchell’s loving portrait of a street musician playing for the pure joy of it. This is the third straight Crosby album to include a Mitchell song, following “Amelia” on 2017’s Sky Trails and “Woodstock” closing 2018’s Here If You Listen. Crosby, who was an early champion (and romantic partner) of Mitchell’s, producing her debut album, Song to a Seagull, sang “For Free” on the Byrds’ 1973 reunion album. Now, though, it has a deeper resonance, reconnecting to the essence of music-making. Rather than an observer, he’s the guy in the song.

“Yep,” he says. “There I am standing on the corner. It’s squarely, smack dab in the middle of who I wanted to be, as me. I love what it says. Putting it on as the title track is also taking a little dig at the streamers. Because it is for free, man. They don’t pay us.”

Crosby had become a fan of Sarah Jarosz via I’m With Her, the group in which she’s teamed with Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins. And he loved Jarosz’s 2020 album, World on the Ground.

“I called her up and said, ‘Listen, Sarah. Can we do something together?’” he says. “And she said, ‘Sure! What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I just want to sing with you.’ And she said, ‘Oh, you sweetheart.’”

Crosby quickly suggested “For Free.”

“I’ve sung it a bunch, and I’m confident with it,” he told her. “She said, ‘Oh, I love that song.’ So I sent her a tape of it that I went in to the studio and cut. James made this incredible piano track for it. Just beautiful. Sarah sent it back with her vocal on it, and it completely blew my mind out of my ear. It was unbelievably good.”

Clearly, Crosby still craves collaboration. A sense of joyful purpose is unmistakable in his voice and in the voices and playing of those who helped him make the album. Foremost is James Raymond, the producer-composer-keyboardist who has been at Crosby’s musical side regularly since 1997, five years after learning that Crosby was his biological father. His talents have been showcased not only in his father’s solo projects, but also for years with CSN as a full-time member of the touring band, and in the jazzy group Crosby and Raymond fronted off and on with bassist Jeff Pevar, cheekily branded CPR. On For Free, Raymond wrote or co-wrote seven of its 10 songs, including “I Think I” and the somberly beautiful closer, “I Won’t Stay for Long,” inspired by Marcel Camus’ haunting 1959 film Black Orpheus.

“It’s wild to watch,” Crosby beamed. “He’s gotten to be as good a writer as I am, or better. ‘I Won’t Stay for Long’ is the best song on the record. It makes me cry. It just freaks me out.”

Guitarist Dean Parks adds color to “Rodriguez” and “Shot at Me,” the latter a powerful ballad which he co-wrote from Crosby’s words inspired by an encounter with an Afghanistan war veteran, who told him of the most human costs of war. It’s a strong addition to Crosby’s deep catalog of incisive, biting topical songs.

“I seem to run into those guys and talk to them,” Crosby says. “I ran into this guy at the airport and was drinking in the bar and he looked really bummed, really sad. So sure, I talked to him.”

As for not being able to tour anymore, Crosby is sad but sanguine.

“Singing live is the great joy of my life,” he says. “My family and singing live. That’s the top of my world, you know?”

Even if the shows stop, the music won’t, right?

“I don’t know,” he says. “I can still sing. That’s why we’re doing the records, because we love making music. Right? They obviously don’t pay us for them, so that’s the only reason there could be. We’re not trying to win the ratings war or something. We’re just singing exactly the music that really rings our bell and makes our heart sing. And there you go. And if people like it, great. And if they don’t like it, great, we don’t care.”

Photo credit: Anna Webber.
Album cover painting by Joan Baez.

Graham Nash: Pursuing the Hopeful Path

Posted on by Editor

It’s been 14 years since Graham Nash released his last solo album, Songs for Survivors. In the interim, the 74-year-old has experienced rather significant challenges — both personal and professional — all of which have naturally informed his new album, This Path Tonight. Not only are Nash and his wife Susan Sennett divorcing after 38 years of marriage, but the singer/songwriter also called the future of Crosby, Stills, and Nash into question when he admitted to Dutch magazine Lust for Life in early March that David Crosby had treated him “like dirt” and he wouldn’t be participating in any future CSN records or shows.

As harsh as those comments seem given his typically amiable demeanor, they might have as much to do with the creative place he’s in as a solo artist. The tough experiences he’s faced have let loose a veritable musical flood. Working with producer/guitarist Shane Fontayne, the pair produced 20 songs over the course of one month, 10 of which would eventually comprise This Path Tonight. And Nash doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. “I’m still writing with Shane,” he says. “We were writing last night, as a matter of fact.”

It seems the prolific songwriter has once again found his creative sweet spot and, while the circumstances instigating that output are less than ideal, they’ve sparked an album of brooding intensity. “Everything is going according to plan, but it’s an emotional rollercoaster, and This Path Tonight is my emotional journal through my life, at this moment,” Nash admits in a forthright tone.

If it seems like This Path Tonight would be a woebegone album thanks to the themes of loss, heartache, and nostalgia which arise in certain songs, think again. Hand a songwriter as talented as Nash difficult moments, and he deftly transforms them into rich introspections offering messages of hope. “If there’s any message in This Path Tonight, it’s that you have a future. Figure out what you think will make you the most happy, and go grab it and run,” Nash says, his voice taking on an optimistic note as he discusses his latest work.

Both melodically and thematically, This Path Tonight reveals Nash at his contemplative best, oscillating between the melancholy nature of questioning one’s place and path in life, and the hope that can be attained from finding answers … or at least enjoying the search. Unlike Songs for Survivors — which felt like a stiff, overly structured album — This Path Tonight contains a lush quality all the more intriguing for its simple, straightforward arrangements and production. “I’m really proud of this record,” Nash admits. “I think it’s a good piece of work.”

Nash has struck on the magic that makes him such a legendary songwriter. On “Fire Down Below,“ the song’s bluesy feel — found largely in gritty guitar riffs and rhythmic piano underpinnings — contrasts Nash’s airier vocals, but all work together to build into a chorus that feels plucked from the 1970s. It’s as catchy as it is meaningful, a hard combination to hit upon.

While having to venture down that path of self-discovery at 74 could, understandably, feel like a burden considering such soul-searching tends to fall within a more youthful domain, Nash’s natural curiosity about practically everything helped guide his way. Beyond his songwriting, he pursues artistic expression in myriad forms, including photography, painting, and drawing. “I’m a curious man,” he admits, recounting a time he received a blast from his past while doing a book signing for his autobiography, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life. “A kid came up to me, and he gave me an 8×10 manila envelope. He said, ‘You need this.’ In this envelope is my report card from when I was 11, and the first thing that a teacher said on my report card was, ‘This boy wants to know everything.’ And I guess I haven’t changed,” Nash chuckles.

That kind of curiosity allows him to communicate back from the trenches, so to speak. “I’ve already realized that it’s the duty of every musician and every artist to reflect the times that they live in, and that’s exactly what I’m doing here,” says Nash. “These songs are what’s happening in my life right now, and probably to a lot of people out there happening to their lives at the same time.” It’s a gift he’s been offering listeners ever since he put pen to paper to melody and formed English pop-rock band the Hollies in the 1960s.

Nash displays a penchant for writing particularly instructive songs. He’s long been attuned to the political issues and social injustices that continue to affect the world. Explaining a new song he’s working on with Fontayne, he says, “I saw a terrible photograph that somebody sent me last night that was taken in the 1940s, and it was of four beautiful children sitting on a stoop outside their shack next to a sign that said ‘Four Children for Sale.’ In the 1940s, there were people that were so poor they had to sell their children. Don’t think that didn’t start me thinking, so Shane and I started to write a song.”

Two of the songs on This Path Tonight’s deluxe edition continue a similar political work even while the rest of the album concentrates on more personal fare. Nash wrote “Mississippi Burning” about three college students murdered in the 1960s when they tried to help black people vote, while “Watch Out for the Wind” deals with the morning Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri.

Still, he takes issue with the fact these situations keep surfacing with no clear resolution in sight. “It’s one of the saddest things about being a songwriter,” he candidly says. “Yes, I’m loving the fact that people still love to hear ‘Military Madness’, but holy shit, what a drag to keep singing it. I wrote that 45 years ago about my father going off to WWII.”

He continues, “The world is so crazy. It is so nuts out there. I mean, just look at the political landscape, for instance: It’s a clown car. It’s insane. And that’s just the politics, not the wars, and Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan and Iraq. The world is crazy. We have to hope it will get better.”

Music offers one such balm, and it’s a point he examines in one of his new songs, “Golden Days.” Nash plays upon the song’s title, a phrase that arises and shifts with each verse, beginning as “olden days” before transitioning to “golden days,” “broken days,” and finally back to “golden days.” With each utterance, memory alters the way one looks at the past. Set against a solemn melody plucked on guitar, the song’s central theme concerning time’s passage gives way to what music offers life through all its ups and downs. Nash sings at the song’s close, “Songs with soul and words with so much hope for a brighter day.”

The hope that informs his music plays a large role in his own personal outlook. “My basic understanding is that life truly is simple. Take care of the area around you, take care of the litter around you, encourage your child, smell a flower, do something every single day that makes you smile and you will live longer. Well, I’m 74 now, so it’s stood me in good stead,” he says.

That would be prosaic advice coming from someone who wasn’t aware of the world’s greater injustices and dilemmas, but from Nash, it’s a sage attitude steeped in understanding.

As music journalist turned cultural critic Ellen Willis wrote in a 1967 essay about Bob Dylan, “In a communications crisis, the true prophets are the translators.” The same could be said of Nash. At the heart of it all, he remains a translator, one who skillfully expresses those personal crises threatening to undermine even the strongest individual in order to offer listeners an inspiring perspective instead.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.