(Credits: David Gans)
Mon 29 September 2025 19:00, UK
It didn’t take very long for David Crosby to translate his emotions onto the tape.
Even though he was more interested in the mechanics of harmony a lot of the time, it’s easy to listen to the tunes he wrote for The Byrds, Crosby, Stills, and Nash and in his solo years that feel like natural extensions of where his head was at the time. He never wanted to be the typical pop singer, but even if he could write phenomenally happy songs, he knew that there needed to be some sort of balance throughout his work as well.
After all, CSN were never meant to be a happy-go-lucky band by any stretch. Everyone would come for the harmonies, but what made them stay was how nuanced the tunes were, especially when Neil Young entered the fold and started writing far more pointed material, whether that was politically-tinged music or crafting ballads that were a lot more introspective on tracks like ‘Helpless’.
Even though Crosby had been a seasoned pro in the world of rock and roll by this point, that didn’t mean he couldn’t learn a thing or two from what Young was doing. If I Could Only Remember My Name showed everyone the layers of his broken heart, but chances are that couldn’t have come out of him were it not for people like Young and Joni Mitchell showing him how to open up like that.
This was a long way from him writing ‘So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star’, but that was fine by him. The pop writer was only a small facet of his career, and even when he was at half-capacity when working with his friends in the 1980s, the fact that he held it together to make a tune like ‘Compass’ is respectable, especially with lyrics that are all about confronting all those years that he lost from being an addict.
But as he grew older, Crosby started to see the culture that was coming up around him and becoming a lot more disheartened at the next generation. If most artists of his generation were writing songs about modern times, they would have probably been talking about how they’re confused by social media, but when Crosby looked through the people walking up and down the seedy side of Los Angeles, he couldn’t help but feel his heart break a little bit.
Although ‘If She Called’ was never going to be a huge single, Crosby did think it was one of the most tragic tunes he ever had to write, saying, “‘If She Called’ is probably the saddest song I’ve ever written. I wrote it when I saw some hookers working outside a bar and realized that I didn’t know how they dealt with it. I didn’t understand where they hid their hearts and their souls when they’re doing that thing, which is an awful thing to do for a living.”
And for someone that helped bring ‘Teach Your Children’ to life, it makes sense why he would approach a tune this way. This certainly wasn’t no ‘Roxanne’ by any stretch. Crosby seemed genuinely interested in what goes into this kind of life, and even if it was for anyone to make ends meet most of the time, he knew there was an element of tragedy to someone that could never be open and honest about anything.
Crosby was the last person to tell people how they were going to live their lives, and while ‘If She Called’ does have a message, he was never one to preach from a musical pulpit. He was one to observe most of the time, and if he saw something that genuinely moved him, it didn’t take long for him to turn it into a song.
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