(Credits: Far Out / Eddie Janssens / wikiportret.nl)
Thu 15 January 2026 18:15, UK
If there was one thing David Crosby was put on this Earth to do, it was to arrange vocal lines.
As much as his chops as a songwriter were fantastic, some of the best pieces of his career came when he orchestrated every single voice in Crosby, Stills, and Nash to sound absolutely perfect whenever working on their classics. All those years of listening to the most complex musicians had an effect on him, but he knew to treat every guest vocalist like any other session player when listening to them perform.
Because as much as people can refine their chops as a session player, being a session backing vocalist is a much different thing. Sometimes a band like Pink Floyd can luck out and get one of the greatest vocal performances in history when Clare Torry walks into the room to perform ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, but it really changes depending on the song. Not everyone has the right voice for everything, but Crosby was able to bend his voice into many different shapes.
There’s a lot of grit behind his voice whenever he sang ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, but if you compare it to the kind of singing that he did on the rest of Deja Vu, he was ready to mould the harmony into whatever he wanted. But a lot of the genius that he developed over time can only happen when he followed in the footsteps of everyone from Miles Davis to Joni Mitchell to John Coltrane.
But for someone with as many vocal chops as Crosby had, Steely Dan seemed to be sculpting perfection when they went into the studio. All their songs were meticulously crafted to sound absolutely perfect by the time they walked out of the studio, and while a lot of those chords weren’t necessarily easy to play, getting a vocal genius like Michael McDonald into the mix was just what songs like ‘Peg’ needed.
McDonald definitely had that distinctive tone to his voice whenever he played with The Doobie Brothers, but when Crosby started working with him on his own solo records, he started to get a better idea of the kind of musician he was. He had soaked in the best of every single artist he worked with, and compared to the legends, he could hold his own next to people like Stevie Wonder when he went into the studio.
Wonder is certainly one of the greatest vocalists of all time to anyone with functional eardrums, but Crosby felt that McDonald deserved a spot among the finest players of all time, saying, “Mike and I have been friends for a long time. I’ve sung with him before and I think he’s an astounding talent. He’s probably one of the best singers alive. He and Stevie Wonder are the best singers in the world. I’ve always wanted to write with him because he’s a brilliant writer.”
And it’s not like McDonald’s strengths began and ended at making those yacht rock jams, either. Many of his tunes were catchy enough to get on pop radio at the time, but if you look at the kind of ear he had, the strange harmonies that turned up on a lot of those Doobie Brothers records were equal parts poppy and jazzy whenever he reached for a note that might have been a bit more unexpected.
Because, really, that’s what Crosby was always looking for when he made his classics. It’s one thing to have a great idea for a pop song, and many artists have made a fortune out of that mentality, but if you want to be truly adventurous, it’s important to give the audience the kind of songs that they didn’t realise they needed in their lives.
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