Credit: Far Out / Michael Stokes
Fri 18 September 2026 19:30, UK
David Crosby never wanted to settle for just any other pop song whenever he made a record.
He had outgrown that kind of music long before he even formed Crosby, Stills & Nash, and he wasn’t going to go back there if he could help it. He wanted the chance to make something a bit more fresh, and when left to his own devices, he wasn’t about to waste the opportunity to make something extraordinary without having the rest of his bandmates breathing down his neck about everything.
But when he was working on his first post-Byrds songs with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, it’s not like he needed to face much pushback. He was making songs that had a lot more depth than anything that he had been working on, and even though he didn’t need to have the most complicated harmonies of all time, he knew what was effective on people that wasn’t necessarily the traditional rock and roll approach.
He was willing to make tunes that went off on tangents and had a lot of different sections throughout their runtime, because as far as he was concerned, anything he wrote had potential to be a hook. Whatever he was working on had to have that alluring quality that he heard in his favourite Joni Mitchell records, but there’s a certain emotion hiding within the grooves of his album, If I Could Only Remember My Name.
Some of the best songs that he ever made turned up on this record, and even though there were more than a few times where he sounded like he was falling apart, he didn’t want to hide anything. A lot of this album was centred around him losing the love of his life, and he was willing to put all of that down on paper from the minute that he started writing any number of the songs on the record.
This was the kind of record that he needed to get out of his system when he first started playing, but there are definitely pieces that are easier to listen to than others. Hearing someone sharing the deepest parts of their soul isn’t all that easy, but a tune like ‘Traction in the Rain’ was one of the few that had yet to wear out its welcome for Crosby, even after playing it for years on end.
Looking back on his masterpiece decades after the fact, Crosby felt that there was nothing that sounded as beautiful as ‘Traction in the Rain’ when he listened back to it, saying, “That may be one of the prettiest songs I ever wrote. I love it. It’s just a straightforward singer-songwriter beauty. I love it. There’s that line, ‘It’s hard to get through another city day without thinking of getting out’. Well, I was already not liking cities and not liking how they felt. But I was living on my boat in Sausalito. I was pretty happy about that. I was already headed for the country.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And given the problems he was having in Los Angeles at the time, living on his boat wasn’t the worst idea in the world, either. He needed to get away from all those reminders, and while that did lead to him not taking care of himself and eventually becoming a drug fiend, he was at least able to find the right balance between his emotional state and his chemical dependency later on in life.
He almost needed to write tunes like ‘Traction in the Rain’ to sew up the wounds in his broken heart, but that doesn’t mean that the pain magically goes away. Only time would tell if he would stitch himself back together completely, and he considered himself lucky to be able to see the other side of the rock and roll lifestyle.
