The first time Phil Collins met Crosby, Stills & Nash’s David Crosby, he asked him to sing on his next album. Collins, who had been a fan of his since his days in the Byrds, had previously crossed paths with Graham Nash and Stephen Stills but never with Crosby until an Atlantic Records 40th anniversary party in the late ’80s.

“I said, ‘I’ve got to meet David,” recalled Collins. “He’s a big hero of mine. So they introduced me to him, and I went backstage and I said, ‘Can you sing on my next album?’ He said ‘Sure.”

By 1994, both had become close friends, and Collins even paid for Crosby’s liver transplant surgery that year, shortly after he was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. “This man is my friend and I’m very proud to have him as a friend,” said Collins, introducing the CSN legend during their 1998 A&E special, Phil Collins & David Crosby – Another Day in Paradise.

“He is a wonderful guy and one of the least affected musicians that I know by stardom,” Crosby said of Collins during an interview on Later with Bob Costa years earlier in 1991. “He’s as big as you can get and he’s just as real as you can be.”

[RELATED: 4 Songs You Didn’t Know Phil Collins Wrote for Other Artists]

“Hero”

Crosby and Collins had already started a nearly decade-long collaborative run by the late ’80s. On …But Seriously, Crosby ended up singing on two tracks, Collins’ No. 1 hit “Another Day in Paradise” and ‘That’s Just the Way It Is.” A year before David Crosby underwent liver transplant surgery, he released his third solo album, Thousand Roads, which was his last album for 21 years before releasing Croz 21, and his final, For Free, before he died in 2023. 

Thousand Roads features songs written or co-penned by Joni Mitchell (“Yvette in English”), John Hiatt (“Through Your Hands”), and opens on “Hero,” a song Crosby co-wrote with Collins. Produced by Collins, who also played drums, keyboards, and drum machine on the track, the song covers the good versus evil within human nature.

It was one of those great stories
That you can’t put down at night
The hero knew what he had to do
And he wasn’t afraid to fight

The villain goes to jail
While the hero goes free
I wish it were that simple for me

And the reason that she loved him
Was the reason I loved him, too
And he never wondered
What was right or wrong
He just knew, he just knew

Phil Collins’ “Hero” and Graham Nash

In 1993, Collins also released a demo version of “Hero” with his vocals only as a B-side to “We Wait and We Wonder” from his fifth album, Both Sides.

Five years after releasing Thousand Roads, Crosby delivered a live album with his jazz trio, CPR, alongside guitarist Jeff Pevar and Crosby’s son, keyboardist James Raymond. Recorded at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles in November 1998, Live at the Wiltern features Crosby’s CSN bandmate Graham Nash is also a special guest, joining him and Collins on a live version of “Hero.”

Photo: Lester Cohen/Getty Images