Age is just a number: David Crosby's For Free

If you ever get into one of those pub discussions with someone with trenchant views on venerated musicians still making records, chances are that at some point they’ll declare that old farts should simply step aside and let the next generation have a go. This assumes that there is a threshold at which retirement should be mandated. But at what age would you set that? 50? 60? 65? 70? 

It’s somewhat preposterous that creativity has any age limit - upper or lower. The case for older musicians being gently eased into their dotage by taking away the keys to the recording studio does, occasionally, get strengthened by someone releasing an utter stinker. I won’t name names. Given, though, that what we term ‘pop’ music has been with us since the mid-1950s, and not everyone has been killed off by old age, drugs, drink or other forms of misadventure, there are plenty of acts from the classic rock and pop age still plying their trade admirably.

The Rolling Stones, for example (Mick Jagger turns a respectable 78 next week and can still get away with skinny jeans), and the 94-year-old Tony Bennett; Paul McCartney, also 78, put in a creditable effort with his McCartney III, late last year, while Willie Nelson, 87, has released 14 albums alone in the last 11 years. I’m no great fan of Bob Dylan, for that matter, but last year’s Rough And Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio album, was a tour de force.

So, a month shy of turning 80, David Crosby delivers For Free, and it is wonderful, in all dimensions. Being the fifth solo album since 2014’s well received Croz, you could say that it represents a continuing purple patch. With his 2017 album, Sky Trails, Crosby said there was a lot still to come: “There was a lot of pent-up creative juice,” he said of the writing renaissance after Crosby, Stills and Nash finally wound itself up. “It’s as if I’d been in a dark room and someone turned on the lights”. In 2021, the lights are well and truly still firmly on. 

The first thing that strikes you about For Free is how fresh it sounds, not the least of which Crosby’s ageless voice. If you had no idea that he’d been a pioneer of the hippy folk-rock movement and stalwart of the Laurel Canyon scene more than 50 years ago with The Byrds and then CSN (oh and, go on, CSN&Y), you’d never guess that the principal voice you hear on this album is about to enter its ninth decade. This is an even more remarkable achievement when you consider Crosby’s historic dalliances with the law, substances various, heart attacks, a liver transplant (widely believed to have been paid for by Phil Collins) and sundry other medical contretemps over the years. But that voice, once part of so many classic harmonies, is as sweet sounding as ever. To be honest, I could have enjoyed For Free if it was just a-capella recordings.

Part of the freshness comes from the co-production by James Raymond, the son Crosby put up for adoption in 1962, and with whom became reconciled in the late 1990s, leading to musical collaborations ever since. “Can you imagine what it’s like to connect with your son and find out that he’s incredibly talented - a great composer, a great poet, and a really fine songwriter and musician all around?” Crosby says. “We’re such good friends and we work so well together, and we’ll each go to any length to create the highest-quality songs we can.” 

In that regard, more than any other, For Free delivers comprehensively. It closes with the bittersweet I Won’t Stay For Long, a poignant piece written entirely by Raymond but clearly about his father’s advancing years. “I’m standing on the porch,” it establishes. “Like it’s the edge of a cliff. Beyond the grass and gravel lies a certain abyss.” It sounds mawkish but, conversely offers a hand of hope for the future. It’s a satisfying conclusion to an album that commences in equally pleasing form, with the rousing River Rise, co-written by Crosby and Raymond with Michael McDonald, setting the scene. From this listener’s perspective, it’s a resonant love letter to Crosby’s native California, McDonald’s blue-eyed harmonies injecting a little of the Golden State that he added to his work with the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan. Speaking of which, one of the album’s highlights is a track written with and featuring Donald Fagen, Rodriguez For A Night, which manages to out-Dan the Dan with its combination of groove and a sophisticated lyric that, as per, only Fagen might get about a mythical former hell raiser.

That gives an indication of the topics elsewhere on the album. Not fantasy figures, as such, but a reflection of life’s challenges and its opportunities. There are, too, nods to the community - physical and spiritual - that Crosby was a part of back in those sun-dappled Canyon days, from the album's cover portrait of the singer painted by Joan Baez, to the title track, a retread of a regular Crosby interpretation of a Joni Mitchell song, but one sounding as fresh as if it had been written yesterday.

“It’s not how much time you’ve got because we really don’t know,” Crosby recently told US radio legend Howard Stern. “It’s what you do with the time that you have. I’m trying to really spend it well. I’m very grateful for each day that I get and I try to do it making music because I think the world needs music.” Sentiment that could easily have been expressed at the turn of the ’70s, but given where the world is today, as valid as ever. 

There is a sense, however, that Crosby is winding up with For Free. Its tracks, its lyrics - while not mournful, far from it - do suggest an octogenarian putting things in order, and his comments to Stern appear to back that up. But if he and Raymond are capable of producing more like this, the notion that age is just a number will continue to be served. Let’s not tempt fate, though. Let’s enjoy this delightful record for what it is.

Ticket to ride: The Coral return

It is the 5th of May. Spring has technically been with us since the end of March, but at the beginning of this week Britain experienced the coldest May Day bank holiday in a generation. Last night, the Etihad Stadium was coated in wintry hail. It still feels like the central heating needs to be on. 

Thoughts of a holiday somewhere more temperate continue to be dashed by that damn coronavirus and the convoluted rules restricting anyone from sensibly booking a holiday for fear of not being let back in. In fact, for the second year running, a holiday somewhere involving my dust-collecting passport seems as far away as ever. Couple all this with the fact that, post-foot surgery, I’m confined to the sofa, effectively still under lockdown, despite pubs, shops, swimming pools and all the rest being open again. I have never been in greater desperate need of escape.

Relief is at hand, thankfully, in the form of Coral Island, the bright, sparkling, nostalgia-laden trip back in time from The Coral. Drawing unashamedly from the same palette that decorated Crosby, Stills and Nash at their most whimsical (Our House), the Small Faces’ semi-psychedelic Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake or even, at an aural squint, The Beatles’ Penny Lane, Coral Island takes a thematic trip to an imaginary seaside resort, replete with funfair rides and, generally speaking, a carefree, jolly day out for everyone. And it is utterly delightful. 

It is also highly ambitious, at 24 tracks long - an unashamed double concept album in old money, not that you’ll have much issue with the length, the ambition or the music. Ah, the concept album: while the likes of Pink Floyd’s The Wall or The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis might be the examples cited by critics of the form, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many’s the record with a narrative thread running right through it. Pet Sounds, London Calling, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars - the list of classics is endless, but the genre hasn’t been totally consigned to the heritage trail. So why now? ‘Why not?’, say The Coral, happy to challenge conventions by putting out a double-concept in the age of pic’n’mix streaming and audience attention spans apparently unwilling to commit to anything more than individual songs, rather than sustained album consumption, and certainly not a collection of almost an hour’s worth of material.

Radical as that might sound, there is some unwitting logic behind it. The audience is both captive right now but also desperate for escapism, and what better route out of COVID confinement than an album of such joyous sentimentality as Coral Island. Over its two discs, the album captures the two sides of a seaside resort: the boisterous summer months of excited children, organ music and ice cream, and then the downbeat winter period, with the fairground rides covered up and just the sound of seagulls piercing the tourist-free air. It’s theatre of the mind, to some extent, with the music driving the mood and frontman James Skelly’s 85-year-old grandfather providing spoken interludes in much the same manner as Stanley Unwin did on the aforementioned Small Faces opus.

So, what makes it such a pleasing excursion? Coral Island is gentle theatre, all acoustic guitars and blended harmonies, giving it a folky feel without descending into the faux street busking of the Mumford clan. More importantly, it’s the combination of the music and the lyrical scene-painting that makes it so enjoyable, whether the melancholia of Summertime reflecting on fairground arcades, or Mist On The River evoking teenage frustrations of summer love going unrequited. Old Photographs blatantly breaks out the Werther’s Originals for a sepia-tinged vignette of yesterday, while Autumn Has Come almost celebrates the end of the summer season that Take Me Back To The Summertime harks after.

I sincerely hope that I get a summer holiday this year and, in particular, get to see somewhere with azure seas and sandy beaches. That, you can safely conclude, is not going to be on these shores, not even Cornwall. But as over-privileged a statement as that is, you could do worse than to take a trip to Coral Island, to escape to a place that does still exist, and does still fulfil its purpose. The Coral may be tapping into childhoods lost (or, simply imagined), but after the year we’ve all had, they’ve delivered a delightful break from reality.