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.