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.

The end is nigh: Sheryl Crow's Threads

After my post last week about an abruptly different employment status, this latest headline might appear alarmingly nihilistic, but fear not. Following my conscious uncoupling last week I suddenly have time on my hands to catch up on numerous overdue domestic tasks. That includes listening to the small pile of records that has accumulated like traffic cones stacked up by the road, ominously, long before the road gets dug up. Top of the pile, through no particular selection process, is Sheryl Crow’s Threads which, the singer says, will be her last.

She has been touting the prospect of retirement from album making for a while, recently telling Rolling Stone that she’d fallen out of love with the process. “I’ve loved making albums, I’ve loved growing up with albums, [but] I don’t think people listen to albums as a full artistic statement anymore,” she explained. “They cherry pick and make their own playlists or you’ll only hear a song if comes up on a playlist. For me to make a full artistic statement, with a beginning and a middle and an end, and to put the emotion and the money and the time into it only to have it not be heard that way? It seems slightly futile.” Crow is not done yet with the idea of making new music, however, but says she’ll focus on writing and releasing individual songs. Which makes consideration of Threads interesting. “I feel really good about this being my last album,” Crow told Rolling Stone. “I feel like it’s really the summation of my creative life all the way until now. Threads is a beautiful final statement.” Whether it is or whether it is not I’ll come onto in a moment.

But, first, let me take you back a couple of weeks, when I had a job, and was sitting at Munich Airport after yet another corporate country visit. I suddenly realised that the music being piped into the departures area was Coldplay, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what Coldplay song it was (and couldn’t be arsed to fire up SoundHound to find out) because I stopped buying Coldplay albums as they (band and albums) had ceased to be of any interest whatsoever. They’d become over-earnest, the music wallpapery and Chris Martin had basically become a bit of a tit, what with all that latter day hippie-dippieness. The Coldplay song I heard in Munich was pleasant enough, don’t get me wrong, but ordinary. Pleasing, but nothing outlandish. A Ford Mondeo, if you will. William Shatner, even (you’ve seen his face all your life, and even though he’s now, remarkably, in his 80s, it doesn’t seem any different to when he was Captain Kirk in the 1960s). Familiar, like a neighbourhood that never changes.

So what’s that got to do with Sheryl Crow? Well, there have been emerging parallels. 27 years ago, when her debut album Tuesday Night Music Club burst through via the gloriously infectious All I Wanna Do, Crow commenced a run of albums that strolled between LA cool and Stonesesque rock and roll, blues and country, soul, edgier stuff and alt-country folkiness. It was always polished - though thankfully not gloss-polish. It was mature without sounding old, familiar without being derivative. It rightfully propelled her into rock’s executive lounge, recording and touring with the Stones, Eric Clapton (whom she dated, later writing My Favourite Mistake about the experience), and headlining a package tour with John Mayer (I was lucky enough to see their San Diego gig). Such is Crow’s standing that she’s never been short of stellar associations, from the late B.B. King to Bob Dylan. Which brings me to Threads, her eleventh studio record and a 17-track collection of collaborations with a galaxy of luminaries, from Stevie Nicks and Willie Nelson to Clapton and Sting, and from Chuck D to Vince Gill and even Johnny Cash, whom, if memory serves me, died in 2003.

Duet albums are often this way, an excuse to do something with musical mates but which add very little actual value to the principal act’s value proposition. Threads, though, might be different but, perhaps, only in the context of being Crow’s last album. For there has been a creeping sense of diminishing returns with her most recent. That’s not to say that 2013’s Feels Like Home and 2017’s Be Myself weren’t good, they just lacked the vibrancy that made earlier efforts like TNMC, Sheryl Crow and The Globe Sessions zippy and fresh, even with patent, denim-clad classic rock vibes. Things had begun to feel over-familiar, lacking groove. The Coldplay Syndrome.

Picture: Instagram/Sheryl Crow

If Feels Like Home was a reflection of Crow’s relocation with her two adopted sons to Nashville, leaving behind the Californian free spirit that was core to her early work, Threads opens with Prove You Wrong, featuring Nicks and young country star Maren Morris, and as much of a country marker as she could possibly make. Strangely, for an opening song - traditionally a blunderbuss of a track to wake up the listening programme to come - it’s probably the weakest of the 17. Thankfully, the following 16 tracks liven up in varying ways. Tell Me When It’s Over, co-written with and featuring country rocker Chris Stapleton, is one of her best in years, while Lonely Alone with Willie Nelson is a beautiful, gentle confessional. So Live Wire takes a deliciously bluesy route with Bonnie Raitt (who was “instrumental” in Crow picking up a guitar at the age of 17) and Mavis Staples adding a gospel-infused sensibility. The cover of George Harrison’s Beware Of Darkness, featuring Sting and Brandi Carlisle, runs a risk of mawkishness, but is actually quite good (with, thankfully, Sting’s appearance being understated). Others, such as Story of Everything (with Gary Clark Jr. and Chuck D), Still The Good Old Days (with Joe Walsh) and Dylan’s Everything Is Broken (with Jason Isbell) work less well. As an exercise in the application of professional friendships, Threads can’t be faulted. It is as its best when Crow’s natural ability for writing songs with rock-blues roots comes to the fore and you don’t, actually, care all that much who she’s working with on the track.

There are a couple of songs worth highlighting: a cover of the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge track The Worst - a surprising choice at that - is a intriguing duet with Keith Richards. Keef, we all know, is not a natural singer, and yet his rasp provides a wonderful counter to the sweetness of Crow’s own voice. And then there’s Redemption Day, a track Crow included on her eponymous second album in 1996. Originally written after she’d toured US troops in Bosnia, Cash re-recorded the song in 2002, with the intention of making it being the “cornerstone” of his next album, but he died before it could be released. “Cut to now,” Crow explained recently, “and with everything that’s going on in America and in the world that song kept coming to mind so I asked his family if it would be OK if I used his demo vocal.” Cynics might be troubled by such raiding of a dead icon’s past, but the song - already good to begin with - is hauntingly good. We can sometimes sit discomfortably with retreads, reissues and re-recordings, be they of songs, films or television series, but here Crow’s cover of her own song is perfect. “I can’t think of many better compliments as a songwriter [than Cash recording one of your songs],” she said recently. “It was a very humbling experience, to hear him now with this crazy person in office – it was definitely sobering.”

Crow is only 57 - just five years my senior - so it would be horrendous to think of her retiring. She says she’s not, but given that she’s been drawn to, and has drawn to her, some of rock’s grandest statespeople, both on Threads but historically, all because of her traditions of songcraft, it would be a shame to think that the well has run dry. Her argument that the album, as a curated sequence of songs, is a spent force has some validation in this age of streaming services. But at risk of being an old head - face facts, I am - there is still a place for records with a beginning, middle and an end, that tell rich stories through lyrical heft and high quality musicianship. And that should stand out as being recognisable when piped through an airport.