Crosby, Stills and Nash - CSN Demos (2009)

(This review originally appeared in June 2009.)

I heard Crosby, Stills and Nash's Demos album for free, courtesy of National Public Radio's Web site, back in 2009.  The album, released in June of that year, strips some of the trios best-known early songs (alas, no demo recordings of "Shadow Captain" and "Dark Star" from the 1977 CSN album) down to the essence, revealing finely crafted melodies and deeply personal insights. "Long Time Gone," a Crosby song, is more pointed here and contains a lyric left out of the final master, Nash's "Marrakesh Express" sounds playfully joyful, There are bigger surprises here among the songs that became solo cuts - "Be Yourself" and "Sleep Song," from Nash's 1971 solo debut Songs For Beginners, are achingly beautiful, while Stills's "Love The One You're With" emerges more as the party song celebrating good times that it was meant to be than as the ode to groupie-jumping that Stills's detractors (and he has many) say it is.

Graham Nash and his longtime buddy Joel Bernstein co-produced this collection, so, as with the 1991 Crosby, Stills and Nash box set Nash oversaw, you're going to find him very well-represented. Fine by me; with gems such as "Chicago," how can you go wrong? But Crosby really proves his mettle as a composer with low-keyed but no less intense performance of "Almost Cut My Hair," and Stills's demo of "Singing Call" (from his second solo album) sounds like a finished product. Indeed, the songs here that became solo cuts (with the exception of the Crosby song "Music Is Love," which is the only track here to feature Neil Young and was ad-libbed on the spot) only make the listener fan ponder the CSN albums that were never recorded due to their relentless solo projects of the seventies.

The sense of craftsmanship and commitment to their art (if not their partnership) reveal the ambitions of a group that were not just another bunch of rock superstars collaborating out of ego. There was some of that, but it wasn't ego that brought these three together. It was all about the music, and it still is.