Sweet and high
Crosby’s miraculous second act continues. By David Fricke. David Crosby ★★★★ For Free BMG. CD/DL/LP
THERE MAY be no better measure of the long miles David Crosby has travelled in excess and survival than his reading on this album of
Joni Mitchell’s title song. Originally on her 1970 LP Ladies Of The Canyon, For Free has been in Crosby’s live repertoire for nearly as long. A 1977 concert performance on Allies,a lacklustre 1983 album with Crosby, Stills and Nash, betrays its time: Crosby on the verge of his dark ages, shattering Mitchell’s crystalline waltz with exaggerated bravura. Here, Crosby delivers the revelation in that passing moment with a street musician – the distance between pure art and mere celebrity – as a pilgrim come home, in a warm, humbled tone with guest singer Sarah Jarosz and elegant, restrained piano played by Crosby’s son and producer, James Raymond.
The eternal miracle of music – as profound inspiration and renewing salvation – has been a running theme in Crosby’s stunning second act as a solo artist: For Free is his fifth studio album in a decade, a productivity he never attained with CSN (or Y). Given the dire past that follows him in the form of fragile health and estrangement from those bandmates, it is no surprise that frustration and delight come on alternating tides. “They don’t tell you when you arrive/All the things you need to stay alive,” Crosby rues in I Think I, a mix of clouds and modal jazz buoyancy that turns to relief when he hears “people singing in the rain/I start walking towards that sound again.” Secret Dancer opens with the cold, harsh quiet of incarceration – an all-too-familiar memory for the singer – and a grim suggestion of torture: “That night when they finished/The humans went and locked the door/And walked away the way humans do.” But the defiance comes right away (“In the stillness… A time to write and sing”), echoing the music’s seesaw of shadows and light.
Helpful friends on the album include the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald (backing vocals in River Rise) and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen (who co-wrote Rodriguez For A Night). The Other Side Of Midnight, a beguiling reprise of Crosby’s psychedelic stargazing in CSN’s Wooden Ships and on the 1971 solo marvel If I Could
Only Remember My Name, was actually written by Raymond – the apple has not fallen far from the tree. But it is Crosby’s stubbornly enduring voice – the will to live and create in that gift after he came so close to throwing it away – that binds the wonder and mission on
For Free. In Shot At Me, Crosby recalls a coffee shop exchange with a soldier just back from the Middle East who advises him on how to stay alive under fire: “You’ve got to find your lifeline and/Pick up your thread and/Tell your story before you’re dead.” Crosby may be on the road to sunset, but he’s still got work to do.