Unbeknown to most fans, So Far was a stopgap release, undertaken by Atlantic Records in the absence of a new Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album to accompany the reunited quartet's summer 1974 tour…
Among Schumann’s inspired late chamber works is a collection of music for more unusual instruments, composed in a concentrated flurry of creativity between 1849 and 1853 and written specifically for particular players, and it is to these exquisite short works that the world-famous Nash Ensemble turns its impeccable collective musicianship.
Although Crosby, Stills & Nash had, in effect, been together for well over a decade when Daylight Again (1982) was issued, it was only their third studio long-player of concurrently new material.
Essential: a masterpiece of country folk music
“Grasp just how brief but utterly magnificent their reign was”
It is part of the enduring myth surrounding the making the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album that our three heroes more or less bumped into each other, accidentally burst into song and Bob’s your uncle – a ground-breaking supergroup was born.
When David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash created this pop super trio in 1968 after their splits from the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Hollies, respectively, it would have been a pipedream that a hits package released 37 years later would sound as eternal and essential as this one. The 19 songs straddle the four-album, landscape-altered timeframe between 1969's post-Woodstock debut Crosby, Stills & Nash and 1982's Daylight Again, which helped inaugurate the MTV era. Unbalanced sequencing–which randomly bounces 12 years ahead and five years back–is rescued by the superb harmonies, unique songwriting and divergent personalities of the three members. With politics and culture always at the forefront, Stills bookends the band's trademark canon with "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" and "Southern Cross," Nash incorporates Eastern influences to "Marrakesh Express" and folk timber to "Just a Song Before I Go" and "Teach Your Children," and the ever-capricious Crosby leads the way lyrically with the lingering "Delta" to the Robert Kennedy tribute "Long Time Gone".
As part of their ongoing reissue of the Crosby, Stills & Nash catalog, Rhino put out Demos, a collection of early home recordings of staples from the CSN catalog, demos recorded both alone and together between the years of 1968 and 1971. Unlike some similar collections, not much here is especially revelatory; apart from "Love the One You're With," here almost droning at the beginning, there are no great differences in lyrics or approach, with such solo recordings as "Almost Cut My Hair" pointing clearly to their latter full-blown incarnations.