There Was a Little Part of David Crosby in All of Us, Whether We Knew It or Not - Rolling Stone

His early co-writes with the Byrds, like “Wait and See,” were firmly in the folk-rock vein, but he left all that behind soon enough, opting for the tumbling joy of “Lady Friend,” the seductive yearning of “It Happens Each Day,” the hippies-in-the-Olde-World feel of “Renaissance Fair,” the penetrating starkness of “Everybody’s Been Burned,” and, of course, the notorious “Triad.”

He seemed less interested in cranking out sing-along acoustic pop odes to highways and sunshine (the type that landed other troubadours on AM radio at the time) and more invested in songs that conveyed his own confusion, numbness, and lack of direction.

The silly spoken bit before “Marrakesh Express.” The choir-bad-boy harmonies he would add to Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” or “For Everyman” or his Byrd bandmate Roger McGuinn’s version of “The Water Is Wide.” His rant about the Warren Commission at the Monterey Pop festival.

Another time we met, during rehearsals for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary concerts in 2009, RS had just published an interview I’d done in which he referred to himself as “old and creepy.” He immediately quoted that line back — and then laughed at how funny it was.

When I asked about the just-completed but still unheard CSNY reunion album, and how old fans might find comfort in the fact that they were all in good health, he snorted, “Well, some of us are” — not quite the rah-rah promotion his record company would have wanted to hear.

The last time I saw him in person, in late 2018, he was touring with the relative youngsters (Michelle Willis, Becca Stevens, and Michael League) in the Lighthouse Band, and the contrast to that Eighties show couldn’t have been more apparent.