Bonus Mix: The Great Lost CSNY Album

Having spent the past few days gorging on David Crosby's first solo album (blogged yesterday), I decided to construct a great lost Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album, the missing follow-up to 1970's legendary Déjà Vu.

As fans of the band in its various incarnations are well aware, CSN/CSNY's studio history in the wake of the CSN debut and the Young-appended Déjà Vu is something of a disaster, decades of half-assed releases and false starts, the band historically plagued by in-fighting and egos and drugs.  (Check out last year's excellent band bio from David Browne to read about it in excruciating detail.)  So you have to imagine what it might have sounded like had the band gotten their shit together and actually followed up the 1970 release with another joint effort.

Instead, each of the members went off and recorded a solo album -- in most cases, representing some of the best work any of them ever did, together or apart.  So I burned myself a CD (replicated on Spotify below) pulling a few tracks off each of those albums (plus a Young outtake), imagining what might have been if they'd instead gone into the studio together and put out a joint release the following year.  I largely avoided the more rocking tunes, opting for a mellower, mid-tempo vibe.  To give it a more band-like feel, I stuck with songs featuring the band's trademark harmonies (in some cases, but not all, the guys are backing each other up).  I also skipped a few singles that are already strongly associated with the band (i.e. "Love The One You're With," "Chicago").

I think it works pretty well.  It's a little hard to integrate the Young songs, since After the Gold Rush is such a definitive Neil album that it's hard to hear these as anything other than Neil Young songs -- but, that said, even on Déjà Vu the Neil contributions sound more like Neil Young songs than CSNY songs.