During the final years of his life, David Crosby found new collaborators in the shape of the Lighthouse Band. They were named after the 2016 album Lighthouse, which is where the four first came together, although not for the whole album. But it was a start.
Michael League was the producer of that album, as well as Crosby’s main musical partner. They collaborated on most of the songwriting, and League provided a lot of the instrumentation as well – especially a multitude of different types of guitars, as well as adding vocal harmonies to several songs.
On the track By the Light of Common Day, Becca Stevens and Michelle Willis would join them, resulting in an amazing track with stunning four-part harmonies worthy of comparison with CSNY. Becca Stevens also wrote that track alongside Crosby.
The four of them had initially met when Michael League invited all of them to an event with his virtuoso orchestral-jazz-prog band Snarky Puppy. Becca Stevens had recorded a song with the band which she was slated to perform with them that night. This is what brought her to Crosby’s attention.
On stage in New York in 2019, Becca introduced the song by recalling their first meeting on that night: “I was there practicing my song, when I heard some old man talking through the whole thing behind me. I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’ and looked out of the corner of my eye. It was David Crosby. He came up to me after the rehearsal, and the first thing he said to me was ‘You’re really fucking weird!’ But then the second thing he said was, ‘We should write a song together!’ I first thought he hated me, but realised that he liked me!”
Croz, in turn, said: “Becca is one of the reasons that I fell in love with this whole thing in the first place. Michael introduced the four of us together, and I have been just stupefied at how good they are.”
After the recording of the Lighthouse album, the four of them became the touring band for that record. This was such a great experience that Crosby was never in doubt that he wanted them all to be very much involved on the next album Here If You Listen (2018).
In the liner notes to that album, he wrote: “We walked into Mike League’s studio in Brooklyn with two finished songs… just two… to begin a new Lighthouse Band record. Crazy thing to do… unless you’re walking in with Michelle and Becca and Michael. What happened is, we wrote the whole rest of the record and recorded all of it and mixed it with Fab in one month. Never done anything like that before… an amazing creative experience. I asked for it to be a group record… not a solo with help… they took me seriously and the result was explosive. This is one of the best musical experiences of my life.”
The music of David Crosby and the Lighthouse Band is frequently quiet and plays as much on leaving space in the songs as on what’s there. It’s not music that will shine on a casual listen – and the album title Here If You Listen is almost a reflection on that. There is a lot going on, but you will need to pay attention. If you do, there is a lot to notice. At times the musical expression is quite powerful, albeit emotionally rather than sonically. Its power comes from within – the combination of subtle melodies, musical flourishes, and lyrics designed to strike a chord.
One of the songs on this album has the intriguing title of 1974. Could this be a song about the year 1974, the year when CSNY tried (and failed) to record a new album? They ended up doing a gigantic two-month stadium tour across America and parts of Europe instead – maybe it is about that?
As it turns out, the song is actually based on a demo from 1974, with its year of conception used as a temporary title that ended up sticking.
Sometime in 1974, Crosby entered a studio to put down some song ideas. Who knows if they were meant for a proposed CSNY album or if the song had a clear destination at all. This particular song is far from realised – it is a song sketch, consisting of chords with a vocal melody being hummed on top. It is the type of demo that is good to bring into a collaborative environment – it has a direction, but there is room for other people to expand on it and get involved in giving it a final expression.
In any case, nothing happened to the song at the time, and Crosby didn’t go back to it later either. The tape went into storage. Somewhere along the way there was likely a process of digitizing the tapes he had, because this song – likely among several others – ended up on his computer.
Many years later, Michael League was in Crosby’s house working on songwriting. He was also looking at Crosby’s stockpile of old ideas on his computer, and came across a file titled “Croz 1974 scrap”.
He fell in love with that clip, suggesting to Crosby that they should finish it. Croz muttered something about how long it had been sitting around and added a ‘whatever’, which League took as a good enough sign of approval.
League sent the file to Becca Stevens, who was keen to take a crack at it. She came in a few days later with four-part harmonies and lyrics for the entire song. The four of them sat down, ran through it and did some fine-tuning. 44 years after its initial conception, a finished song had arrived!
Let my love beat on
Like your blood my friend
All of my love songs
Send them out again
Revel in music
Let it
Take care of you
The track is quiet and introspective, like much of the music composed by the Lighthouse Band. It’s not necessarily immediate music, and it does not fit every mood or occasion. At the right time, though, it will be a soul-soothing tonic of pleasantness. A musical comfort blanket.
Interestingly, the original demo is still very much part of the finished recording. “The really fascinating thing is that you can hear me finding the song,” Crosby said in a YouTube clip talking about the song. “That’s actually me finding the melody and writing the song. The only time I ever got one on tape where I actually had the machine running when I found the song. When I found the lick. And it’s fascinating, ‘cause you can hear it plain as day. You hear me find it. You hear that I’m overjoyed with it. I repeated it a couple of times, and then we take it to now. They [the Lighthouse Band] come in on that original demo – and it’s still the original demo, from ’74, but they come in and turn it into a song from now. It’s totally exciting to me. I love it.”
It would be remiss not to mention that another track on Here If You Listen is called 1967. Just like 1974, this is yet another long-lost demo that has been resurrected, this time dating back to when Crosby was a member of The Byrds. This tells us that the inclusion of older material wasn’t an isolated thing – they (certainly Michael League) closely reviewed several older ideas as material was pooled and considered for the record, with the idea of sprucing it up and giving it an update. Just like 1974, this song contains the original recording of Crosby playing around with a set of chords that he had, with the Lighthouse Band adding new arrangements to it.
Here If You Listen was released on 26 October 2018, and once again Crosby and the Lighthouse Band went out on the road. The setlist was dominated by tracks from their two albums alongside a few old favourites. 1974 was a very natural inclusion in the set and was performed on every night.
Crosby’s final decade was remarkably productive, with him releasing five solo studio albums over the course of eight years. By comparison, he released three solo albums throughout his entire career prior to that. “The last couple of years have been the densest, longest writing surge I think I’ve ever had,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Most people at my age are either lazy or they’re just pulling the handle trying to get another hit. They feel that maybe they’ve said everything they want to say. They also just don’t work at it. I’m not smarter or better than they are. It’s just that the songs are coming to me.”
His travels with the Lighthouse Band would be one of his final tours. Only one further tour was undertaken – a solo tour which took him across the US in May and June 2019. He also performed a final Tiny Desk performance with the Lighthouse Band in August 2019, after which the pandemic hit and robbed us of further live experiences. He gave his final public performance alongside Jason Isbell on 26 February 2022 at the Arlington Theatre near his home in Santa Barbara, California. He passed away on 19 January 2023 at the age of 81.
Creatively, he was happy with his final years. On stage with the Lighthouse Band, in a poignant moment of happiness, he told the audience: “I figure that I am, without any question at all, the luckiest SOB on the planet. I can’t believe it. I mean, OK, I had tremendous luck. Tremendous people to work with, wonderful records to make, unbelievable shit falling in my lap over and over again. And then when I’m supposed to be done, when I’m supposed to be all crispy and ready to die, THIS happens! I am just tremendously lucky.”
Let your love beat on
After you are gone
All your love songs
Plant them ‘neath the sun
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