David Crosby’s Music Always Lifted Me Up

A NATURAL HIGH –

Jan. 21, 2023 – It was about something larger and deeper, a sense of hope that my generation, which came of age in the late 1960s and 70s, had once clung to fiercely but had gradually begun to relinquish as we grew older. It was not just because the disappointments and limits of life had crept up on us, but because something more important seemed to be slipping away: a belief in human connection and progress, in the power of beauty to wash away the petty and cruel impulses of human nature and allow us to start over.

For years, whenever I felt lonely or confused or discouraged, I have turned for solace to the close blend of harmonious voices and uplifting messages that Crosby, Steve Stills and Graham Nash, often with Neil Young, created. In “Wooden Ships,” a lost soldier reaches out to an enemy, offers to share his wild berries and asks which side had won the war. In “Our House,” a man describes his happy home life with fresh flowers in a vase and “two cats in the yard.”