David Crosby – For Free – Vinyl Record

Description

David Crosby – For Free – Vinyl Record

For Free finds David Crosby making new music with collaborators who understood both his voice and his appetite for unusual harmony. Released in 2021, shortly before his eightieth birthday, the album was produced by his son James Raymond. Its ten songs bring together original material, guest contributions, and a return to Joni Mitchell's title song. Crosby had become remarkably productive again in the later part of his career, and this record belongs to that active period. The music has the ease of experienced players, but the arrangements and songwriting still show a willingness to follow an unexpected chord or a fresh partnership.

Raymond is central to that partnership as producer, keyboardist, and writer. His understanding of Crosby's musical instincts gives the album a coherent setting, even when the individual songs have different authors or guests. Players associated with Crosby's Sky Trails band also contribute, including saxophonist Steve Tavaglione and drummer Steve DiStanislao. The performances can draw on jazz harmony without losing their connection to songs. Crosby's voice remains the point around which those details gather, and the accompaniment gives him room to move through a melody without having to push against a crowded arrangement.

River Rise welcomes Michael McDonald as a co-writer and singer, bringing another immediately recognizable voice into the opening track. Rodriguez for a Night makes a different connection: Donald Fagen supplied the lyrics, with music by Crosby and Raymond. That collaboration fits Crosby's long-standing interest in the harmonically sophisticated writing associated with Steely Dan. The two guest contributions do different jobs, one adding a vocal partnership and the other opening a songwriting conversation. Both become part of an album that sounds comfortable drawing on musicians outside Crosby's usual circle without losing its own character.

Sarah Jarosz joins Crosby on For Free, returning to a Joni Mitchell song he had known for decades. The piano-based performance leaves the voices and the song's account of a street musician close to the foreground. It gives the album a thoughtful center, especially beside the original material around it. Elsewhere, Greg Leisz contributes pedal steel to I Think I, another example of the care taken with individual arrangements. These are choices made for particular songs, and they help the album retain variety within a generally warm, measured musical setting.

I Won't Stay for Long closes the record with a Raymond composition inspired by the 1959 film Black Orpheus. Heard at the end of an album made when Crosby was approaching eighty, it carries an additional resonance, while remaining a song written and recorded during his lifetime. Joan Baez's portrait of Crosby supplies the cover, adding another connection to a musical community that stretches back many decades. For Free brings those older friendships into contact with the newer work Crosby and Raymond were doing together. The result is an album concerned with songs, harmony, and collaboration, made by a singer whose interest in all three remained very much alive.

Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic

Release Details

Artist

David Crosby

Album

For Free

Format

Vinyl Record

Number of vinyl records

1

Original album release

2021

Label

BMG

Track Listing

Side A

River Rise (feat. Michael McDonald)

I Think I

The Other Side of Midnight

Rodriguez for a Night

Secret Dancer

Side B

Ships in the Night

For Free (feat. Sarah Jarosz)

Boxes

Shot at Me

I Won't Stay for Long