Very Free and Easy

Got a note from Sven after my summer of 1970 post. "CS&N always brings me back to those days," he wrote, and he's absolutely right--I have no idea how I could have failed to mention that album.

Prior to that summer, I had never listened to Crosby, Stills, and Nash; I had heard snippets of "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" on the radio, but had never even heard the entire song. Sven bought the eight-track early that summer, and we gave it a listen. Initially, I was surprised by the overall tone of the album--it seemed to be lacking a resonance that was present in a lot of what we were listening to at the time. But by the third playing, I was hooked by those wonderful harmonies, the intensely personal songwriting, the blending of acoustic and electric...

A couple of weeks ago, I prepared two playlists: Malibu 1970 and Summer 1970. The latter is comprised of the many songs that I listened to during that summer; some of them date back to 1967 or 1968, but those were songs that I was playing over and over again forty years ago. The former, though, is only those albums that we listened to in Sven's car that summer; it's a small playlist, and I think I have every note of every song memorized from repeated playing.

The first album I added to that list was Crosby, Stills, and Nash, that eponymous first album.

Thanks for remembering, Sven!