8.
David Crosby – If I Could Only Remember My Name
With a star studded cast of west coast “psychonauts” this album really got me into multi-tracking my own voice into Crosby-inspired choirs. I love Jerry Garcia’s lap steel solo on ‘Laughing’ – it’s a real spine-tingler. I loved this one immediately. The album really helped me through a troubled time of marriage break-up and home upheaval, when I wasn’t really living anywhere. It’s a very beautiful album, but in a way it’s very sad. It’s a heavy and “doomy” record, and I think he wrote that after his girlfriend was killed in a car accident. I think he just invited everyone, including Neil Young, Jerry Garcia and other members of his band up to record. It was obviously a great healing process for him and the whole album just seems to be wrapped around quite heavy emotions, and very serious things in his life that were going on. It’s about him trying to process these things, and being very open as a man. I love some of the latter tracks on the record – the last tune, ‘I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here’ was a vocal-only drone song, and Crosby had said that it felt like his girlfriend had been present in the room when he recorded it, and he was trying to reach out and connect with her.
