NEW ALBUMS
DAVID CROSBY For Free
Personal reflection and pithy humour, with a few pals.
By Terry Staunton
Crosby: more than mere navel-gazing
ANNA WEBBER
BMG
8/10
THE renewed and reinvigorated Crosby’s twilight productivity continues apace as he approaches his 80th birthday this August. For Free is his fifth album since Croz, 2014’s comeback after a 20-year absence from the studio, again with the guiding hand of his multiinstrumentalist and producer son James Raymond and the same core of musicians, now dubbed the Sky Trails Band.
Yet, while the record’s 10 tracks are elegantly shaped by players plucked from a younger generation, there are strong contributions of both pen and performance by more veteran figures from the main man’s past too, not to mention a sleeve portrait painted by Joan Baez. The title track first saw service on its writer Joni Mitchell’s 1970 album Ladies Of The Canyon, stripped back here as an intimate piano ballad with Texan singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz as duet partner.