Crosby, Stills & Nash's eponymous debut album marks the point where rock music transitions from the heady explorations of the 1960s into the burnished self-reflections of the '70s. Upon its release in 1969, the album ushered in a new era, one where revolutions turned inward as the music got quieter and softer, creating a soundtrack for a generation easing into adulthood. Maturation looms large in the collective work of David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash, who were occasionally joined by Stills' former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young, who was added to help fill out the band's sound as they headed out on tour that wound up shattering all previous records for ticket sales. CSN(&Y) made music for grown-ups during their '70s heyday, an aesthetic that eventually evolved from folk-rock into adult contemporary pop in the '80s. The transition wasn't necessarily smooth.

There are also background vocals from the likes of James Taylor, Carole King and Jackson Browne. This is a solid little album of rich melodies and solid vocal harmonies and exemplifies their enduring appeal over the last 30 years.

One of the most hotly awaited second albums in history - right up there with those by the Beatles and the Band - Déjà Vu lived up to its expectations and rose to number one on the charts. Those achievements are all the more astonishing given the fact that the group barely held together through the estimated 800 hours it took to record Déjà Vu and scarcely functioned as a group for most of that time. Déjà Vu worked as an album, a product of four potent musical talents who were all ascending to the top of their game coupled with some very skilled production, engineering, and editing. There were also some obvious virtues in evidence - the addition of Neil Young to the Crosby, Stills & Nash lineup added to the level of virtuosity, with Young and Stephen Stills rising to new levels of complexity and volume on their guitars…

"The ABC Years" of David Crosby and Graham Nash were the years 1975 and 1976, when the two, best known for their association with Stephen Stills and, sometimes, Neil Young, were performing as a duo and had left Atlantic Records, which issued the recordings they made with those partners, for ABC, a label later subsumed within MCA, the imprint under which this compilation has been issued. Crosby & Nash released three albums with ABC: 1975's gold-selling, Top Ten Wind on the Water, featuring the chart entry "Carry Me"; 1976's gold-selling Whistling Down the Wire, featuring the chart entry "Out of the Darkness"; and 1977's Live. By the time that last, contractually obligated, album came out, they had rejoined Stills to reform Crosby, Stills & Nash. But this brief, productive period was arguably their most impressive, alone or in tandem, outside the more popular trio/quartet. Fronting a highly regarded and high-priced Los Angeles session band sometimes called the Section (drummer Russ Kunkel, bassist Leland Sklar, guitarist Danny Kortchmar, et al.) and best known for backing James Taylor, Crosby turned out a series of his characteristic jazz-tinged tunes with self-reflective lyrics, while Nash performed pop songs on personal and political topics. Annotator Steve Silberman recalls that such Nash efforts as "Take the Money and Run" and "Mutiny" directed anger at the absent Stills and Young, though the lyrics are too vague and metaphorical for the layman to parse, especially a quarter-century later.

Maybe it took more than nine months to come up with another batch of first-rate material, or maybe David Crosby and Graham Nash were saving their first-rate material for the next Crosby, Stills & Nash album, but Whistling Down the Wire, their third and final new studio album as a duo, was a distinctly second-rate effort. As usual, Crosby's loosely arranged jazz-blues tunes were offset by Nash's more pop-oriented songs, but this time around neither of them came up with anything memorable. Crosby seemed most comfortable on his "Dancer," an instrumental, while Nash expressed himself in poetic metaphors that were difficult to follow. In "J.B.'s [Jackson Browne's?] Blues," he seemed to have what be considered a potentially critical message to deliver to a friend, but to his wider audience it seemed merely cryptic. Happily, Crosby and Nash bounced back the following year when they reunited with Stephen Stills for CSN.