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David Crosby handed away on Jan. 18 on the age of 81, and from what musician Steve Postell advised Variety, it feels like his loss of life got here at a time when the Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young founder was planning his subsequent your – and his subsequent album. “David didn’t think he was gonna last for years, which he joked about all the time. But there was no sense that we weren’t gonna be able to do this show and these tours,” stated Postell. “We were talking tour buses and what kind of venues, and the whole team was all back together again — the road manager and tour manager and sound guys — on top of this band we’d put together.”
Crosby’s household introduced that David died following “a long illness,” which Postell advised Variety was a “very confusing thing” since “We were rehearsing. We were going out to dinner.’ Postell said that there “was not even a remote sense that we weren’t about ready to hit the world. And it’s a shame people didn’t get to hear it. This was something else. This was as close to the original thing [Crosby, Stills, and Nash] as we were gonna get. It was very powerful.”
“I never got to actually be in the studio with him when I was recording those vocals,” Sarah Jarosz, one of many musicians who labored with Crosby on the album, advised Variety, “but he and James [Raymond, Crosby’s son and fellow member of the band] had reached out to me about a month ago saying they were working on this new album, and he really wanted me to sing on a new song, ‘Talk Till Dawn.’ It had just been a few days since I sent the vocal off [before Crosby died], but the way James made it seem to me is that he did get to hear it before he passed, which is obviously extremely emotional for me.”
Jarosz recorded vocal and mandolin components for Crosby’s subsequent album. “He just wanted to create until the very end, and that was always my impression of him in our conversations,” she advised Variety. “He was so full of music, and it always struck me because, as a young musician myself, I think it’s easy to sometimes look at someone who’s had a long life and incredible career and think: How can they still just have that drive and that fire within them?”
Similarly, Jarosz was confused concerning the “long illness” a part of Crosby’s loss of life announcement. But, she shared how David appeared to know his time was coming to an finish. “I mean, every time we talked, he would call, and I’d be like, ‘How are you doing?’ And he’d be like, ‘Well, I’m dying’ — but jokingly, with a laugh,” she advised Variety. “I wasn’t aware if there was a long illness. It was more just like the hard years of living and being 81. It certainly came as a shock.”
In May 2022, David advised college students at Golden High School in Golden, Colorado, that his touring days had been over. “I’m too old to do it anymore. I’m too old to do it anymore. I don’t have the stamina; I don’t have the strength,” he stated, per Variety. “Being on a bus tour is a daunting task. It’s very hard. It takes it out of you.”