Released June 17, 1977 | Recorded 1976–1977 Length 43:50 | |
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CSN is a Crosby, Stills & Nash album released in 1977, the fifth album by the group, the second by the trio configuration and the first without Neil Young since his entry into the band. It peaked at #2 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart; two singles taken from the album, Nash's "Just a Song Before I Go" and Stills' "Fair Game" peaked at #7 and #43 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100. It is currently the trio configuration's best selling record, outselling their debut Crosby, Stills & Nash by 200,000 copies. It has been certified for quadruple platinum sales by the RIAA.
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In the interregnum that followed their tour in the spring and summer of 1970 to support Déjà Vu, the band had only completed one project together, a 1974 reunion tour. David Crosby and Graham Nash had recorded three albums as a duo, with Crosby releasing a single solo album (in addition to a Byrds reunion album) and Nash a pair. Stephen Stills pursued other projects including the release of four solo albums, a short career with Manassas that yielded two albums, as well as a tour and an album with Neil Young, which itself nearly became a CSNY project.
CSN featured strong writing from all three members, the last time for seventeen years that the band would compose songs and handle vocals without major assistance from outside sources. The production of the album fits in well with the ruling aesthetic of the time as featured in other blockbusters such as the Eagles' Hotel California, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours: well-crafted, melodic songs played with precision and balance, essaying the personal travails of the authors.
Many of Stills' songs on the album echo his marital problems, with "Dark Star" returning to the Latin rhythms he had favored all the way back to his Buffalo Springfield days. Crosby continued the existential probings consistent with much of his past work, and Nash offered both a radio-ready acoustic ballad with "Just a Song Before I Go", and an elaborate set piece re-creating a vision of an LSD experience that he had in Winchester Cathedral with "Cathedral". Many tracks were sweetened with a string section, a first on a CSNY project.
The album was released for compact disc an initial time in the 1980s, then again at Ocean View Digital from the original tapes and reissued on September 20, 1994. It was remastered once more by Steve Hoffman in April 2013, for an Audio Fidelity 24kt gold disk release in the summer of 2013.