The Arts Desk: 10 Questions for Musician Graham Nash
It was in August 1968 that Graham Nash, then still a member of The Hollies, took a cab from LAX airport in Los Angeles to Joni Mitchell's house in Laurel Canyon. He was just embarking on a love affair with Joni, but also about to blast off on a different kind of adventure with the two musicians who greeted him at her house, David Crosby and Stephen Stills.
When Nash added his high vocal harmony to the other two voices as they sang a new Stills song, "You Don't Have to Cry", it was the first spark of a California soft-rock revolution. Crosby Stills and Nash, later joined by Neil Young, would find themselves in the vanguard of an idealistic, politically aware, ecologically concerned musical movement that Nash himself once dared to liken to the artistic upheavals that galvanised Vienna at the start of the 20th century.
This week, the Salford-born Nash is releasing his sixth studio solo album, This Path Tonight, and next month he'll be back in Britain for live performances featuring just himself and guitarist and co-writer of the new songs, Shane Fontayne. "An acoustic performance gets you right to the essence of a song," Nash reckons. "And you'd better deliver it too because it's not like Neil's over there and Stephen's over there – they're watching you because it's a solo thing."
The new album is a collection of personal and introspective material which catches Nash at a new turning point in his life. At 74, he has parted with his wife of 38 years, Susan Sennett, for a new relationship with New York-based photographer Amy Grantham. An accomplished photographer himself – "I've been a photographer for longer than I've beeen a musician," he points out – he's staging his exhibition My Life Through My Lens at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery from 23 April to 3 July. The white-haired Nash is no longer the shaggy-haired young hippy who rode the Marrakesh express, but there's still something innocent and wide-eyed about him. And despite all those years in the States, he still appreciates a well-brewed pot of tea.
ADAM SWEETING: So you wrote the songs on your new album at amazing speed?
GRAHAM NASH: Yeah. Shane Fontayne and I wrote 20 songs in a month, that's almost one a day, and recorded them in eight days. When I realised that that was happening, the rest just flowed great. Shayne is the second guitar player in the Crosby Stills and Nash band and the other guitar player is Stephen Stills. No pressure! Shane is beautiful, he's a great musician, he's English, he saw the Hollies at Finsbury Park Empire when he was 12 in 1964. He understands my limitations as a musician. I'm not a very good musician at all. I know enough chords to be able to write songs. I've always been a little uncomfortable writing with other people, but with Shane it seems so natural. Shane travels on my tour bus, and we got on our bus and I started writing because this woman I'd met [Amy Grantham] had set me on fire, and I just started to vomit words all over the paper. I would hand them to Shane and the next day we had a song. In fact the second song on the record is called "Myself at Last", that's the first take of the first song we tried. The songs are about looking back, but I'm also walking forward into my future. I start the album with "Where are we going? [from "This Path Tonight"], because I don't know. I just trust that the universe loves me enough to support what I'm doing.Did you always feel a destiny calling you in some way?
I always knew what I wanted to do. Is that destiny? I knew I wanted to be a musician since I was 13 years old. I had a friend, Fred Moore, and for his 13th birthday his mother bought him a bike, and he rode all the way to Bad Nauheim in Germany and met Elvis. So of course I wanted a bike, right, but we couldn't afford it, so what's your second choice son? Well how about an acoustic guitar? I guess it was my first metaphysical choice. If I'd gotten a bike maybe I'd be Lance Armstrong instead of Graham Nash.