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New Music

This New David Crosby Song is Pretty Damn Good

LOS ANGELES, CA - NOVEMBER 09: Musician David Crosby performs onstage during the International Myeloma Foundation's 7th Annual Comedy Celebration Benefiting The Peter Boyle Research Fund hosted by Ray Romano at The Wilshire Ebell Theatre on November 9, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Mike Windle/Getty Images for IMF)

We practically have a column devoted to David Crosby‘s incredible, inexhaustible, and curmudgeonly Twitter presence, but we rarely take an opportunity to highlight the man’s music, even though he’s making it at a regular, even-prolific pace. The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, and Nash alum’s solo oeuvre is a mixed bag, especially dependent on how much you categorically get into music definitely recorded at orgies. But his new song “Sell Me a Diamond,” is a deathly-smooth, meditative miniature, and fully worth your time if you’re a devotee of ’70s Joni and Steely Dan. (We know from both rock’n’roll history and Crosby’s tweet-storms that he is, too.)

Dipping into a throatier, conversational Donald Fagen cadence instead of sticking to his soaring CSN tenor, Croz sings about trying to negotiate the perfect, “conflict-free” diamond sale, and then gifting it to worthy, pure “souls.” Later, there’s a bit about the merits of turning off the grim news and “listen[ing] to children laughing” instead. As NPR notes, Crosby co-wrote the enigmatic song with his son, and the two are definitely working with some oblique metaphors. But over the shimmering ride-cymbal backbeat and steel guitar, it doesn’t really matter what it all means. It just sounds good as hell.

“Sell Me a Diamond” comes from Crosby’s new album Sky Trails, which is out September 29 on BMG. Listen to the song below.

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/335268207%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-PTLMr&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=false

[h/t NPR and Stereogum]