Graham Nash has arrived in the here and now. He owes that not only to his age, but also to David Lynch, who had given Nash and his third wife, Amy Grantham, a course in Transcendental Meditation a few years ago.
“I feel like through meditation I’m finally starting to see who I really am,” Nash explains. Although his new studio work, “Now”, is not necessarily a spiritual album, it is his most personal, as the 81-year-old emphasizes. What in most cases is little more than a PR phrase is understandable in the case of “Now”, because the creation of the album has a lot to do with a life crisis.
It was one of the many turning points in the musician’s life that should be the starting point for his new album: In 2016 he divorced his second wife, Susan Sennett, after 38 years. “I was 75 at the time and thought I would never fall in love again. And then it happened.” The album begins with this thought: “I used to think that I would never love again/ I used to think that I’d be all on my own/ I really thought that it was coming to an end/ And just the thought of it chilled me to the bone‘ Nash sings there. Nostalgia and looking back are not things that particularly interest Nash. But it can now be a short pause. “I’ve always lived in rock ‘n’ roll and never really stopped. But now I’m nearing the end of my life. I’d like to be here for another twenty, thirty years, but maybe I’ll drop dead in the middle of our conversation — who knows?” he says.
Finitude is omnipresent
Finiteness is omnipresent, as the death of his bandmate David Crosby taught him. “I miss David tremendously! I wish we had made more music together. He and I wrote a lot of great songs together. But there should have been more.” There was no reconciliation between the two feuding songwriters, but there was at least a rapprochement shortly before Crosby’s death. “We ended up communicating with each other again. We sent each other voice messages. David wanted to apologize for opening his mouth too wide at the time, especially when it came to Neil Young.”
Nash also doesn’t exclude the political on “Now” — because that goes hand in hand with the private, as he emphasizes. In the play “Golden Idol”, for example, there is talk of the “MAGA tourists who took over the hill” (meaning here the riots by Trump supporters on the US Capitol in Washington in January 2021). The native Briton is concerned about the situation in his adopted country, the USA: “Many are talking about an imminent civil war — and that scares the shit out of me!” he says. He is also concerned that nuclear energy (which he protested against in the late 1970s) is experiencing a kind of renaissance and is being seen again in some places as a safe form of energy production. “No sane scientist would tell you it’s really safe!”
Still, Nash remains an incorrigible optimist, as he professes on the record’s second, and undoubtedly most hippy, track, “A Better Life.” “To be an optimist these days is something extraordinary. But what is the alternative? Death, nothing. I have to stay optimistic. Although, of course, the state of the world worries me, both politically and ecologically. But we have the opportunity to change the world — and music can help with that.”
Despite his experience, the man who made Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young history is a little excited ahead of the release of Now, but then asserts himself: “Time is the only relevant currency these days. But I know I’m not wasting your time with this album.”