Graham Nash on his songwriting evolution from the Hollies to CSN

“I was trained in my time with the Hollies to write two-and-a-half-minute songs to play right before the news. We knew how to make hit records; we knew how to create music you couldn’t forget after you heard it twice. But the lyrics were a little juvenile, a little teenager, you know—‘Riding along on a carousel’ and ‘Hey, Carrie Anne.’

“But when I came to America and started hanging out with David [Crosby] and Stephen [Stills] and Neil [Young] and Joni [Mitchell], my songwriting changed. I realized that if I took the melodic ideas that I’d learned with the Hollies and brought more decent lyrics to those changes, we had a better song.”

—Graham Nash

From my interview with Graham Nash in the August 2016 issue of Acoustic Guitar, in which Nash reflects on his evolution as a songwriter, the personal upheavals behind his album This Path Tonight, and the end (for now?) of CSN. Read the full interview here.

Here’s one of Nash’s songs, “Golden Days,” written about his time with the Hollies, in which he asks, “What happened to ‘All You Need Is Love’?”