CSN&Y - Long May You Run - 1976

Hot on the heels of their 1974 release Human Highway, CSN&Y managed to regroup and record and release Long May You Run. A much more polished effort than its predecessor we find the band working together nicely. The songwriting credits are divided evenly among the four giving each member equal time, the first and only CSN&Y album to do so. A strong album that received good to fair reviews, it is still counted among their best works.

For a band with such a tumultuous past and turbulent relationships and large egos it's amazing they can work together at all. When they do manage, that's when the magic happens.

Side One
01 Long May You Run
02 Mutiny
03 Black Coral
04 Time After Time
05 Make Love To You
06 Ocean Girl

Side Two
01 Taken At All
02 Guardian Angel
03 Foolish Man
04 JB's Blues
05 Midnight On The Bay
06 Out Of The Darkness

Reality Notes

In 1976 CSN&Y made one more attempt to finish an album together and once again egos got in the way. This is basically a straight mashup of the two albums Whistling Down The Wire and Long May You Run with full band versions used where available. I stuck with those songs I knew they had worked on but dropped Human Highway as that was used on the last album.

We had set an end date for the Human Highway album at December of 1974 - mostly so that we could use Homeward Through The Haze and give David at least one strong song. That leaves us with 1975 through the Miami sessions in 1976 to build our song pool from. I also allowed any song from the Crosby-Nash and Stills & Young Band albums to be in the running. While we don't have mixes of every song they worked on we can use anything from those albums as substitutes. The list of songs we know they worked on is as follows.

January 1975
Western Witches
Guardian Angel

Long May You Run Sessions Miami 1976
Taken At All
Long May You Run
Human Highway
Black Coral
Midnight On The Bay
Ocean Girl
Mutiny
Talk To Me
Dancer

I immediately eliminated Western Witches, Talk To Me and Dancer, each for different reasons and also Human Highway because we used that already. This gives us seven songs to establish a foundation with. The three songs we do have a that include all four are Long May You Run, Black Coral and Taken At All.

The track listing for this comp has gone through several iterations. My first attempt came out as follows.

01 Long May You Run
02 Mutiny
03 Black Coral
04 Foolish Man
05 Taken At All
06 Time After Time
07 Midnight On The Bay
08 JB's Blues
09 Out Of The Darkness
10 Ocean Girl
11 Guardian Angel

I really liked this tracklist and it stayed this way for some time but one day I realized that there were only two songs from Stephen and three each from the other three. Knowing the egos of those involved I assumed that Stephen would insist on one more song of his so I added one of his and removed one each from Graham and David which is more in line with earlier releases.

01 Long May You Run
02 Mutiny
03 Black Coral
04 Time After Time
05 Make Love To You
06 Ocean Girl
07 Taken At All
08 Guardian Angel
09 Midnight On The Bay
10 Out Of The Darkness

This made me happy briefly. The timing was right and the overall feel was concise and flowed nicely but I missed Foolish Man and I felt that I couldn't add that back in and not Graham's song so I came up with what we have here.

Three songs each, egos placated but it now is 24 minutes per side. What's a producer to do? For my post here I will leave it as is. You can configure this anyway you want but personally I am going with my original 11 song tracklist. I'm not really fond of Stephen's Make Love To You and the other song choice of his, 12/8 Blues, was not any better.

I altered the original album cover to reflect the change from Stills & Young to CSN&Y.

Sources
Crosby-Nash - Whistling Down The Wire
Still & Young Band - Long May You Run
CSN - Box Set
The CSNY Anthology (Bootleg, although the songs from here are also available on official sources)