First, let’s answer the question you know you want to ask: How is his singing? The short answer: Pretty darn good. At age 80, there are fewer attempts to reach those signature ultra-high notes, but not enough to scare you away. Graham Nash still sounds the way you want him to sound, and considering that the two albums he recreates here in their entirety—his solo debut, Songs for Beginners, and its follow-up, Wild Tales—date from the early ‘70s, that’s pretty remarkable. But just as important, if not more so, is the fact that the 20 songs he remade here in 2019, with a full band, are every bit as poignant as they were when they were new. One might expect that the songs with a political bent, the opening “Military Madness” and the anthemic “Chicago” among them, would feel dated this far from their birth, but instead, given recent world events, they ring truer than ever. So too, in a way, does “Prison Song,” from 1974’s Wild Tales: Its storyline may revolve around someone in Texas receiving a 10-year sentence for selling weed, not as common an occurrence these days, but if you think its kicker lyrical coda—“There’s not a rich man there who couldn’t pay his way/ And buy the freedom that’s a high price for the poor”—is a thing of the past, then you haven’t been paying attention. Nash and his band, which includes his longtime accompanists Shane Fontayne (guitar and vocals) and Todd Caldwell (keyboards, vocals), stick largely to the original arrangements—their goal here is to celebrate these two classic albums, not reinvent them, and the material all holds up. Elsewhere, erstwhile radio favorites like “I Used to Be a King” and “Simple Man”—both rising from the ashes of Nash’s split from ex Joni Mitchell— remain instantly familiar, and some of the less ubiquitous tracks benefit from the superb performances they receive here.
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