Tuesday April 29, 2008 at 9:28
—Marc Cohn, “She’s Becoming Gold,” The Rainy Season (1993); background vocals: Graham Nash and David Crosby
Chris Stills’ dad knows a little something about singing with great harmony vocalists. If you want to hear how a David Crosby background vocal can enrich a song, here’s exhibit A.
Marc Cohn—best known for “Walking in Memphis”—knows how to write great songs and on his second album, he used Crosby and Nash (as well as Bonnie Raitt) to make them sound even better. The lyric of “She’s Becoming Gold” describes a woman in mid-life-crisis mode, and the shimmering vocals emphasize the narrator’s admiration for the change she’s starting to undertake. Graham Nash comes in first, and then the sound becomes fully rich when Crosby joins in.
And yet: is the woman’s transformation as good as it sounds, or is she really just ossifying (albeit prettily)?
