Daylight Again is the fourth studio album by
Crosby, Stills & Nash, and their third
studio album in the trio configuration. It peaked at No. 8 on the
Billboard 200 albums chart, the final time the band made the top ten before the death of
David Crosby in 2023. Three singles were released from the album, all making the
Billboard Hot 100: "
Wasted on the Way" peaked at No. 9, "
Southern Cross" at No. 18, and "Too Much Love to Hide" at No. 69. The album was certified
platinum by the
RIAA with sales of 1,850,000.[3]
Background
The genesis of the album lies in recordings made by
Stephen Stills and
Graham Nash at intervals in 1980 and 1981 and the album was originally slated to be a Stills–Nash project. They employed
Art Garfunkel,
Timothy B. Schmit and
Mike Finnigan to sing in place of where
David Crosby might have been. Executives at
Atlantic Records, however, had little interest in anything but CSN product from any member of the group, and held out for the presence of Crosby, forcing Nash and Stills to start paying for the sessions out-of-pocket.[4] They began to turn toward the company's point of view, however, and decided to invite Crosby to participate at the eleventh hour.
Crosby brought two tracks to the album: "Delta", where Stills and Nash squeezed their vocals into Crosby's already-taped
multi-tracked harmonies, and "Might As Well Have a Good Time", which received the bona fide Crosby, Stills & Nash treatment.[5] Most of the recording, however, features other voices in addition to the main trio, a first for any CSNY record, as is the number of outside writers. Graham Nash wrote the album's biggest hit, "Wasted on the Way", about the time the group spent in squabbles and diversions rather than concentrating on their music. The second single, "Southern Cross", was Stills' partial rewrite of a song by brothers Richard and Michael Curtis.[6][7] The song "Daylight Again" evolved out of Stills' guitar-picking to accompany on-stage stories regarding the
South in the
Civil War, segueing into "Find the Cost of Freedom", which had been the
B-side of the "
Ohio" single in 1970.[8]
Daylight Again was the band's first album in the
video age, and a video was filmed for "Southern Cross" featuring the band and one of their favorite metaphors, a sailing vessel. It received a fair amount of rotation on
MTV in 1982 and 1983, and helped to propel the album's sales.
The album has been released on
compact disc on three occasions: an initial time in the 1980s;[9]remastered using the original master tapes by Ocean View Digital and reissued on September 20, 1994; and again remastered using the
HDCD process and reissued by
Rhino Records on January 24, 2006, with four bonus tracks.
Graham Nash – vocals, electric guitar (1, 4),
organ (4), percussion (7), acoustic piano (8),
harmonica (9)
Additional musicians
Mike Finnigan – organ (1, 7, 10, 13, 14), additional vocals (1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9), Yamaha CP-30 analog stage piano (3), electric piano (4), acoustic piano (7), keyboards (9)
Craig Doerge – synthesizers (1, 5, 8, 14), keyboards (2, 5, 12), Rhodes piano (8), acoustic piano (10, 14, 15)
Richard T. Bear – acoustic piano (3), synthesizers (3)
^The date constantly given for first generation remastering for digital as issued on compact disc, October 25, 1990, is the earliest date for which amazon.com has records regarding compact disc releases. So, for any CD that came out prior to that, they simply put in that date rather than an actual one since they do not have it. Every single first generation compact disc was not issued on October 25, 1990.
^Canada, Library and Archives (2013-04-16).
"The RPM story". www.bac-lac.gc.ca. Retrieved 2020-07-05.