It's New to Me: Songs for Beginners by Graham Nash (1971)

Illustration from Austin Hall's "The Man Who Saved the Earth", printed in Amazing Stories magazine, April 1926

I usually start the week by writing about a new release, for the obvious reason - because of a thing called "relevance". Most of my other entries are of questionable value - who wants to read a three-paragraph capsule reaction to a random old album? Unfortunately, I'm not prepared to write about a new release today, so I thought I had a somewhat relevant reissue to write about. When I went to the record store last week, a new-looking reissue of Graham Nash's first solo album Songs for Beginners was sitting on the NEW RELEASES shelf. Doing a little research now, it looks like this reissue came out in 2009, making it less relevant than I'd thought. This remaster of the album sounds great, though, and I'm pretty impressed with the songs as well - Songs for Beginners is a nice little album.

And being a "little" album seems to be the thesis of Songs for Beginners - it comes across as a reaction to the ambitious, important solo albums that Nash's peers were putting out at the time (e.g. David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name and George Harrison's All Things Must Pass). In fact, the personnel of Songs for Beginners is quite similar to the players on If I Could Only Remember My Name, including Neil Young and members of the Grateful Dead. Notably missing is Joni Mitchell, who sang on Crosby's album but doesn't sing on Nash's, probably because she and Nash had just messily ended their relationship, an event that is a central theme on the album.

So the songs on Songs for Beginners are, for the most part, introspective vignettes written in Nash's embarrassingly plain verse, set to effortless, beautiful melodies. The album is bookended by two "bigger" songs, opening with the catchy buy corny anti-war anthem "Military Madness" (built around the rhyme "military madness/solitary sadness") and ending with the album's big single "Chicago" (written about the fallout of the '68 Democratic Convention). These songs haven't aged that well, an interesting contrast to the other songs' more timeless quality. "Better Days" has a suite-like structure of multiple parts, but the other feel-sorry-for-me numbers ("Be Yourself", "Simple Man", "Man in the Mirror") are the real focused and simple embodiment of the album's title. For me, the sweetest songs are the most stripped down, like "Sleep Song" and "Wounded Bird". The latter song is all Nash with no guest players - just him and a guitar, singing a corny lyric that culminates with a line about a "coat of questions" and an "answer hat" and then, when I'm in mid-wince, the layered vocals of multi-tracked Nash being a one-man CSNY kick in and it's the best song ever.

"Wounded Bird" by Graham Nash