Saturday, April 30, 2016
Graham Nash
Album: “This Path Tonight”
Grade: B
In the cover photo for “This Path Tonight,” his first new solo album in 14 years, Graham Nash stands at the beginning of a wooded trail receding into the distance.
It would have been more fitting if he had been further down the path.
That’s because Nash’s new record is an inward-looking, but not particularly insightful, reflection on a legendary career. Mostly, Nash is thinking about where he’s been.
“And the question haunting me,” he sings vulnerably on “Myself at Last,” one of the album’s better songs, “is my future just my past?”
Examining the past can be risky, even for a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Nash’s musings here aren’t groundbreaking – and some are uncharacteristically trite.
“But nowadays it seems that we all need to care,” Nash sings on “Golden Days,” a song that seems to acknowledge that his heyday is behind him. “And follow all our dreams, and answer all our prayers. What happened to ‘all you need is love?’”
You get the idea.
Despite the cliches, the playing is first-rate, and Nash’s voice, still one of the most expressive of the Woodstock generation, sounds familiar and fine.
—Scott Stroud, Associated Press