Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Looking Forward - Alternate Version (1999)

I remember when "Looking Forward" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young came out in 1999. I'd been very hopeful that CSNY would put out something great, and I was disappointed by what actually came out. In retrospect, it isn't a bad album, it's just that it couldn't live up to the standards set by earlier works such as the "Deja Vu" album.

Taken one by one, the songs were actually pretty good, but something seemed off. I think the production was one big problem. It wasn't outright bad, like the production on some earlier CSN albums, but there was something off about the sound. Maybe it was too slick and digital. The backing vocals in particular were odd. They sounded massed and processed, so one couldn't make out the interaction of the individual voices.

I've done two things to fix the problems of the original album. First off, I've changed some of the songs on it. Actually, I like nearly all of the songs. However, CSNY in its various permutations recorded some songs in the late 1990s that deserved to be on the album. For example, in 1998, CSN released "Half Your Angels," but only for free through their website. The CSNY song "Climber" only came out on the David Crosby compilation "Voyage." So I've included a total of six songs not originally on the album. To make room, I'm bumped five of the original songs onto my next CSNY album, which I imagine could have come out in 2002.

Secondly, I tried to address the production problems. Luckily, in 2000, CSNY went on tour and played all but three of the songs from the album. Also luckily, a high quality soundboard bootleg exists of one of the concerts. I've used that to replace all the songs I could, while also removing all the audience noise. This results in more of a rough, "warts and all" sound, but I much prefer that to the overproduction, and especially over whatever weird thing they did with the massed backing vocals.

I wouldn't say this is a great replacement for the original "Looking Forward," since five of the songs from it are on the 2002 album I've made, and they're some of the better songs. Instead, hopefully you'll listen to that one too once I post it, and judge what CSNY was doing around the turn of the millennium as a whole.

By the way, there are only three songs here that are the exact performances on the original album: "No Tears Left," "Queen of Them All," and "Sanibel." I did find a live version of "No Tears Left," but it was only performed rarely in concert, and the sound on the bootlegged version is merely okay, so I stuck with the original,

01 Looking Forward (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
02 Wounded World (Stephen Stills with Graham Nash)
03 Climber (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
04 Half Your Angels (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
05 Acadienne (Stephen Stills with Graham Nash)
06 Slowpoke (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
07 Time Is the Final Currency (Crosby & Nash)
08 No Tears Left (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
09 Out of Control (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
10 Morrison (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
11 Someday Soon (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
12 Queen of Them All (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
13 Sanibel (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16408173/CROSBSTLLSNSHYNG1999LokngFrwrd_atse.zip.html

The cover art comes from a press conference in 1999 to promote the new album.