Whistling Down the Wire

Maybe it took more than nine months to come up with another batch of first-rate material, or maybe David Crosby and Graham Nash were saving their first-rate material for the next Crosby, Stills & Nash album, but Whistling Down the Wire, their third and final new studio album as a duo, was a distinctly second-rate effort. As usual, Crosby's loosely arranged jazz-blues tunes were offset by Nash's more pop-oriented songs, but this time around neither of them came up with anything memorable. Crosby seemed most comfortable on his "Dancer," an instrumental, while Nash expressed himself in poetic metaphors that were difficult to follow. In "J.B.'s [Jackson Browne's?] Blues," he seemed to have what be considered a potentially critical message to deliver to a friend, but to his wider audience it seemed merely cryptic. Happily, Crosby and Nash bounced back the following year when they reunited with Stephen Stills for CSN.