Credit: Christopher Michel
Sat 21 March 2026 20:15, UK
The magic behind anything David Crosby did usually came back to his way with vocalists.
There wasn’t a single harmony that he sang with The Byrds that wasn’t perfect, and even if Crosby, Stills, and Nash had more than their fair share of ups and downs, even they had to marvel at Crosby’s sixth sense when it came to arranging every single voice to sound absolutely pristine on their records. But even if he had some of the greatest vocal chops of anyone, he felt that certain artists were naturally gifted with the voice that everyone wishes they could have had.
Because when you think about it, Crosby didn’t just burst onto the rock and roll scene with one of the greatest voices in the world. He had studied some of the greatest records that were in his collection to see how the harmonies worked off each other, and since he was a student of jazz, a lot of what he was doing always circled back to the kind of notes that made people’s ears perk up and wonder what the hell they just heard.
There wasn’t a rulebook that could teach someone how to land on a song like ‘Deja Vu’, but Crosby wasn’t willing to look at the greatest construct of music theory. He had a great deal of respect for artists who could make jazz harmony work in rock, but that could never replace being in the right place at the right time when it came to putting on an extra voice to an album like If I Could Only Remember My Name.
If there was one band that Crosby was head over heels for, though, it had to be Steely Dan. The jazz rock aficionados could produce pure magic whenever they walked into the studio, and even if Donald Fagen was the perfect voice to sing some of their unsavoury songs, it almost wasn’t fair to have someone as brilliant as Michael McDonald be demoted to a backing vocalist. His voice could cut through anything, and Crosby felt that no one else could have been better than him.
Even years after hearing him for the first time, Crosby still felt that McDonald and Stevie Wonder belonged in the same league, saying, “I’ve been saying for a while that probably the two best singers in the United States are Stevie Wonder and Michael McDonald. Michael is the best singer I know. [Everybody] heard him on Steely Dan records and went, ‘Holy shit!’ And those hits with The Doobies, ‘Holy shit!’” But if McDonald was already a vocal aficionado, Wonder was in a completely different league.
If Steely Dan was able to make jazz-influenced perfection, Wonder was like all of those session musicians being boiled down to one person. Even if he was more R&B than rock and roll, Songs in the Key of Life is practically mandatory listening for anyone who cares to listen to good music, whether it’s him getting a bit more gritty on ‘Pastime Paradise’ or getting joy out of the simple pleasures in life like on ‘Isn’t She Lovely’.
But aside from Crosby, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why so many people wanted Wonder and McDonald to help them on their records. McDonald would be a mainstay of the session scene and would even indirectly influence everyone from Van Halen to later Steely Dan, and if someone like Paul McCartney felt Wonder could play circles around him, that was nothing compared to what came out of his mouth when he started working with the former Beatle on the song ‘What’s That You’re Doing’.
Not everyone is ready for this kind of genius when they hear it for the first time, but Crosby knew that there was something else going on with both Wonder and McDonald besides just proper vocal technique. They were willing to push themselves to make the best vocal performances they could, but rarely has any virtuoso managed to make their music so effortlessly as they could.
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