I was trained in my time with the Hollies to write two-and-a-half-minute songs to play right before the news. We knew how to make hit records; we knew how to create music you couldn’t forget after you heard it twice. But the lyrics were a little juvenile, a little teenager, you know—“Riding along on a carousel” and “Hey, Carrie Anne.” But when I came to America and started hanging out with David [Crosby] and Stephen [Stills] and Neil [Young] and Joni [Mitchell], my songwriting changed. I realized that if I took the melodic ideas that I’d learned with the Hollies and brought more decent lyrics to those changes, we had a better song.
From my interview with Graham Nash in the August 2016 issue of Acoustic Guitar, in which Nash reflects on his evolution as a songwriter, the personal upheavals behind his album This Path Tonight, and the end (for now?) of CSN.