On the bonus DVD included with the new reissue of Graham Nash’s Songs for Beginners, there is a gallery of the artist’s photography. One of the photos is of an old car, trundling down a rural one-lane road towards foggy pines in the distance. The caption reads, “Neil (Young) going home to Broken Arrow Ranch, Northern California.”

I know the landscape where the photo was taken, in the rolling Santa Cruz Mountains, somewhere off of Skyline Boulevard, along the Pacific Ocean. Neil Young lives in Woodside, California, an affluent mountain town with Skyline as its main thoroughfare. A two-lane mountain road that I drove back and forth from the San Lorenzo Valley to work in San Francisco — and where I rolled my car in an icy morning frost. I was upside down and crawled out the passenger side door. I still have the ambulance bill hanging over my head. It’s an interesting personal footnote to what originally seemed a trivial bonus. The rest of the photo gallery features portraits of the likes of a jolly David Crosby, a pensive Stephen Stills, and a glowering Neil Young. But to the music: This album, Graham Nash’s first and, arguably, finest, sounds brilliant in its Rhino two-disc reissued form. The DVD features the album in 5.1 stereo, but the main disc sounds just as good. (more…)