Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

We have become embroiled and entrenched in the moment. Our capacity for concentration has diminished, our long terms goals have been reduced to the short-term win; everything we have as a species worked towards has been placed in chaos by the appearance of not being able to see beyond the present minute, from some living in the now and not the forever.

Art is in danger of following suit; we are concerned with what the presentation does now and less of how it will make an impact in the future. This is dangerous, imagine the beauty of time would look if the listener considered perhaps what a track from the 1960s would sound like if it hadn’t had time to age and mature, to become the essence of the period, to frame the era in a simple but meaningful melody, cast adrift on the wave of opinion for just a single moment…then lost forever.

That is the danger that the moment offers, and yet there are musicians and artists who deal against the run of the temporary and determinedly with lyrical sword in hand and an intelligence of spirit that has kept them at the top of their chosen field.

Graham Nash is not just a legend; he is a global ambassador for music and the persistence of giving all the space in which to hone and craft their thoughts into a place where it could sit in the minds of others for all their lives.

Now is the time, so to speak, of actions, and in Now, the latest album from one of the stalwarts of music who has lived and breathed through every era since music broke free of its pre-war shackles and became a representative of a new way of thinking, not only kicking down the doors of the boundaries imposed from a hangover of the Victorian generation, but the sweet voice that defined not just one band but two, and then his own wide ranging solo career.

These are songs of pastures, of meadows caught by a slight breeze, the English Pastoral, and driven with such depth that they counter the harshness of out times with love; and yet they are strong, they fight, they rumble in the mind and in the heart, and as tracks such as Golden idols, Love Of Mine, It Feels Like Home, Follow Your Heart, and I Watched It All Come Down, Graham Nash ruminates on time perhaps itself, and underneath must feel the pain of loss as would any other soul with so much still to say.

A terrific and beautiful sound, a pleasure of a voice that just understands life so well.

Ian D. Hall