Album Review: Everybody Knows by Stephen Stills

There’s an excellent live Nina Simone recording where the High Priestess of Soul tries to sing Judy Collins’ beautiful self-penned ode, “My Father”. Simone has to stop. She can’t finish the song. She felt alienated from the white middle-class concerns of Collins’ youth. Now Simone was a supremely talented musician who usually could handle folk, rock, and jazz with equal aplomb. But there was something about Collins’ song that troubled her so deeply that she could not continue singing without feeling false..

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“Who knows where the time goes,” Judy Collins famously sang in 1968 and those words seem to be the impetus for this collaboration with old lover Stephen Stills. That cover of the Sandy Denny classic, helped put her on the map and was also the first song she and Stills worked on together. So it’s little surprise that it’s reprised as Collins and Stills attempt an audio closure to the decades old relationship that yielded the latter’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” It’s hard to imagine anyone was anxiously waiting for an album combining the talents of these two legends since their careers ended up going in different directions.

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It’s been 50 years since Stephen Stills and Judy Collins were fresh-faced, wide-eyed folkies ready to take on the music world. As two of the dominant voices of then-burgeoning Sunset Strip, the duo’s songwriting and distinct singing abilities put Los Angeles folk rock at the center of the music universe, and for a year during the late ‘60s, became romantically entangled. Joining forces on an album was long overdue for the folk rock legends.

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