Stephen Stills' 1970 solo debut was recorded mainly in London and Los Angeles around Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young activity. The separation gave him another setting for songs shaped by personal relationships. It remained a collaborative record, despite the single name on the cover.
After the Gold Rush grew out of a home studio in Topanga Canyon and an unproduced apocalyptic screenplay by Young's friend Dean Stockwell. Recorded with members of both Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, it moves between hushed piano ballads and rougher rock without settling into either, and its mix of environmental dread, personal breakup and blunt protest song has outlasted the film it was meant to score.
Written and produced entirely by Joni Mitchell and recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood through late 1970 and early 1971, Blue works through the end of her relationship with Graham Nash, a new one with James Taylor, and a daughter she had given up for adoption years earlier. Built mostly around her own guitar, piano and Appalachian dulcimer with a handful of guest players, it became the record against which her later work, and much of the singer-songwriter movement that followed, has been measured.
Harvest turned an accident into Neil Young's biggest record. Unable to stand for long after hurting his back, he wrote and sang from a brace, recruited Nashville session players he called the Stray Gators, and folded in the London Symphony Orchestra for two tracks. The result gave him a number one single and a sound so widely copied he spent much of the next decade running from it.