David Crosby said he was left with “nowhere to hide” during the making of the new documentary Remember My Name, and added that the film was “honest enough to qualify as an apology” for some of his misdemeanors.

The notoriously outspoken singer-songwriter found himself at odds with his bandmates in the Byrds before becoming part of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and also later fell out with those three colleagues. However, his solo career has gone through a renaissance in recent years.

“I can be contentious. Opinionated. I'm comfortable with that,” Crosby told Billboard in a new interview. “When you're in a relationship like that in a band, it's like a marriage ... you start out, you love each other, you love each other's music. You're thrilled that you're doing this, and every time you play music, you feel brotherhood with the other guys. In CSNY with Neil [Young] and Graham [Nash] and Stephen [Stills], we were a competitive band. … We were also very shitty to each other over and over and over again, unkind and disloyal.”

He said he agreed with producer Cameron Crowe and director A.K. Eaton when they decided to focus almost entirely on Crosby in the film. “You make a documentary these days, mostly you go around and stick a mic in front of every famous person you ever met -- ‘Say something beautiful about me, then I invent electricity and I discovered California and aren't I cute,'" he noted. "Cameron and A.J. and I all agreed going in, you're in a movie now. He's now the boss, appropriately and wonderfully merciless. He gave me nowhere to hide.”

Crowe noted that the documentary could be made to work in such a format because of Crosby’s abilities as a storyteller. “He knows when he has you,” he said. “He knows when your attention is wandering, he knows when he owns you. He can throw crumbs down as he lays out a narrative, just keep you going.”

Asked if he thought Remember My Name might “heal some wounds,” Crosby replied that he thought "the film is honest enough to qualify as an apology. It's a very difficult film for me, playing a flawed human being, highly imperfect -- sometimes an asshole. Lots of mistakes. If you are trying to look at me as a whole picture, you can't leave that stuff out, because otherwise it's like cooking the meat and no salt.”

Remember My Name will arrive in theaters on July 19. You can watch a trailer below.

 

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