Background
After the summer 1974 tour by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the quartet made a second attempt at a new CSNY studio album. Like the attempt from 1973, this proved fruitless, although the track "Through My Sails" showed up on the 1975 Zuma album by Neil Young. The quartet pursued their own directions, Young forming a new version of Crazy Horse to record Zuma, and Stephen Stills resuming his solo career with a new album in early 1975. David Crosby and Graham Nash opted to reactivate the partnership that had yielded tours in 1971 and 1973 and an album in 1972. This time they made it a going concern, signing a three-album deal with ABC Records, of which this album was the first of their contract.
Content
As on their debut album, most of the instrumental backing was provided by the group of session musicians known as The Section. This quartet consisting of keyboardist Craig Doerge, guitarist Danny Kortchmar, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russell Kunkel, along with multi-instrumentalist David Lindley and bassist Tim Drummond, would be dubbed by Crosby as 'The Mighty Jitters' and provide support for the duo both on stage and in the studio for the remainder of the decade. Sessions for the album took place at Rudy Recorders in San Francisco, and the Sound Lab and Village Recorders in Los Angeles.
Entering their mid-thirties, Crosby and Nash explored darker, trenchant themes in their lyrics for this album, "Carry Me" referencing the death of Crosby's mother, with "Wind on the Water" an elegiac plea concerning the slaughter of whales. As usual, songs topics included personal issues and friends: "Mama Lion" purportedly about Joni Mitchell; "Cowboy of Dreams" about Young; and "Take the Money and Run" concerning the financial aftermath to the mammoth CSNY 1974 tour. Two songs feature the first issued writing collaborations of Nash and Crosby. The one on side two that closes the album, "To the Last Whale...", links two separate compositions: an a cappella sketch by Crosby "Critical Mass", into the title track by Nash.
Wind on the Water was reissued for compact disc on January 11, 2000, on MCA Records. On April 24, 2001, the album was repackaged as Bittersweet on the European budget label Hallmark Records from a second-generation master tape and issued in Europe only. In 2002, the album was released in the Netherlands for European distribution under the title The Magic Collection: Crosby and Nash, on the low-budget label ABC Records, in the series "The Magic Collection" (a division of Telesonic Holland). In 2008, the album was reissued in the UK, for the local and European distribution, on Landmark label (a division of Entertain Me Europe Ltd.), this time under the title Take the Money and Run. There was a vinyl-only reissue of the original album on Invisible Hands Music in August 2016.
In 2008, the album was reissued with a live concert from an FM broadcast recorded at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, 14 December 1974 at a concert to benefit the United Farmworkers' Union and Project Jonah.
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