After David Crosby's release from prison, he reunited with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash for CSN tours in 1987 and 1988.[2] The recording of American Dream with Neil Young took place over the course of those years, but the quartet opted not to tour to promote it. The album was not well received, and Stills viewed it as "contrived".[3] In 1989, Stills and Young commenced tours with their own bands, while Crosby and Nash began work on what was to be a new Crosby & Nash record. Crosby also released his second solo album Oh Yes I Can that same year.[4] Stills regrouped with Crosby and Nash to perform at the collapse of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, and the sessions for the new Crosby & Nash album evolved into the new Crosby, Stills & Nash one instead.[5] Atlantic had encouraged the inclusion of Crosby into the Stills–Nash project that became Daylight Again back in 1981.[6]
Recording
The album was recorded at several recording studios around Los Angeles, the majority at The Record Plant, although part of "Live It Up" began at the Home-Brew Studio in Ohio and was finished at the professional location. "If Anybody Had a Heart", "Arrows", and "After the Dolphin" were recorded at Devonshire Studios; "(Got to Keep) Open" was recorded at Capitol Records studios.
Nash, the nominal leader of these recordings, expressed misgivings about the sessions. In addition to feeling uncomfortable in a leadership position, he stated that "only once did we sing together on one mike. So in that sense, it was not really a true CSN record."[5]
The band toured to promote the album in 1990, but none of these songs found a permanent place in the group's repertoire, with only "House of Broken Dreams" and "Yours and Mine" being performed a handful of times beyond the 1990 outing.[7]
Greg Sandow commented in Entertainment Weekly that Live it Up is dominated by tunes which are catchy but generic and mindless. He added that the songs "Yours and Mine", "Arrows", and in particular "After the Dolphin" offer genuine depth and meaning, but that the overall product is "a strangely bland album that only die-hard fans will love."[9]
Jeff Giles covered Live it Up in his retrospective series "Whoops!", assessing it as an embarrassingly failed attempt to marry the hippie sensibilities of Crosby, Stills & Nash's past with the glossy production values of the era in which the album was recorded. He cited its contemporary, Don Henley's The End of the Innocence, as a much more successful attempt at this combination.[11] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, William Ruhlmann praised both the band's singing and the performances of the session musicians, and argued that it is only a complete lack of good songs which makes Live it Up the weakest Crosby, Stills & Nash studio album.[8]
