"How do you write about breaking up with Joni Mitchell?" asks Graham Nash in the liner notes to his first solo album. Good question. His 1970 split with the willowy Canadian singer-songwriter was the seed of this modest 33-minute solo debut, which proves the cliché that unfortunate events can generate excellent art. The stripped-down piano ballads "Better Days" and "Simple Man" ("I just want to hold you/I don't want to hold you down") and the majestic "I Used to Be a King," spangled with Jerry Garcia's crystal-palace pedal steel, are all stirring heartbreak exorcisms. Yet the most memorable songs are driven not by tears but by political passion: the jauntily accusatory "Military Madness" (nicely overhauled for the Bush era on CSNY's recent concert-film soundtrack, Déjà Vu Live) and "Chicago," whose image of a man "bound and gagged" and gospelish reprise of "we can change the world" still feels desperately timely 37 years later. Alongside Neil Young's "Ohio," they remain the most potent political anthems in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young songbook. Nash would devote most of his later career to collaboration, but this shows that even for team players, solitude can be a good thing.