David Crosby is Star Struck | StarTalk

So we established that there's an entire Geek Side to David Crosby that I never knew until that moment. So I wanted to know, was he able, did he care, did he want to fold this geekitude into his music?

So I asked, "What has his passion for science inspired him as a songwriter?"

"Let's check it out. I wrote a song with Paul Kantner from Jefferson Airplane, called 'Have You Seen the Stars Tonight.' Now, you know, you want to talk about it and you want to say I want to go out to the stars. It's humanity's destiny. But in order to communicate it, I looked at it through the eyes of somebody who was there on a ship, saying, 'Hey, do you want to go up on a deck and look at the stars with me tonight?' You know, and talk about their feelings from a human point of view. It's a tough thing. You want to look at the world, the universe out there, through someone's eyes who's feeling something about it. I think otherwise you're not communicating with your... it's tougher to communicate."

"Yeah, yeah. And so you've done this a few times. Why not more? Or is it you just have a whole other secret life that you lead?"

"It's not an easy thing to do. It's easier to write about love because we all experience it, because it has such a wide, you know, spectra of things. I've never thought about it, but that is now so obvious a thing now that you say it that way. It's because we all feel it or want to feel it, that it always shows up in the songwriters.

"Whereas the wonder for the universe happens to a person only when they get out on a clear night in a place like the high desert or out on the ocean, where I’ve seen it, and they look up. All of a sudden, it comes on them, and they realize, 'Wait a minute, I'm standing on the side of a tiny mud ball out in the middle.' And there's starstruck. There's a reason there's a name for it; because at that moment they're like me and you, and that's the moment I want to try to communicate. I use that image when I can, but it's a much rarer feeling."