‘I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here’: The David Crosby song that emerged as a “hallucination”
Because of his notorious hellraising and penchant for a good time, David Crosby is often afforded a somewhat comical essence in the common stories about his life. However, he was as complicated as they come, and experienced more hardship than is imaginable to most people.
While Crosby’s drug addiction would take its toll on him personally, producing many fall-outs with friends, saw him land in jail – which forced him to get clean – and ultimately, led to a highly publicised liver transplant in 1994 when he was completely down and out that Phil Collins gregariously paid for, the most fraught period of his life came through no fault of his own.
It’s no secret that Crosby participated in the free love and hedonistic spirit of the counterculture more than most of his peers, but his use of drugs and alcohol would reach new depths after he experienced a kind of tragedy that anyone who’s in love fears most deeply: the death of their loved one.
On September 30th, 1969, when taking their cats to the vet, Crosby’s girlfriend and muse, Christine Hinton, who he was on record as being madly in love with, died in a car accident. Naturally, Crosby was absolutely devastated, and it ruined him, setting his life on the trajectory it would later take. It makes you wonder if he’d have gotten himself in such bother if she lived. Alas, fate can be cruel, and no one can tell what it has in store for us.
The tragedy occurred while CSNY were recording their era-defining masterpiece, Déjà Vu. As a testament to Crosby’s character, he continued work on the album, and during the rousing, defiant last call of the counterculture, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, which was recorded after Hinton’s death, you can hear his voice cracking under the sheer weight of his heartbreak.
Hinton wouldn’t just impact his performance on that song. When speaking to Mojo in 2008, he revealed how the transcendental acapella of ‘I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here’ from 1971’s If I Could Only Remember My Name was also inspired by his late partner. He said: “I guess you can feel exposed but what else are you going to write about? If you are going to write and record material which moves people it needs to be pulled from real life. You don’t really have a choice.”
Years before that, in the liner notes of the 1991 CSN box set, Crosby revealed more about how Hinton’s spirit fed into the song and explained that the otherworldly performance came to him in a complete “hallucination.”
He explained: “I don’t know where that came from. It was a hallucination. I’ve always been drawn to strange vocal works. I overdubbed six tracks a cappella, with echo. Later I was left with a persistent feeling it was about Christine Hinton, bygirlfriend who was killed. I was very much in love with her, and she went away very suddenly. I was not equipped to deal with the loss. This piece was a sudden, improvised, overwhelming requiem.”
‘I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here’ might clock in at just over a minute long, but Crosby’s expert layering of acapella vocals and the emotion in them qualifies it as one of the most profound cuts he ever recorded. Channelling his emotions into music was something he was adept at, and later when the effects of Hinton’s death had seen him land in prison, he penned ‘Compass’, another number that taps into something deep within.
