‘Our House’: The story of Joni Mitchell’s personal love song
While titans of the 1960s counterculture, three of the four that made up the era’s most famous supergroup would peak in commercial and critical stature with their debut as a quartet.
The combined efforts of The Byrds’ David Crosby, The Hollies’ Graham Nash, and Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills sought their debut as a trio with 1969’s eponymous LP, a record that captured their dusky, West Coast vocal harmonies just in time for the Woodstock Festival three months later.
Having played with them on stage in an unofficial capacity at the lauded festival, Stills’ old Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young joined the gang, forging the eternal Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young troupe and igniting the beginnings of a long and tempestuous unity largely fractured and tested by Young’s mercurial artistic instincts and Crosby’s insatiable drug habit.
While last-minute tour cancellations and spells in prison would follow across the years, they would always have 1970’s Déjà Vu as their defining folk rock opus, a document of all members channelling unique alchemy they’d never capture so captivatingly again.
However, one of Déjà Vu’s highlights wasn’t written by any of the band. Having played it live since 1969, and eventually featured on Ladies of the Canyon, released a month later, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ would stand as the record’s lead single, boasting a rockier arrangement over the original’s pensive and meditative acoustic reverie of Max Yasgur’s famous farmland. She also indirectly informed the third single ‘Our House’, a breezier, lighter pop offering from Nash celebrating the humdrum banality of domesticity while he and Mitchell were dating from 1968 to 1970.
The germ of the song came about after a stroll among one of Los Angeles’ antique stores. Leaving Art’s Deli in the Ventura Boulevard area after breakfast, Mitchell was struck by a vase in a nearby shop window and swiftly snapped up the item upon Nash’s encouragement.
Arriving back at her house at 8217 Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon, Nash’s suggestion to light a fire and stick flowers in the newly purchased vase inspired a swift jump to Mitchell’s piano to sketch ‘Our House’s’ special vignette of a couple enjoying life’s every detail.
“…all of a sudden, that incredibly ordinary moment that you and I as men have experienced a thousand times, you know, ‘OK, love you, do that’ and I’ll do this’, Nash reeled off to Dan Rather in 2014, “You know, dinner will happen and the kids will be fine…that’s a perfect example because when Joanie was in the garden trying to find flowers for the vase, she wasn’t at her piano, which means I was, and ‘Our House’ was written incredibly quickly…”
The Beatlesesque melody and soft-Baroque pop flex mark Déjà Vu with a unique character among the folk rock earnestness, indeed, it feels lifted straight from one of Paul McCartney’s frothy cuts exploring the quainter and more eccentric end of life and relationships.
‘Our House’ would prove to be a fan favourite and an eternal bond between the two over the years, Nash performing the song in 2019 as part of Mitchell’s 75th birthday celebrations at LA’s The Music Centre’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
