The two songs David Crosby wrote when he had no words to offer: “It was a hallucination”
David Crosby‘s role in the grand play of music in the 20th Century cannot be understated. Though he may not have been blessed weith top billing and artists such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon and bandmate Neil Young rightfully operate in the higher echelons of our collective consciouness as the era’s ultimate songwriters, Crosby is a pivotal figure.
Not only was he a part of the foundational group The Byrds, without whom much of Bob Dylan’s success would have skirted only the very edges of the mainstream. He also helped to form the Laurel Canyon set, which included Young, Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell, and a host of other stars. With his band CSNY (Crosby, Stephen Stills, Nash and Young), the songwriter would create one of the most important supergroups of all time.
Despite his fulcrum-like position in the centre of the late 1960s and early ’70s rock movement, Crosby’s solo work is often forgotten. Following the release of CSNY’s brilliant LP Déjà Vu, Crosby would go on to release his solo record, If I Could Only Remember My Name, a year later. The album wouldn’t prove to be a success for Crosby in the charts and would largely be considered simply a diarised entry of his grief at the sudden loss of his girlfriend, Christine Gail Hinton.
Hinton sadly lost her life in a car crash in 1969 as she took the pair’s cats to the vet. It would be a tragic event forever shaping Crosby and notably influencing his work. Crosby told Uncut: “When I was making my solo record, I was in terrible shape because my girlfriend had just died. I didn’t know what to do. I had no way to deal with it, so I hid in the studio – it was the only place I felt comfortable. Jerry [Garcia] came by every night. Every night he’d show, and we’d tap away.”
The grief, coupled with the desire to express those emotions more positively, led Crosby to spend much of his free time in the studio. But while he was happy to make music, the idea of writing lyrics never felt comfortable. It meant two of the LP’s most beloved tracks came without words: ‘Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves)’, complete with a subtitle from Nash, and ‘I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here’.
The former was perhaps the most deliberately avoidance driven composition. For Crosby, the music simply arrived: “When I wrote this song, it seemed complete. It never asked me for words. Id did it, it felt good, so I left it that way.”
The track wasn’t simply an expression of Crosby’s grief but also his artistry. “I had a double handful of songs, and were good,” he told Uncut. “I was doing things nobody had heard before, like ‘Tamalpais High’ and ‘Song With No Words,’ using your voice like a horns stack. They were loving that we’d do shit nobody else had done.”
But, in reality, the tunes were flecked with his sadness and his inability to communicate outside of the nonsense words and sounds he was making on the tape. It’s a reflection of the mute feeling many partners feel when they lose the other half of their lives. Music, for Crosby at this time, seemed to appear as a guardian angel ready to guide him through the darkest time of his life.
Talking about ‘I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here’, he shared: “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, by girlfriend 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.”
The track is another poignant reminder that words dont necessarily always equate to more meaning, as Crosby imbues the number with pure and raw emotion. When speaking to Mojo about the song he shared: “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.”
Artists will always use their art to express themselves, and songwriters will often rely on their words to do so. But, at a time when communicating in any full sense feels at best difficult and, at worst, hopeless, then music has a habit of providing the guide ropes needed to find the light at the end of the tunnel.
