“We both cried”: The beautiful love song Stephen Stills wrote for Judy Collins
Stephen Stills and Judy Collins were two of the biggest names in folk music throughout the 1960s.
Stills was pioneering the folk rock genre with his band Buffalo Springfield, while Collins was maintaining the more traditional strain of folk that was still going strong by the end of the decade. When Stills joined his new supergroup Crosby, Stills, and Nash in 1968, it came as Stills and Collins were on the last legs of their relationship.
Those final moments of any relationship can make you do crazy things. Add to this a creative spirit and access to a studio and you might have found yourself penning an ode to love in your spare time, too. The timing was poetic if not painful. One chapter of Stills’ life was opening up, but another found itself crumbling into the sea. Personal lives have a habit of becoming professional when you’re a songwriter, and it was hard to keep this moment from entering Stills’ work.
In a last-ditch effort to preserve their partnership, Stills decided to write Collins a song. But not just a song: a seven-minute epic that imitates the suites of classical music. Featuring a distinct open E guitar tuning and four different sections, ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ was the ultimate passion plea from Stills to try and keep Collins in his life.
It’s a big move for a songwriter to put it all out there, turning his private heartbreak into something operatic and on full display. A sprawling confession unfurls into one of Still’s most incredible pieces of work as each section shifts in tone and mirrors the instability of the relationship itself. The ambition of the composition only heightened the vulnerability at its core.
“[Stephen] came to where I was singing one night on the West Coast and brought his guitar to the hotel, and he sang me ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, the whole song,” Collins recalled in 2000. “And, of course, it has lines in it that referred to my therapy. And so he wove that all together in this magnificent creation. So the legacy of our relationship is certainly in that song.”
“Afterwards, we both cried – and then I said: ‘Oh, Stephen, it’s such a beautiful song. But it’s not winning me back,'” Collins added in 2017. “I’ve always understood that people have to write about their lives. Most of all, I felt the song was flattering and heartbreaking – for both of us. Neither one of us walked away from that relationship relieved. We were feeling like, ‘Whoa, what happened?'”
By 1969, Collins and Stills had officially ended their relationship. They weren’t alone either: around the same time, Stills’ bandmates in CSN were going through their own romantic troubles. Graham Nash had split with Joni Mitchell, while David Crosby had lost his longtime girlfriend, Christine Hinton, in a car accident. The turmoil would inspire the atmosphere that surrounded the group’s follow-up with Neil Young, Déjà Vu, which was noticeably darker in tone than Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
Check out ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ down below.
