The Crosby, Stills, and Nash song written on cardboard
Getting the structure of ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ together was a monumental task for Stephen Stills. The former Buffalo Springfield guitarist had just written one of his most ambitious songs and was set to show his new bandmate, David Crosby and Graham Nash. The only problem was that ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ had so many different parts and sections that Stills struggled to get all of the verses to fit together to make it into a proper Crosby, Stills, and Nash song.
“It started out as a long narrative poem about my relationship with Judy Collins,” Stills recalled in the liner notes to the 1991 reissue of the band’s debut album. “It poured out of me over many months and filled several notebooks. I had a hell of a time getting the music to fit. I was left with all these pieces of song and I said, ‘Let’s sing them together and call it a suite,’ because they were all about the same thing and they led up to the same point.”
“When Stephen Stills first played me this song, I wondered what planet he was from,” Nash later told Rolling Stone. Collins herself was flattered by Stills’ dedication to her, but even though the song was written as a means of reconciliation between the two, Collins decided that it was ultimately time for her to move on.
“[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?’”
For Stills, the consolation prize was a classic composition. ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ took advantage of the singular three-part harmonies that soon became the signature sound of CSN. But getting all of the vocals into a cohesive order proved to be difficult. Stills threw out and tore up so many sheets of paper attempting to get the song down that he eventually moved onto a different method: writing down the sections of the song on cardboard.
“It was the beginnings of three different songs that suddenly fell together as one,” Stills told Rolling Stone. “Actually, on the demo, the middle part is not exactly how they would play. Half of it is it just falls off in its own – but we actually split it in half, and they got started singing and boom, there it went. Once it all was there then, we just kept adding parts. When I wrote it, I used cardboard shirt-blocking, you know, those things from the cleaners – ’cause they were harder to lose than pieces of paper and they didn’t crumple up. I could line them up on music stands and they’d stand up.”
Check out ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ down below.
