The song David Crosby called the “definitive” Crosby, Stills and Nash track
With an entire catalogue’s worth of classic material, it’s hard to pin down the most definitive track from Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Do you include the material written and recorded with Neil Young, the likes of which make up some of their most iconic work? Do you just keep it to the core three members, encompassing the likes of ‘Wooden Ships’, ‘Guinnevere’, and ‘Southern Cross’? How do you decide what makes the perfect CSN song?
For David Crosby, the answer was varying. In one of his final interviews, Crosby was asked by SongFacts to revisit some of his best-loved material with CSN. When asked what song he thinks remains most relevant, he went with his won ‘Guinnevere’. But when asked about what he considers the “definitive” CSN song, he hemmed and hawed between two tracks before ultimately landing on one.
“Probably ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’,” Crosby claimed. “Maybe ‘Wooden Ships’, but for that acoustic tilt we had, I think ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’.”
A nearly eight-minute excursion through the end of a relationship, ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ features every element that made CSN so unique, not least of which were their pitch-perfect harmonies. Written by Stephen Stills in the aftermath of his dissolving relationship with folk singer Judy Collins, ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ was a completely unedited document of CSN’s early power.
“It started out as a long narrative poem about my relationship with Judy Collins,” Stills explained in the liner notes to the band’s 1991 self-titled box set. “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.”
“It was the beginnings of three different songs that suddenly fell together as one,” Stills later 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 cleaner’s – ’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.
