The song David Crosby wrote about “a mystical experience”
While music was the primary affection of the late singer-songwriter David Crosby‘s life, there was another side of him that served as his happy place. Crosby fell in love with the seas as a child when his parents enrolled him on sailing classes, and soon enough, the ocean became his sanctuary, even impacting his songwriting.
As he grew up close to the Californian coast, in his parents’ mind, sailing would allow him to pour his energy into a positive place rather than using it as fuel for disruptive behaviour. Although it seemed like an unusual hobby for a child, Crosby instantly knew when he began lessons that it was his calling.
In 2013, he referred to himself as a “natural sailor” and recalled to the Wall Street Journal: “When I was 11 years old, my parents wanted me to do something besides get in trouble. So they enrolled me in sailing classes at the Sea Shell Association in Santa Barbara, Calif. From the moment I climbed into that 8½-foot dinghy in 1952, I knew instinctively what to do and sensed I had done it before. I was a natural sailor, and it’s one of the reasons I later wrote ‘Déjà Vu’.”
After leaving The Byrds in 1967 and needing a break from the music business, Crosby took out a $25,000 loan from his friend Peter Tork in The Monkees, which he invested into a 74-foot boat named Mayan.
Although it was initially difficult for him to control the vessel, once he learned how to steer Mayan, Crosby set sail for San Francisco and called the boat his home. This period of living on the water was the perfect environment for his songwriting, and according to Crosby, he wrote ‘Wooden Ships’, ‘The Lee Shore’, ‘Page 43’ and ‘Carry Me’ while on the boat he described as his “deep muse”.
When writing up notes about ‘The Lee Shore’ in a compilation celebrating the career of Crosby, Stills and Nash, he explained how sailing was a “mystical experience”, which he sings lovingly about on the track that explores his adoration of the ocean.
He said of the song: “Sailing is a mystical experience for me. The Mayan represents everything healthy and positive for me, and has quite literally saved my life on a number of occasions. It gets me out of the whole scene. The ocean doesn’t give a damn, it’s never heard of you.”
The three most important things to Crosby were his family, music and sailing; everything else was irrelevant. This triangle of interests interconnected as sailing was at the heart of some of his fondest memories with his family and crucial to creating some of his best songs, including ‘The Lee Shore’.
