The Story Behind The Song: ‘Our House’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Every now and again, a cold, grey drizzle descends over a Los Angeles morning. It clings close to the ground like sea spray, breaking up the precession of the sun just long enough for the free-spirited denizens to put down their white wine spritzers for a moment and embrace the cosiness of cold. In the meantime, it might even induce a folk classic. At least that was the case when it came to Graham Nash writing ‘Our House’.
Like many people who find themselves in Laurel Canyon, neither Nash nor Joni Mitchell were from there. Nash grew up in the gruff northern seaside town of Blackpool, England, where it always rains sideways. Mitchell hails from Fort Macleod, Canada, where the sleepy and spacious Alberta streets are often dusted with an icing of frost. So, when the rare Pacific rains enveloped a chilly Californian morning in the autumn of 1969, both sides of this songwriting couple must have been feeling rather homely.
The pair had met at a party in March 1968 and were now trying to find their own little slice of domestic comfort amid the carnal chaos of the Canyon scene. Maybe a rainy and morose day is what they had been waiting for to dim the lights on their lives a little. With that in mind, they set out in their car, braved the cold, and headed towards Ventura.
They slipped into Art’s Deli for breakfast. Then, warmed by its famed delicacies, they slipped back out into the mist and marauded around the neighbourhood. Passing a non-decript antique store—the type of shop you can walk by a thousand times before you suddenly notice it—Mitchell found herself drawn to a quanit little vase decorated with flowers. After a quick, sly glance at the modest price, Nash persuaded her that if she loved it, then it was worth buying. Vase in hand, they headed to the car with the come hither of warm tea and shelter from the shower beckoning them home.
“We open the door,” Nash recalls of their arrival, “and I said, ‘Listen, why don’t I light a fire, and you put some flowers in that vase that you bought today’. You’ve got to do something with that, right?” the stately Englishman joked. The quaint romance of the line grabbed him. It not only typified the sort of love and escape he was longing for, but the words themselves had a rolling melody that demanded a tune.
So, in the ambient light of their living room, a space slowly filling up with the trinket timestamps that mark a relationship in motion, Nash sat down at the piano and wrote ‘Our House’ in “probably an hour and a half”. Mitchell returned from plucking a few wildflowers from their garden to find him halfway through a folk ditty that was bound to be a masterpiece.
However, perhaps she didn’t know it then, but it also poignantly prognosticated the end of their loving relationship. The reason the song is so beautifully resonant is because it perfectly captures the sound of romantically settling down. You can hear it from a mile off—that first prang where you look at Country Homes magazine with anything other than abject apathy lingering somewhere in the chords.
You can tell from the dainty sweetness of Nash’s singing that he is new to this domestic bliss. In your 50s, such a remark may have been uttered so often that it goes amiss, but it struck the songsmith like the first sun of spring. Life was getting easy with Mitchell, and that was warming, even on the rare cold days in LA. Nash was growing to love it. Mitchell was, too. So, why is there a note of bitterness amid the honeyed belle of the homely tune?
Well, the most commonplace precipitator of all tragedies was making itself known to Mitchell: bad timing. While the appeal of life in a “cosy room” with Nash was readily apparent to the Canadian star, she had been married once before in her young life, and the settling down was too hot on the heels of starting up again for her liking.
“I was being isolated, starting to feel like a bird in a gilded cage,” she told Rolling Stone. While still in a relationship with Nash, Mitchell packed up from their home that once seemed so idyllic and travelled to Europe alone. Therein, she sent Nash a telegram explaining that the relationship was over. Her ambivalent feelings at the time are summed up on the gut-wrenching track ‘River’ which contains the lyrics, “He tried hard to help me, you know he put me at ease/ He loved me so naughty he made me weak in the knees/ I wish I had a river I could skate away on/ I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad/ Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I’ve ever had.”
So, to the couple at its core, ‘Our House’ is a bitter reminder of what could’ve been, sweetened by the memory of a morning that was. However, for those in the crooked world blessed by a windfall of fortunate timing, it serves as an idyllic embodiment of life getting simpler as two.
