(Credits: Far Out / Atlantic Records)
Fri 7 November 2025 19:15, UK
Crosby, Stills and Nash aren’t the sort of band that provokes tribalism, like The Beatles. Fans don’t split into camps and align themselves with the work of one individual songwriter; instead, they celebrate the collective. Because if those three parts harmonies should inspire anything, it is camaraderie of thought.
But, if I were pressed to pledge my allegiance to just one of the band’s songwriters, then I would have to admit it was Stephen Stills. For me, his songwriting style epitomises everything that was great with the band: a strong melodic foundation that made way for impromptu jams and harmonic improvisations.
On that famed self-titled debut album, three of the standout songs came from Stills. The opener ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, the iconic ‘Helplessly Hoping’ and the groove-laden ‘Wooden Ships’. While the latter came in collaboration with David Crosby, the opening two were Stills at his pure best, acting as the songbird of this Laurel Canyon generation.
The raw stripped-back profile of both of those songs epitomised the barefoot liberalism of the band’s sound and has acted as the gateway for many new fans. In fact, it will come as no surprise for me to admit that when I was in the midst of my musical education, a whole 40 years after the release of that record, it was ‘Helplessly Hoping’ that triggered my love for the band.
But sometimes, it’s easy to forget about the rest of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s discography. Because that debut was so emphatic, and because their follow-up records were so on and off with the inclusion and exclusion of Neil Young, the trio’s later work gets forgotten. But in 1977, when they released CSN, they proved the magic was still there, most notably with the track ‘Just A Song Before I Go’.
Much like the iconic songs of their debut album, this one felt natural, as though it bled from the walls of their guitars and the harmonies fell out of the sky. Which, in essence, is what happened.
The writer, Graham Nas,h explained, “The origin was this: I was in the Hawaiian Islands and I had a couple of hours to waste before I had to catch a plane back to Los Angeles. I was at the home of a friend of mine, Spider was his name, and as I got up to leave he said, ‘You know what? You’re supposed to be a big-shot songwriter. I bet you can’t write a song’.”
He continued, “I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I bet you can’t write a song just before you go home.’ I said, ‘Really? You bet? How much do you bet?’ He said, ‘$500 you can’t write a song just before you leave.’ I still have his $500 because it was written on a bet, really. It was the biggest single hit that CSN ever had, I believe. Like my friend Joe Wall says, ‘If I’d have known it was going to be such a big hit I’d have written a better song.’”
Of course, when Nash would have first played it in front of Wall, it might not have sounded like the hit it turned out to be, because like all of the band’s great songs, it needed the performance of all its members to really come to life.
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