(Credits: Far Out / David Gans)
Sun 22 March 2026 14:42, UK
When looking back to the peak of rock music as a cultural driver in the 1960s and ‘70s, it is always interesting to discover the various collaborations, friendships, and romantic relationships between some of our most beloved musicians.
There may have been an overriding message of peace and love in the late ‘60s, but love all too often comes hand-in-hand with rivalry. This is something folk-rock legend David Crosby knew all too well.
In one of the 1960s’ most fruitful post-fame collaborations, four remarkable musicians formed the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. All four arrived from successful foundations: Crosby from The Byrds, Graham Nash from The Hollies, and Stephen Stills and Neil Young from Buffalo Springfield. This crowding of musical genius was also led, if less directly, by a fifth dimension: Joni Mitchell.
Like Young and Stills, Mitchell was a proponent of Canada’s impressive folk crop and found success on the road in the US through the mid-1960s. She won the hearts of thousands of folk enthusiasts at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival and, by 1967, fell into Crosby’s orbit. “I walked into a coffeehouse in Coconut Grove, and she was standing there singing those songs, and I just was gobsmacked,” Crosby told the Tampa Bay Times in 2016. “I fell for her immediately. It’s a little like falling into a cement mixer. She’s kind of a turbulent girl.”
The relationship, however, deteriorated as the two musicians’ paths began to diverge. Before they could completely separate, Crosby took up a semi-permanent residence with an old girlfriend and began a romantic relationship. When Mitchell found out, she was rightly incensed. It saw the singer confront Crosby at a party held at The Monkee’s Peter Tork’s house. “Joni was very angry and said, ‘I’ve got a new song’,” Crosby reveals in David Browne’s book, The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup.
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Alamy)
Mitchell then played ‘That Song About the Midway,’ which had “references to a man’s sky-high harmonies and the way she had caught him cheating on her more than once… there was no question about the subject of the song,” Browne writes. “It was a very ‘Goodbye David’ song,” said Crosby. “She sang it while looking right at me, like, ‘Did you get it? I’m really mad at you.’ And then she sang it again. Just to make sure.”
Although fleeting, this romance was the glue that adhered Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1968. In the spirit of ephemeral flings and free love, Mitchell remained a close friend and collaborator of the supergroup after parting with Crosby, entering into a more stable and binding relationship with Nash. Any ill feeling between Crosby and Nash wasn’t apparent at this point, but over the years, the CSNY/CSN trail was littered with vitriol, much of it between Crosby and Nash.
In 1970, Mitchell broke up with Nash on the apparently false conception that he wanted her to sacrifice her career for a housewife role. “Like the song suggests, I asked her to marry me, but I think she thought I wanted a ‘wife’ to cook meals and so on, which was never my intention,” Nash once remembered, discussing Mitchell’s ‘River’ as one of his all-time favourite songs. “I wanted her to be as free as possible, to be as brilliant as possible. She’s an amazing woman.”
Mitchell was present at the birth of CSNY and seemed to be a light bulb on which her orbiting musicians banged their heads with admiration and frustration. An independent, assertive and veritably gifted musician, she left awe and bickering in her wake. “She is arguably the best singer-songwriter of our times,” Crosby told Howard Stern of Mitchell on SiriusXM. “I don’t get along with her that well anymore, but I do love her with my whole heart for what she’s given us.”
In the 2019 documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name, Crosby commended Mitchell’s talent, an assertion made all the more powerful by his conflicted personal relationship with her. “She’s the best there is. There’s no question,” he said, adding, “She’s better than all the rest of us.”
When Crosby passed away in January 2023, he had just begun to patch things up with Nash after many years of hot and cold temper over various personal and professional factors. Despite their differences, he admitted to Stern in 2021 that Mitchell was always better suited to a relationship with Nash. “I don’t think Joni gets along with any of her exes. I was very happy when she went with Graham [in 1967],” he admitted. “Graham was, I think, the best of us for her. The best experience she had with a guy was with Graham.”
Listen to Graham Nash’s demo of the famous CSNY song ‘Our House’, featuring Joni Mitchell.
