53 Years of Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu, the hit album by folk rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young has officially been around for 53 years as of today!

Released as the second studio album by Crosby, Stills, and Nash and the first as a quartet featuring Neil Young on March 11, 1970, it would go on to become the best selling album of each respective musician's careers with over 8 million sales to date. 

Photo taken from Wikipedia.
Cover photography by Tom Gundlefinger.

It was recorded at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco, California, where the album underwent a lot of extensive work. Stephen Stills estimates the amount of time spent in the studio to be around 800 hours, in which there were hundreds of different takes on songs and a lot of nitpicking involved. This caused a lot of conflict between the musicians who were already in a dark place at the time. Graham Nash spoke to Music Radar in an interview, stating: "the mood was different from the first album, which was recorded while the band members were in relationships, and by the second Joni and I had split up, Stephen and Judy had split up, and Christine had just been killed. It was all dark".

Singles included "Woodstock", "Teach Your Children", "Our House", and "Carry On". The first three managed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, and the entire album managed to stay on the Billboard 200 charts for 88 weeks total. It was certified gold two weeks after release. As far as big-name magazines and critics go, the album was received without a major amount of negativity.

Contributions from other musicians on the album include Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead playing the pedal steel guitar on "Teach Your Children", John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful playing harmonica on "Déjà Vu", and of course, Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves on drums and bass (respectively) for the majority of the tracks.

Today is a great day to pull out this quintessential folk rock album. 

Happy listening!


Hey there! I'm Olive, and I'm a part-time blog writer hoping to share my love of older music and countercultural history. I started this blog during my freshman year of college as a means to get a head start doing what I love most - writing. I've always loved writing and music, and wanted to do something that would involve doing both. Now, I've got this cool (totally not biased) blog page!

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