10.000 Songs: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Our House

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Rob
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10.000 Songs: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Our House

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This topic is part of the weekly 10.000 songs, 10.000 opinions. In this, every week another song from the Acclaimed Music song top 10.000 is selected for discussion. The song is chosen completely at random, through random.org, making the selections hopefully very varied. The only other rule in this is that after an artist has had a turn, he can’t appear for another ten weeks. The idea for this topic came to me because I wanted to think of a way to engage more actively with the very large top 10.000 songs that Henrik has compiled for us, while still keeping it accessible and free of any game elements. Yes, that’s right, no game elements. You are free to rate the song each week, but I’ll do nothing with this rating. I want it to be about people’s personal reviews and hopefully discussions. So in reverse to other topics on this site I say: “Please comment on this song, rating is optional”.
Earlier entries of this series can be found here: archive
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“With two cats in the yard”

Image

109. Crosby, Nash, Still & Young – Our House


The facts:
Year: 1970.
Genre: Folk rock.
Country: United States of America.
Album: Déjà Vu.
Acclaimed Music ranking: #6806.
Song ranking on Acclaimed Music in the artist’s discography: 9th.
Ranks higher than Heavy Metal Drummer by Wilco, but lower than Vaya Con Dios (May God Be With You) by Les Paul & Mary Ford.
Place in the Acclaimed Music Song Poll 2015: Unranked.

The people:
Written by Graham Nash.
Produced by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash & Neil Young.
Lead vocals by Graham Nash.
Harmony vocals by David Crosby & Stephen Stills.
Drums by Dallas Taylor.
Bass by Greg Reeves.
Piano by Graham Nash.
Harpsichord by Graham Nash.

The opinion:
It is impossible for me to see this title appearing anywhere without first thinking about the unrelated song by Madness with the same title. Even the critics can’t forget that one, as they have placed that far more frequently on their lists than the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song. The Madness track is just so damn catchy.

Which is not to say that the CSNY song lacks a strong melody. This was of course a super group at the peak of its power. It is a well known fact that all four members would make a solo album after Déjà Vu and without exception that would become their most acclaimed album. Pretty much every song on Déjà Vu itself feels like a classic, as the enormously successful LP made its way into the public consciousness. Our House wasn’t the biggest hit – that would be Teach Your Children -, but it is very much a major tune from its period.

It is also somewhat unusual. Not in music, but in its subject matter. Despite their broad appeal, they were seen as a real counterculture band. They posited themselves as such, as they mostly lived the hippie lifestyle and weren’t afraid to share their political view. It wasn’t just a simple good choice for them to cover Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, it was destiny. That song was who they were.

What they weren’t at the time was people with everyday lives. Graham Nash knew as much when he wrote Our House. He has talked at various moments about the conception of the song. At the time he was living with Joni Mitchell, with whom he had a relationship for two years (before she was with David Crosby and after with Stephen Stills). One day they were shopping and Joni Mitchell bought a cheap vase. Later she was working in the garden accompanied by her two cats, while Nash lighted the fire. After that they ate supper together. Nash was struck by how ordinary these events were. As a singer in a current supergroup who previously had been in another big band (The Hollies) he wasn’t used to such commonplace moments. The extraordinary ordinariness of this “event” prompted him to write these lyrics, which simply describe parts of that day. He immediately composed the tune there, on Mitchell’s piano. It was finished in an hour.

So what we get here is a simple sounding piano tune that celebrates what you call ‘domestic bliss’. Not your usual hippie subject, as it is very much not counter-cultural. Graham Nash wrote another song for Déjà Vu: Teach Your Children (Nash was actually the writer of most of the CSN(Y) hits). And that was another song that was almost strikingly status quo. It asks parents to respect and love their hippie kids, but also asks that the hippie kids do the same for their parents.

In the same year, The Velvet Underground released Sweet Jane, a song that celebrated a working class life and marriage. That was equally uncalled for in rock circles at the time, but the song is very different in tone than Our House and Teach Your Children. Lou Reed, writer of Sweet Jane, seemed very self-conscious about what he was doing. He knew he was writing something that went straight against what his listeners wanted to hear. He literally addressed the “protest kids” as if he wants to confront them with their limited visions.

There is not a hint of such self-consciousness in Our House. Graham Nash may have been aware that an ordinary day was unusual for him, but not so much that it was unusual for a hippie group to sing about it. If Sweet Jane is something of an alternative protest song, Our House is a straightforward piece of scene setting. In one of his solo songs, Simple Man, Nash sung “I am a simple man/ And I play a simple tune”. I don’t have a full overview of the works of Graham Nash, but I think there is a truth in that. On Déjà Vu the two Graham Nash songs are the simplest and gentle, in both music and lyrics.

That might very well be the reason that the group spoke to so many people. They might never have been a “dangerous” band, but perhaps they didn’t end up as a hippie-only act simply because Graham Nash was there with songs that comforted people outside the hippie crowd. He was friendly company. Up until preparing for this very article I always thought of Nash as the cypher of the group. He didn’t have quite as big a character as David Crosby, Stephen Stills or Neil Young. He wasn’t talked about as much. Now I’ve come to realise that this is exactly what makes Graham Nash such an appealing figure to many people. Crosby, Stills and Young made equally accessible music, but Nash could most readily insert a honest niceness in his songs.

The band was full of egos so I’m somewhat surprised that of the first three singles of the album they decided to make two of them a Nash song (the first one was the cover of Woodstock, which didn’t belong to any member in particular). Nobody disagreed with favouring Nash so much? Whatever the case, it worked. Woodstock, Teach Your Children and Our House made the album a huge seller. There was a fourth single: Carry On, written by Stephen Stills, but that one went nowhere on the charts.

Of course, there is a bigger story behind this band and the creation of this album. The infighting is as legendary as the band’s music. The only way Déjà Vu could be realized was by having all members arrange sessions for their own songs. That’s why not necessarily every member of the group appears on each song. Young was absent on quite a lot of them. In fact, he doesn’t appear on Our House. He was also absent on Teach Your Children and Carry On, which means that of the four singles released for the album he was only present on Woodstock. He did get a producer credit on all songs, along with the other members, but it is very doubtful Young did any production work on songs like Our House.

People who have impatiently scrolled down to see my rating might be surprised that I give it a rather low grade. Nothing I have written up till now might give you the impression I dislike the song. The fact is, I don’t particularly dislike it, but it doesn’t appeal to me in any way either. I respect what Nash was doing here and I can’t say it isn’t done well. It’s just not my song. The tune doesn’t captivate me and I guess descriptions of domestic life don’t do much for me, maybe because married life still doesn’t have much appeal to me. I much prefer most other songs on Déjà Vu. In fact, the only one I like less is Teach Your Children. Does that make me someone who doesn’t like Graham Nash? Well, I just gave his album Songs for Beginners a try and I liked that quite a bit. Just not so much Our House. That’s all very personal and so is the final grade.
5/10

Other versions:
Like all classic rock songs of the period I expected this one to be covered a lot. There certainly are a few, but the list isn’t as long as usual for a seventies hit. Much of it isn’t very inspired. All the covers are faithful to the tune. The biggest change is that Helen Reddy speaks of “two dogs in the yard”. I guess she isn’t a cat person.

Sheena Easton is probably the biggest name to cover this. She gives it fine vocals, but her version is hampered somewhat by the very 80’s production. Drum machines don’t go well with this song. A big surprise is a version for little kids and babies, by a group called Kidsongs. I mean, baby versions of famous songs aren’t exactly rare around these parts, but this is actually a worthwhile one. I like the interplay between male and female vocals, which add to the sense of living together. Perhaps this is the way this should have been done all this time.

Also unusual is that Our House was sampled in a hip-hop track. Let’s face it, hippie music isn’t popular with rappers at all and their sound doesn’t make for natural sampling in the harsher sounds of hip-hop. So the vocals by Nash, Crosby and Stills get distorted for Our House by Lounge Lo and Cappadonna. It works, I guess.

The playlist:

Sheena Easton’s cover.
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