.This is a laid back 70s pop song. I like their music in the early seventies the best but I won’t turn this off if it comes on the radio.
The song peaked at #7 in the Billboard 100 and #10 in Canada in 1977. Their first album was named Crosby, Stills, and Nash but this one was called CSN which is confusing. The album did well helped by this hit. It peaked at #2 in the Billboard Album Charts, #10 in Canada, and #23 in the UK in 1977.
After touring in 1977 and 1978, further work as a group was complicated by Crosby’s increasing dependence on cocaine. Nash’s 1980 Earth & Sky was supposed to be another Crosby-Nash album, but Crosby was not in shape to participate
It surprised me but this was the highest charting song by CSN or CSN&Y. As Nash tells it in his memoir Wild Life, the guy taking him to the airport was his drug dealer, who said, “I’ll bet you can’t write a song before you go.” Nash then thought, “Hmm… just a song before I go,” and composed it on the spot. I have the exact quote below.
Graham Nash: I’d been on vacation in Hawaii. Leslie Morris was with me, and in an effort to score some grass we met up with a dealer named Spider at his house near the beach. This was around one in the afternoon, and I had a four o’clock flight back to Los Angeles. Spider was a cheeky little bastard. He said, “You’re supposed to be some big-shot songwriter. I bet you can’t write a song before you go.”
“Oh, really,” I said. “How much?”
“A hundred bucks.”
I finished “Just a Song Before I Go” in a little under forty minutes. Turned out to be the biggest hit Crosby, Stills & Nash ever had, on the charts for twenty weeks. The original lyric I’d scribbled on school composition-book paper is currently in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
From Songfacts
Graham Nash wrote this song on a bet. David Crosby explained in the liner notes to their 1991 boxed set: “Graham was a home in Hawaii, about to go off on tour. The guy who was going to take him to the airport said, ‘We’ve got 15 minutes, I’ll bet you can’t write a song in that amount of time.’ Well you don’t smart off to Nash like that, he’ll do it. This is the result.”
Going to the airport and his day of travel were on Nash’s mind, so that’s what he wrote about: “driving me to the airport and to the friendly skies.” The “song before I go” was for his friend who made him the bet.
This was the first single released from the re-formed Crosby, Stills & Nash, and in the US it was the highest-charting song of any iteration of the group. The group’s first album came in 1969, and they won the Best New Artist Grammy Award for that year. In 1970, they added Neil Young and released two albums before taking some time off – they didn’t see the Top 40 from 1971-1976. In this period, the members recorded solo, with Graham Nash and David Crosby teaming up for a 1972 album, and Stephen Stills forming the band Manassas. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young got back together for touring in 1974 and released the 1976 album Wind On The Water. The next year, minus Young, they were Crosby, Stills & Nash again for the first time since 1969, and the CSN album was the result. Following more solo efforts from Stills and Nash, they hit the studio again in 1982 for the Daylight Again album, and reunited with Young for the 1988 effort American Dream. They continued to go back and forth with and without Young in the ’90s. Their law firm-style name made for an unwieldy discography, but we always knew who was in the group.
Just a Song Before I Go
Just a song before I go,
To whom it may concern
Traveling twice the speed of sound
It’s easy to get burned
When the shows were over
We had to get back home,
And when we opened up the door
I had to be alone
She helped me with my suitcase,
She stands before my eyes
Driving me to the airport,
And to the friendly skies
Going through security
I held her for so long
She finally looked at me in love,
And she was gone
Just a song before I go,
A lesson to be learned
Traveling twice the speed of sound
It’s easy to get burned
..
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