The song David Crosby claimed to put together in Joni Mitchell’s kitchen: “It definitely was”
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Alamy)
Thu 4 December 2025 20:00, UK
While their relationship may have been fractious to say the least, there are still a lot of unavoidable connections between Joni Mitchell and David Crosby.
Having briefly dated each other in the late 1960s, with Crosby also producing Mitchell’s debut album, Song to a Seagull, during this period, it’s easy to find some basic surface-level connections between the two songwriters, but given how their worlds continued to overlap in the years following their separation, with both artists operating in similar spheres, the connection runs deeper than just their collaborative and romantic relationships.
Despite having had their tolerance for each other tested on a number of occasions, neither artist lost their appreciation for the work of the other, and they remained constant sources of inspiration for one another throughout the 1970s as they worked on their own individual projects.
However, prior to this, Crosby and some of his own co-conspirators found themselves in Mitchell’s company considerably more often, and during the early years of Crosby, Stills and Nash, he would find himself congregating in the kitchen of Mitchell’s house with both Stephen Stills and Graham Nash to work on material.
Mitchell’s kitchen became a fabled location in the supergroup’s history, and is a location that many fans frequently find themselves asking questions about when trying to discover new lore about the origins of the ensemble.
However, according to a 2014 feature with Guitar World, where Crosby answered questions from fans about his career, he addressed a query from Fountains of Wayne’s Jody Porter, who asked just how many songs the trio managed to come up with while sitting in front of the fridge at Michell’s home.
“I know we sang a lot there,” he replied, adding, “That’s where we put Crosby, Stills and Nash together. Stephen and I had been singing, and we were there with Graham. We sang, ‘In the morning when you rise’ [‘You Don’t Have to Cry’], and Graham said, ‘Would you sing that again?’ So we sang it again.
He continued by elaborating on how the song came together. “[Nash] said, ‘That’s fantastic. Would you do it one more time?’ We sang it a third time, and he put the top harmony on it. Right then, we knew exactly what we were going to be doing for a long time. There wasn’t any question. We have very different voices and some kind of weird chemistry. And it definitely was in Joni’s kitchen. Stephen is fiercely sure it happened at Cass Elliot’s, but it didn’t.”
While there are presumably countless other famous songs that have been written in kitchens over the years, and Mitchell herself would undoubtedly have written a few in her own kitchen, it’s just the one track from Crosby, Stills and Nash’s debut album together that managed to come together in this particular location. Why this happened to be such an inspiring location isn’t something that Crosby chose to elaborate on, but for it to have been the space where his band formed, and where one of their finest songs was written, must mean it held a special place in his heart.
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