David Crosby underwent a successful liver transplant 25 years ago today (November 20th). Must be nice to almost drink yourself to death and since you’re a rich rock star just get a new liver. But I digress. The Crosby, Stills & Nash song “Wooden Ships” was actually written on a boat. David Crosby says he wrote “Wooden Ships” with Stephen Stills and the late Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplaneon his boat, which he kept in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at the time. He talks about the song from the album Crosby Stills and Nash and the writing partnership.
“I had most of the music before I involved them in it. But we were sitting around saying, ‘Well, what are we going to do? Let’s write a song.’ And we did. Paul, actually, is the one who pointed it lyrically in the direction that it wound up going, which is a sort of a post-apocalyptic science fiction story. It’s a recurrent theme with him in a lot of his work. It’s very unusual chemistry. Paul and Stephen are very different kinds of guys and I’m not like either one of them, but it was obviously a successful one, ’cause I love the song.”
