I like the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album a fair amount, and “Suite: Julie Blue Eyes” in particular (easy for me to understand why people despise that band though). The last part of the song, where they do the wordless “doo-doo-do-doot” vocal bit and Stills sings something in Spanish, has always made me happy. I can remember hearing it on the radio in the 70s. It felt like a kid’s song, then and now.
When I started downloading Todd Terje edits a couple of years ago, I hoped that he had re-worked that section of “Judy Blue Eyes”—it just struck me as the sort of thing he could transform in an interesting way. Eventually I discovered that he did re-work it, but a different version of the song, one called “Al Carnival” by early 70s Madrid-by-way-of-Columbia duo Elkin & Nelson (I don’t have the original record and I don’t know the songwriting credits, but I am pretty sure that E&N were covering the CSN song, even though that section was, I think, based on an older folk song of some kind). There it is up above. It’s a pretty good example of the kind of thing Terje is drawn to in his edits: lush sound that’s clear and spacious but still forceful, sections with unique textures that can be shuffled and re-looped. I talk about some of these qualities in the context of a broader discussion about the blurred lines between listening to music and making it, in a new Resonant Frequency that went up at Pitchfork on Friday.
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