Songfacts®:

• This song opens the album Deja Vu. Written by Stephen Stills, this song contains two distinct sections bridged with the proclamation, "Carry On, love is coming, love is coming to us all." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Roy - Falls Church, VA
• The second part of the song is taken from "Questions," a song Stills wrote for his band Buffalo Springfield that appeared on their 1968 album Last Time Around.
• In the liner notes of their 1991 boxed set, drummer Dallas Taylor said: "The song was written in the middle of the Deja Vu sessions, when Nash told Stephen they still didn't have an opener for the album. It was something of a message to the group, since it had become a real struggle to keep the band together at that point. Stephen combined two unfinished songs and stuck them onto a jam we'd had out in the studio a few nights before, me on drums and Stephen on a Hammond B-3 organ. As the track begins I'm playing bass drums and high hat, and Graham is playing congas. Then we go into a 6/8 groove, which is rather obscure - Stephen loved to change gears that way. The sessions would go on all night, sometimes three or four days non-stop. The thing I loved about the studio was you could never tell if it was day or night, and we hid all the clocks so no one knew what time it was."
• According to a Graham Nash and Stephen Stills interview with Mojo magazine in 2021, this was the last song written for Deja Vu, their first album with Neil Young in the group. They were walking to the studio from their hotel when Nash said, "We don't have a suite," meaning a hotel suite. Stills thought he was talking about a musical suite like "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" and replied, "I know, we used it for our first record" (Crosby, Stills & Nash).
  
  "I would be shocked if after 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,' anyone got up and changed the record," Nash said. "Once you hear that you want to hear the rest."
  
  Stills agreed and immediately had an idea. He recalled to Mojo: "I went back to my room in this horrifying hotel and the next morning I knocked on Graham's door and said, 'OK, how's this?' And I played him 'Carry On' and he went nuts. So we got everybody together in the studio and recorded it."
• "Carry On" has the distinction of appearing on three different US #1 albums. It was first released on Déjà Vu, which hit the top spot on May 16, 1970. Then it appeared on the CSN&Y live album 4 Way Street, #1 on May 15, 1971. Finally it showed up on the compilation So Far, the #1 album on November 2, 1974.