Songfacts®:

• David Crosby did a lot of sailing, and nautical metaphors show up a lot in his work, "Wooden Ships," for example. In the 1991 CSN boxed set, he explained the meaning of "Shadow Captain":
  
  "It's about what many of my songs are about: Who is at the wheel? It's delving inside the cranial swamp, trying to figure out what matters, and why. It said a whole bunch of things I wanted to get said for a long time."
• Crosby gave his lyric to session musician Craig Doerge, who added the music and also plays piano on the track. It's one of several songs that Crosby has written after waking up in the middle of the night. He told Uncut magazine February 2014: "It's that moment of half awake, half asleep, and it's happened over and over again."
  
  Crosby added: "I woke up at 3 a.m., I was off watch, hundred miles off the coast of California, I got up from my bunk and wrote the whole song down, as it is now without changing the word. I get to the end, 'Shadow Captain of a charcoal ship, trying to give the light the slip,' and I think, 'Croz, you are so f---ing cool!' I'm thrilled by it, but I feel as though it's been trapped in my head, as though I've been gifted it."
• Crosby, Stills & Nash released their first album in 1969, then added Neil Young and released another in 1970. Those albums combined to sell well over 20 million copies and became part of the American musical fabric. But these guys had competing interests and didn't release another album - CSN - until 1977, with "Shadow Captain" on the tracklist.