Carry On

Near the end of the Déjà Vu sessions Graham Nash told Stephen Stills they still had no opening track. Stills took two unfinished songs, one of them Questions, which he wrote for Buffalo Springfield's 1968 album Last Time Around, and joined them to a jam from a few nights earlier. Dallas Taylor, the drummer, recalled that Stills played a Hammond B-3 organ on the jam, and that Nash played congas at the start. In a 2021 interview with Mojo, Stills said he played the idea to Nash the next morning and Nash went nuts. Stills told Hit Parader in 1971 that it went from conception to finished master in eight hours.

The bridge moves from a faster to a slower tempo, with the lines sung a cappella. It was the B-side of Teach Your Children but received steady radio play of its own. It appeared on three different number one albums: Déjà Vu, 4 Way Street, where it runs to 13 minutes, and So Far. Led Zeppelin's Friends on their third album is generally seen as inspired by it.