Songfacts®:

• "Carry Me" was written by David Crosby, who also takes the lead vocal. He describes it as a "song of transcendence," that feeling when you've left your body and feel like you're floating above the world, looking down.
  
  "'Carry Me' is a love song," he told Songfacts. "That's all it is. It's a really, really good love song."
• The third verse makes a strong case for assisted suicide. It's about Crosby's mother, who was ravaged with cancer but wasn't allowed to die on her terms. In the liner notes to the CSN boxed set, Crosby wrote: "She was lying in hospital, dying of cancer, and wanted to go while she still had some dignity. She asked me to do it, set her free - coup de grâce the French call it. So I said, 'Hell, yes.' I learned how to do it from a doctor friend, and I was perfectly willing to do it, I'm not ashamed to say that. But she found out if she didn't die on the hospital and doctor's schedule, they'd conduct an autopsy and charge me with murder. So she had to go through an extra couple of months of desperate pain. She was a good lady. She taught me music, and was always writing poetry. I loved her a whole lot. She really nailed me when she said she felt like a bird with weights tied to her feet, that if somebody would just untie them she could fly. What an image - I couldn't ignore it."
• Graham Nash sings the harmony vocals with Crosby. The song was released on their 1975 collaborative album Wind On The Water, the second they made together. With Stephen Stills, they formed Crosby, Stills & Nash and released landmark albums in 1969 and 1970 (the second with Neil Young added). But there was a lot of conflict and competing interests in the group that kept them from recording. Their next album didn't appear until 1977. In the interim, they released solo albums and others with various permutations of the group. Crosby and Nash got on well in the '70s but fell out in the '80s when Crosby's drug problems became a major issue.
• That's James Taylor on acoustic guitar (Crosby played the electric). The other musicians were session players:
  
  Craig Doerge - piano
  Leland Sklar - bass
  Russ Kunkel - drums
  
  Crosby and Nash had no trouble getting their famous friends to help them out. Jackson Browne, Carole King and Levon Helm also appear on the album.