I can't find a separate James Taylor thread here, so I'll post this article here. As with the Eagles, Taylor receives a Kennedy Center Honor this weekend. Here is the Washington Post article written by Dan Zak on his life and career:
Quote:
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — His brain was frosted with morphine, his heart petered, but his lungs remembered to breathe. Simple as that. He was dying — there were multiple times when he was dying — but his lungs always kept working, every time. And that’s why he is sitting here in September, many years later, sober, in a hotel bungalow that costs thousands of dollars a night. Instead of being dead at 22 or 27 or 33, like many of his artistic peers who sought solace in drugs, James Taylor, 68, fetches from the coffee table a crinkled printout of his discography: 18 studio albums and about 200 songs spanning 48 years of platinum-certified celebrity.
He stapled together his career because he wanted to see which themes kept dogging his music. He made lists. Keeps them on his iPad.
Wanderlust.
Show business.
His father.
Man as both thinker and creature.
The danger of organizing your own work is that you start to appraise yourself. He knows that some songs are better than others and that some songs were better written than they were recorded. “Shed a Little Light,” for example. “The Frozen Man.” Those sessions didn’t hack it. He thinks he came close to success with “Gaia” and achieved it with “Never Die Young” and “Enough to Be on Your Way.” There are a few others.
“ ‘Sweet Baby James’ and ‘Carolina’ — I’m still proud of those songs,” Taylor says, sitting at the bungalow’s glass dining table with a cranberry juice. “ ‘Sweet Baby James’ maybe more, because it’s kind of a Chinese puzzle.”
The lullaby waltz written for his nephew is actually a puzzle?
Taylor pulls a pad of Post-its toward him. “The rhyming scheme,” he says. He takes a black pen and begins writing on the yellow paper.
Range.
Cattle. Companion.
Saddle. Canyon.
Pastures to change.
“It’s got some really strong internal rhymes. Let’s see.”
Snow.
Turnpike. Dreamlike.
Boston. Frostin’.
Ten thousand more to go.
“So it had a very strict form. And it was not easy to make it. It was like a mathematical puzzle, or a Sudoku. And I think that to start a song being a lullaby to a little boy and then to take that, in the second verse, and sort of recapitulate it to myself — at my current moment of realizing that my career might be a go, that I actually could write songs, that I was a functioning musician, that I had problems but there was a way forward . . . ”
A small waterfall goes splish beyond the bungalow’s sliding glass door. The white California light pierces the hedgerow, stripes his gray-blue polo shirt, glints on the gold of his wire-frame glasses. He is admiring something he made 46 years ago as if he has just discovered it.
“I just think the song’s got a lot to it.”
‘Bittersweet and low’
Anyone younger than 50 is forgiven for not knowing this: James Taylor was a babe. A 6-foot-3 stalk of corn and sensitivity. Flowing chestnut locks. A demure pornstache. A way of picking the strings of a guitar as if he was fingering the valves of your heart. Put some sky-blue denim on him, lean him against a wooden post, tell him to look straight into the camera and good night, you moonlight ladies.
Taylor’s second album — “Sweet Baby James,” the one with the words “fire” and “rain” on the cover — sold 1.6 million copies in its first year. By March 1971, he was on the cover of Time, illustrated as a Christ-like, post-Woodstock troubadour under the headline “The New Rock: Bittersweet and Low.”
“I find comfort in fatalism and inevitability . . . in things like earthquakes and eclipses of the moon because I have no hand in them,” Taylor, then 22, told Time. “They relieve me of responsibility.”
His medium is the elements — wind, dust, oceans, rainbows — and thus his earliest memory is trying to walk on the crust of the snow, and sinking, outside the Taylor home in Weston, Mass. In the early ’50s, when he was a toddler, the well-to-do Taylors resettled outside Chapel Hill, N.C., on 28 acres of honeysuckle surrounded by sawmills and tobacco barns. Ike and Trudy Taylor, descendants of mariners, had cosmopolitan tastes and a love for the natural world. They raised their four children on Aaron Copland, the Weavers, the Andrews Sisters. Trudy nudged them to invent radio jingles on homemade instruments. Ike, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina, sang sea chanteys on the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard, where the Taylors summered.
James Taylor first studied classical cello, which explains his bass-cleffed, self-taught style on the guitar: He thumbs a bass line while picking the melody with his first three fingers. His first concert was Peter, Paul and Mary in Raleigh. At 14 he wrote his first song, and it married the white gospel of North Carolina to the Episcopal hymns at boarding school in Massachusetts. His lyrics, summoning the Vineyard and the Piedmont, predicted a life of searching.
Then one day I left my home, and down the river bound,
Sit back on my raft of reeds, I float past fields and towns.
The Taylor family tree, once esteemed in North Carolina, was lately prone to rot. His grandfather and great-grandfather had drunk themselves to death, and his dad and older brother would follow eventually. When James Taylor was 7, Ike Taylor fled to Antarctica for two years to study frostbite, perhaps also to escape domesticity and the weight of his troubled ancestry.
All of the Taylor children spent stints in mental institutions, and each became a musician. As a suicidal 17-year-old at boarding school in Massachusetts, Taylor checked himself into McLean Hospital, where there were screens on the windows but a solid structure to the day. After graduating from the hospital’s high school, he split for New York to become a professional singer-songwriter. He found heroin in Greenwich Village in 1966.
The Rolling Stones released “Paint It Black” that year, and Taylor, now 18, heard the musical appeal of gloom. But his hard living outpaced his songwriting. He did a lot of drugs. Passed out on park benches. Invited sketchy characters to crash in his apartment. He began flirting with death, but his lungs kept breathing. He called home in 1967 and his father heard the distress in his voice. Ike Taylor went to New York to rescue him, to bring him back to North Carolina for treatment.
After rebounding, Taylor’s next move was to London, where he busked beneath overpasses and petitioned record companies. His New York bandmate Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar connected him to British singer Peter Asher, who worked at Apple Records and played Taylor’s demos for Paul McCartney.
“We should sign him,” McCartney told his fellow Beatles. Taylor came in for the audition of his life: playing “Something in the Way She Moves” for McCartney and George Harrison.
“I was as nervous as a Chihuahua on methamphetamines,” Taylor recalls.
‘Perfect guy for the time’
When the Beatles weren’t recording “The White Album,” Taylor used the studio to make his self-titled debut.
Though not a sensation, the album included key calling cards such as “Carolina in My Mind.” Taylor’s music fused the hymnal to the blues, rock-and-roll to country, Robert Frost to Woody Guthrie. His debut got him a record deal stateside with Warner Bros.
“James seemed like the perfect guy for the time,” his friend Kortchmar told Timothy White, who wrote the 2001 Taylor biography “Long Ago and Far Away.”
“As a young man in his early twenties, his aura was of somebody who was sensitive but not feminine, handsome but not too macho. He had that air of Southern gentility but also the New England look of a fisherman or a farmer.”
In 1971, with Janis and Jimi dead, folk rock neutralized acid rock. Taylor released his third album, whose 10th track was aware of its own melancholy: “Why is this song so sad?” With Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, Taylor made yearning a national pastime.
Mitchell backed Taylor’s vocals on “Long Ago and Far Away,” and Simon did the same on “One Man Parade.” Taylor reciprocated on “A Case of You,” which is probably about him, and “Waited So Long.” Taylor and King duetted at Carnegie Hall, and in response to his “Fire and Rain” — I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend — she wrote “You’ve Got a Friend.”
Taylor dated Mitchell and then, in 1972, married Simon.
“When James walked into a room — any room — he transformed it, charging it up with his radiance,” Simon wrote in her memoir, whose portrayal of Taylor is both bruising and worshipful. Even when she hated him she loved him — “not despite his broken-down spirit, but because of it.”
They had two children. Taylor continued his love affair with heroin. He retreated to monkish solitude to compose in notebooks, using one page to write and the opposite to edit, composing line by line, draft after draft, until the notebook was half full and the song was precise. He didn’t always practice the same care with his family.
Simon wrote “Fair Weather Father” in 1976, when daughter Sally was 2. Taylor, not one to suppress a musical confession, sang backup on his own indictment.
He kept using. His lungs kept breathing. His greatest hits came out in ’76 and went platinum. In ’79 Taylor drank himself into a depression in Montserrat. He had his father’s lust for escape, and touring was his Antarctica. The title of his 11th album, in 1981, was “Dad Loves His Work.” Simon filed for divorce, and, the next year, Taylor’s friend John Belushi overdosed at the Chateau Marmont. Taylor sang “That Lonesome Road” at his burial on the Vineyard.
The song is as elemental as any of his songs. The silver moon. The trees. The heart. A plaintive melody. Easy listening, to James Taylor, never meant easy living.
‘My heart is free from fear’
Belushi’s death rattled Taylor in a way that nearly dying never did. His friend Michael Brecker, the jazz musician, took him to his first Narcotics Anonymous meeting. His second wife, Kathryn, whom he had married in 1985, gripped his hand through detox and withdrawal. Taylor has been sober ever since but retains the shame and regrets of his habit. They are artistic inspirations and reminders of fallibility in a world that adores him.
In this Beverly Hills bungalow, he is gracious but makes little eye contact. He is serene even as he fidgets. He is master and journeyman, penitent and shaman, depending on the moment. Taylor says luck is the primary reason he’ll be sitting next to the president at the Kennedy Center instead of a lying in a heap of bones on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s not to say he doesn’t sense a higher power.
“Music suggests an order to the universe that sort of — ”
Taylor stutters for 10 seconds, searching for the verb, thinking of the science of rhyme, the algebra of harmony, the way his songs tell stories and stir nameless feelings.
“ — precedes human consciousness. It’s true to the physical laws of the universe as well as an emotional set of values. And for that reason it does lift you out of the prison of the self.”
James Taylor is no longer trapped there. He is now in multiple halls of fame, has figured out the work-life balance and has even released a Christmas album. He travels with a nail kit, to keep his digits in picking shape, and is routinely performing. Taylor Swift, an admirer and namesake, has brought him onstage at her concerts. He keeps his iPhone ready to record, because lyrics and melodies still come to him out of the blue. His twin 15-year-old boys, with third wife Kim, are completing their first semester at Taylor’s alma mater, 20 minutes from their home in the Berkshires, where he also has a studio converted from a barn.
During a ceremony at the White House in 2015, President Obama awards Taylor the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
The wanderlust is now more of a wanderhobby. The first song on Taylor’s 2015 album, “Before This World,” abandons the pursuit of motion and wipes away the gloom.
The way ahead is clear.
My heart is free from fear.
I plant a flag right here.
Much of Taylor’s best music burns on alienation, on loneliness, yet he’s now dogged by contentment. He appreciates that his bittersweetness has, over the years, become a balm.
“People come to me all the time and say, ‘This is the soundtrack of my life,’ ” Taylor says. “What we do with popular culture is we’re building our mythology, our own personal mythology. A soundtrack. We will subscribe to a number of celebrities or actors or movies or songs that really represent us. And then you can sort of channel that a little bit, when you need it in your own life.”
Taylor then refers to his most famous song as if it’s a socket wrench, or a broom.
“I think ‘Fire and Rain’ has been useful to a few people.”
The next evening, a Tuesday in September, Taylor plays a benefit concert at a midsize venue in downtown Los Angeles.
“He’s been the gold standard for what a singer-songwriter should be,” says Vince Gill, introducing Taylor.
King and Taylor rehearse at the Troubadour Tavern in West Hollywood in 2007. (Ric Francis/AP)
Greeted by a standing ovation, Taylor has a hitch in his step and a quaver in his voice. He has always been an old soul, and now his body has caught up. Five musicians, including the Eagles’ Joe Walsh, take turns playing their own songs, and ornamenting each other’s with a guitar lick or vocal harmony. Taylor thumbs a whispering bass line for nearly every one of them, an involuntary courtesy from a man who thinks of every note as an amen, a pulse, a breath.
Taylor credits Carole King after playing “You’ve Got a Friend.” After “You Can Close Your Eyes,” Gill says: “That’s one of the best damn songs in American history.”
The evening closes as it should, with the lullaby. The first verse to a child. The second to himself. The third to the thing that helps him to sleep, that saved his life, that provides a solution to the puzzle of James Taylor.
“Singing works just fine for me.”
And good night, you moonlight ladies.
The 39th Kennedy Center Honors ceremony will be held Dec. 4 at 7 p.m. in the Opera House. The taped presentation will be broadcast Dec. 27 at 9 p.m. on CBS.
The Famous Beatles Lyric George Harrison Plucked From a James Taylor Song
If you ask people to name their favorite George Harrison songs from his Beatles days, you’ll usually hear them call out tracks from the later albums. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” from The White Album is definitely a common answer; so is Abbey Road’s “Here Comes the Sun.”
But “Something” might rank highest of all when people run down George’s best work. Paul McCartney thought it was the greatest number in George’s songbook, and John Lennon considered it the standout track on Abbey Road.
Frank Sinatra, still a heavyweight in 1969, called it the best love song he’d ever heard. And if you need any further endorsement, look at it from a purely commercial standpoint: “Something” was the only song by George The Beatles released as a single.
But George couldn’t claim it was entirely original (whatever that phrase means). The opening line matches that of a James Taylor song of the same name.
Taylor debuted ‘Something in the Way She Moves’ at Apple in 1968
To be precise, George didn’t just borrow a line from a Taylor song; the line was also the title of the song that appeared on Taylor’s self-titled debut. The song was “Something in the Way She Moves,” and Taylor recorded it at the same studio The Beatles used to record several White Album tracks.
And it was no coincidence that George used the line. After signing Taylor to the band’s newly formed record label (Apple), George and Paul performed on “Carolina on My Mind” on that same album. In fact, Taylor included the song on a demo tape Paul (and possibly George) heard beforehand.
George didn’t try to hide the source of the line, which was really just a starting lyric for a very different song. “There was a James Taylor song called ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ which is the first line of that,” George said around the time of Abbey Road’s release.
“And so then I thought of trying to change the words, but they were the words that came when I first wrote it. So in the end I just left it as that, and just called it ‘Something.'” It certainly didn’t bother Taylor at all.
Taylor said it was ‘flattering’ George used the line in ‘Something’
While a copied line in a song might strike some as bad form (or even plagiarism), it’s not a big deal for several reasons. For one, the lyric itself isn’t particularly remarkable. And it’s something John did with an Elvis line on “Run For Your Life.”
To Taylor, it was barely worth mentioning. “I don’t think he intentionally ripped anything off, and all music is borrowed from other music,” he said. “So, completely, I let it pass. If George either consciously or unconsciously took a line from one of my songs then I find it very flattering.”
Peter Asher, who produced Taylor’s debut record (and whose sister Jane dated Paul for several years), heard from Taylor firsthand on the subject. “James had written that song and George used that same line of lyrics, which James said was a compliment,” Asher told Billboard just this week.
And Taylor went out of his way to note how “borrowed” music was over the years. “James pointed out that in [his own] song he used the lyrics, ‘I feel fine,'” Asher said.
Exclusive: James Taylor announces audio memoir 'Break Shot' on Audible in early 2020 Barbara VanDenburgh USA TODAY
James Taylor has been telling his story through song for decades. Now, the celebrated singer-songwriter is trying something a little bit different.
Audible has announced Taylor’s upcoming Audible Original project, “Break Shot.” A deeply personal audio-only memoir, “Break Shot” is a unique storytelling and musical experience, combining a spoken-word performance with musical interludes recorded at Taylor’s Western Massachusetts home studio.
The “Fire and Rain” and “Carolina in My Mind” singer worked with music journalist Bill Flanagan to share the story of his life up to age 21, covering his childhood, difficult family life and musical development, taking listeners to the cusp of his inevitable superstardom. The memoir promises to offer unique insight into how Taylor’s upbringing inspired some of his most beloved and enduring songs.
“I’ve known Bill Flanagan and admired his writing forever. So I was happy and relieved that he had agreed to help me gather my thoughts and edit this autobiography of my beginnings, the on-ramp to the road I’ve traveled ever since,” Taylor said in a press release. “A pitcher needs a catcher, and a funny and intelligent collaborator can make you seem likewise.”
“Break Shot” is scheduled to be released early next year, though no specific date has been announced. It will be available exclusively on Audible.
Taylor, 71, is a Grammy Award-winning Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and the recipient of both the Kennedy Center Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is currently working on a new album, which is slated to be released Fantasy Records in early 2020. “Break Shot” will be Taylor’s first spoken-word performance.
James Taylor's audible book "Break Shot: My First 21 Years: An Audio Memoir" will be released on Jan. 31, 2020. See the post in Books forum - Keep in mind this is an audio ONLY memoir.
By the time James Taylor turned 21, he had signed to the Beatles’ fledgling record label, become a hard drug user and written some of the most iconic songs of the 20th century.
So when he partnered with Audible for an audio-only memoir, he decided that he’d have plenty of stories to share even if he only stuck to the first quarter of his life. The result: “Break Shot: My First 21 Years” — out Jan. 31 — details Taylor’s upbringing and how it paved the way for his musical career.
The journey takes him from a childhood spent in the idyllic green pastures of North Carolina to Massachusetts, where he reluctantly attended boarding school. He skipped out on college and decamped to London — where he hooked up with the Beatles — and finally moved to Los Angeles, where he became a fixture in the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene.
But the story stops just as the ’70s were commencing —meaning his relationship with Carly Simon, whom he wed in 1972, is not a part of it.
The Grammy winner, 71, is candid about other things in “Break Shot,” though — particularly his mental health. He recalls how he was plagued by depression as a high school student, ultimately leading him to check into McLean Hospital for nine months.
In this exclusive clip from Taylor’s Audible Original, the musician shares the upside of living in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital: He was deferred by the Army and didn’t have to fight in the Vietnam War.
“They put on white coats and walked me into the draft board in Town Hall at Central Square in Cambridge,” Taylor says in the clip. “They sat me down on a chair between them and announced to the town clerk, ‘James here is a mental patient. He’s a good kid but he’s [screwed] up. He’s here to register for the draft.’”[/border]
James Taylor Shares Insights Of New Album, ‘American Standard,’ with American Songwriter, Announces Tour Plans
Legendary singer-songwriter James Taylor is set to release his new album, American Standard on February 28, and will also be the cover story for the March issue of American Songwriter.
American Standard will be Taylor’s 19th studio album but his first release since Before This World, some five years ago. On American Standard, Taylor mixes new sounds with fresh meaning into his timelessness, creating works of art, while also reimagining some of the most beloved songs of the 20th century, making them his own as only Taylor can.
We were able to talk with Taylor in advance of the March publication about his work, and here are a few “bonus tracks” that won’t make the article:
AMERICAN SONGWRITER: The music is cosmic, but also it’s earthly. Music is empirical, whereas so much in these modern times is not. And you can only understand music by experiencing it in real-time; You have to live in it.
JAMES TAYLOR: Yes, that’s the other thing. That’s right. And it either hits you and engages you, or it doesn’t. You don’t have to make a judgment or an analysis of it. It either goes right to your heart or it doesn’t.
AS: Why do you think that is? Certain melodies are almost universally loved, such as “Moon River.” It starts with a melodic leap of a fifth. Do you think a melody needs a big range, or large leaps, to be great?
JT: No, not always. Sometimes something purposefully small and limited is great too. But you can’t deny a great leap, as in “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” That octave leap at the beginning of the tune is a great artifact.
AS: Yes, and so poignant. But is our response to that something intrinsic, or something we’ve learned? Cause it does go right to the heart.
JT: It’s hard to say. I do think that there is cultural bias, but I think that there is also a universality about it that can’t be denied. I think the answer is it’s both; there is a cultural predisposition, but there also is an innate universality about a melody that starts with the overtone series. The fact that when you take a long tube and blow into it, it first makes an octave, then it makes a fifth, then a second octave then a third, a fifth and a seventh, and so on. That’s the basis of it, that these frequencies organize themselves in an overtone series that is a physical reality which is empirically true. So, in the beginning is the octave, and then comes the fifth, and then comes the third, either major or minor, and then comes the seventh, and then you start getting really high overtones like if you were playing a French horn, like seconds and minor thirds.
In addition to the new album, Taylor has announced a major US tour with special guest Jackson Browne, kicking off on May 15th at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans. The tour will reach 26 cities, nationwide. The US tour follows his already announced coast to coast Canadian Tour with Bonnie Raitt. Taylor will also be returning to Fenway Park in Boston with his All-Star Bandon June 21st for a special show featuring Brandi Carlile and Shawn Colvin. For more information please visit https://tour.jamestaylor.com/.
Getting to James Taylor’s house in rural Western Massachusetts is like driving through one of his songs. It’s just after New Year’s and the Berkshires really do seem dreamlike on account of the frosting. A country road pierces the woods, leading to a small clearing. Go right and you’ll find the home that Taylor shares with his wife, Caroline “Kim” Smedvig, and 18-year-old twin sons Rufus and Henry. It’s cozy and unimposing, save for the autographed photo of the Obamas that shares shelf space with family vacation photos. Go left and you’ll see his rustic recording studio, a large cedar-shingled structure dubbed “TheBarn.” Taylor himself is inside, his lean and long frame doubled over as he tends to the wood stove. The personal ritual, a way of literally sharing his warmth, is his own private moment of Zen. He’s an island of serenity amid a storm of studio activity, exuding the gentle but commanding presence of a kind professor.
The 71-year-old has spent a lot of time in TheBarn recently, working hard on a pair of projects that revisit his roots. For many artists this is a simple nostalgia trip, but for Taylor it’s much more complicated. On Jan. 31 he will launch Break Shot: My First 21 Years, an Audible Original audio-only memoir that traces his challenging pre-fame life, set against the socio-political upheaval of the 1960s. The title is a billiards term, describing the moment when the cue ball smashes into the neat triangle formation, sending balls careening in all directions. “It felt as though there was a point when that happened to my family,” he tells PEOPLE. “Things went from ordered and predictable to chaotic in a very short period of time.”
He’ll follow the memoir up on Feb. 28 with his 19th studio album, American Standard, a largely acoustic take on the jazz and musical theater classics that provided a soundtrack to his childhood. A source of inspiration and comfort during his troubled Break Shot era, these tunes are his musical bedrock. “I admire the craft of the professional songwriter,” he explains. “Today we don’t really separate the song from the performer. But there was a time when these songs were going to be sung by lots of different people, and songwriters wrote them to serve a function in a musical — to establish a character, or to carry the action along, or to set the atmosphere for the time and place. I really envy that ability to apply your songwriting craft to a project rather than self-expression and personal experience, as I do.”
Taken together, these back-to-back releases represent the alchemy of Taylor’s artistry: intensely personal compositions written under the influence of 20th century masters. His inner turmoil and sophisticated melodies forged songs like “Fire & Rain,” “Carolina in My Mind” and “Frozen Man,” which have become American Standards in their own right.
For Taylor, revisiting his early years from a contemporary vantage point was “clarifying,” if not particularly pleasurable. He compares the process to Groundhog Day, one of his favorite movies. “It’s the idea that you have to keep on repeating the same thing until you can come away from it, finish it and go forward. Almost like the idea of reincarnation; having to go through the cycle until you get it right and then you can move on.”
Sweet Baby James Taylor’s present lifetime began on March 12th, 1948 in Boston. He was born into an intellectual clan driven by ambition and personal demons in equal measure. His father, Dr. Isaac Taylor, was chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital until he relocated the family to his native North Carolina, cradle of Taylor family ancestral trauma rooted in addiction, depression and an almost Gothic series of personal tragedies. Soon after they arrived, Dr. Taylor accepted a Naval position in Antarctica. For two years, Dr. Taylor’s urbane, Boston-bred wife, Trudy, acted as a single mother, raising their five children in an unfamiliar locale. Even after Dr. Taylor returned from the assignment (he went on to serve as Dean of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill), the rift between them never fully mended.
For a time, the rumbles of marital discontent were drowned out by music. The Taylor household was filled with the progressive folk of Pete Seeger, the raw blues of Lead Belly, the biting satire of Tom Lehrer, and show tunes by the likes of Lerner & Loewe and Rodgers & Hammerstein. Trudy even brought the kids up to New York City by train to catch the latest Broadway productions. “My mom really was very active in finding things for us to do,” he says. “She was very dedicated to educating us and exposing us to new things. She made sure we spoke a second language, made sure everybody got the experience of being on the stage with theater groups. And she made sure we played a musical instrument.” Taylor took up the cello, until the R&B records brought home by his older brother Alex spurred him to switch to guitar. But his repertoire wasn’t just the usual rocker setlist. “I played a lot of hymns and Christmas carols; whatever I could think of to express myself.”
His young life grew complicated as his family started to disintegrate around him. “My parents were in crisis,” he recalls. “Their marriage was coming apart. My dad’s drinking got out of control. He was very functional, but it overwhelmed him. All this happened at a moment when you really need your family to guide you and give you support.” As elder brother Alex rebelled against the collegiate path laid out by their parents, James found himself bearing the full weight of his family’s hopes.
The rising tensions quickly overwhelmed the 17-year-old. Enrolled at a prestigious Massachusetts boarding school, he sank into a deep depression and his grades plummeted. “I had been the ‘non-f— up kid’ who was probably going to make something of himself. My father was a star student and a great doctor. I was in the position of fulfilling the expectations of the family, but I wasn’t getting any information because they were in such crisis. I was an unhappy camper and I basically flamed out.”
At the advice of friends, he checked into McLean psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he was treated for 10 months. Looking back, he cites this as his “break shot” moment and spent much of the period numb and lost. As he would later sing on 1991’s “Copperline,” he was only living until the end of the week. “I really didn’t think of the future at all,” he says. “I didn’t think there would be a future.” But the pain was replaced with a sense of relief, and then a feeling of strength. He had broken away from the life prescribed by his family. Now, he was free. “There was a moment when it became clear to me that I could do music for a living. That was a wonderful thing. So I just followed the music.”
Me and My Guitar He followed it to New York City, where he met up with Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, a childhood friend and musical collaborator he’d met on his family’s summer trips to Martha’s Vineyard. Together they formed a band, The Flying Machine, and played a regular gig at a Greenwich Village club called The Night Owl.
Despite early promise, the group never get off the ground. The bitter disappointment drove Taylor to seek solace in heroin, and self-medication quickly escalated into addiction. Out of money and options, he made a desperate call to his father. Dr. Taylor rescued his boy, driving him 13 hours from New York back home to North Carolina. The act of fatherly devotion, later immortalized in Taylor’s song “Jump Up Behind Me,” gave him a new chance at life. “That was a moment when my dad was really there for me.”
After a period of recovery, music called him again, this time to London. “I went over with my guitar to visit a friend. I didn’t have plans to come back.” He arrived in late 1967, when the British capital was the epicenter of the Swinging Sixties. An intro from Kootch led him straight to the kings of the scene — the Beatles, who were seeking acts for their new record label, Apple. Before he knew it, Taylor went from busking in the street to auditioning for the most famous musicians on the planet. “I was nervous, but I was young. Your brain’s half-baked,” he laughs now. “I sat down and played ‘Something in The Way She Moves,’ for Paul [McCartney] and George [Harrison].”
The Fabs liked what they heard. (In fact, Harrison liked it so much that he borrowed the opening lines for his own composition, “Something,” a short time later.) They offered James a contract, but at 19 he was too young to sign. Once again, he reached out to his father, but this time he did so with pride. “Signing to the Beatles’ label got my dad’s attention. He said, ‘Maybe this thing’s going to work out for James after all.'”
With Apple A&R man Peter Asher acting as producer, Taylor recorded his first album in the fall of 1968 — literally following the Beatles into London’s Trident Studios after they had recorded “Hey Jude” and tracks for ‘The White Album.’ For a young artist, the experience was both intimidating and inspiring. “It was like, ‘Holy cow, I can’t believe this.’” His self-titled debut was released that December, but it got lost in the shuffle of Apple’s increasingly dire business problems. “I’m sure Apple was hemorrhaging money like crazy. Nobody was really paying attention to running it like a commercial venture. If it was going to break even, or even lose a little bit, that was fine with the Beatles. While it was open, it was a real resource. It was great.”
His time on the label would be short-lived, but Taylor’s London excursion paved the way for the success just around the corner. By 1969 he’d moved to Los Angeles with Asher to record his commercial breakthrough, Sweet Baby James. Though barely 20, he’d already endured enough pain to last several lifetimes, and he channeled it into the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Fire and Rain.” Inspired by the suicide of a friend and his own continued battle with addiction, the stunningly frank confessional became his first hit, establishing him as a leading musical voice for the 1970s.
Fanfare Though naïve — and perhaps foolish — to suggest that notoriety wasn’t at least part of his early goal, the sudden spotlight of celebrity caught Taylor off guard. “There was a meteoric change in how things were in my life and my position, [in regard to] the amount of attention I got. That was pretty confusing for a while,” he admits. The global superstardom that landed him on the cover of TIME in May 1971 came as an almost unintentional byproduct. His songs, born of intimate moments and written chiefly to provide comfort to himself, soothed millions who imbued them with their own private meanings. “We often use popular culture to assemble our own personal mythology,” he observes. “For instance, a heartbreak song would help you get over a romantic reversal or ‘Fire and Rain’ would help you get through a rough time in your freshman year in college, or losing a friend. We really do use these performances to support us. People tell me they’ve played ‘You Can Close Your Eyes’ at their mom’s funeral or that they got married to ‘How Sweet It Is’, or ‘You Are My Only One.’ When someone tells you that, that means you made something that really worked for them and had some use for them…An artist looks for that connection with somebody else.”
Long Ago and Far Away More than just a career, music became a method to manage the maelstrom inside himself. “When you have strong emotions and internal challenges, there’s something about expressing it, getting it out in front of you in some kind of form, that tends to exorcise or expiate and relieve it somehow.” Making music helped him make sense of the turmoil that seemed to plague his bloodline. A brief scan of his family history makes one wonder if a sense of trans-generational trauma was at play. Taylor wonders, too. “I think some thoughts, feelings and impressions are passed on,” he says. “My mother always had a terrible dream when she was a child of seeing someone hung, drawn and quartered, which used to be the worst way to administer capital punishment. She didn’t find out that such a thing had existed in history until she was almost finished with high school. When someone described that in a history class she said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been dreaming about this since I was 5!’ She always entertained the possibility that somebody among her forebears witnessed such a thing and it made such an indelible impression that it became passed on.”
The repeated themes that crop up in Taylor’s songs seem to be a manner of working out a psychic knot, not unlike his mother’s recurring dreams. “I have limited subject matter. I actually went through my songs at one point and categorized them. There are songs about my father, or that are strongly connected to my father. There are songs about my family at large. There are spirituals for agnostics, like ‘Up from Your Life,’ or ‘Gaia,’ or ‘Migration.’ There are some songs that sort of complain about show business: ‘Hey, Mister, That’s Me Up on the Jukebox,’ or ‘Company Man.’ Then [there are] certain kinds of love songs, and some recovery songs. I keep circling back and coming at things again and again.”
Hard Times For years, another recurring theme in his life was addiction. His struggles with heroin contributed to the collapse of his first marriage to fellow singer-songwriter Carly Simon, with whom he shares daughter Sally, 46, and son Ben, 43. “It’s unfair to have a relationship with someone with an addiction,” he says today. “It’s like there’s a third party in the room. I definitely was not ready to be a decent partner or a good parent.” The drug-related deaths of friends John Belushi and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson served as a wake-up call, and by 1983 he’d decided he’d had enough of the destructive repetition familiar to addicts. “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I’d had too many of what we call ‘jackpots,’ or moments when you’re just humiliated by your own behavior.”
He joined a 12-step program, which he considers “one of the most inspired developments of our modern times,” and put in the work. To heal, he went back to before the “break shot” occurred. “If you have a substance problem, it can be a case of arrested development. You don’t learn to risk yourself and then get rewards for it. You short-circuit all of that and go straight to the chemical reward in your brain. So you find yourself at the age of 35, as I did when I got clean, having to go back to when you were 18 years old and learn all that stuff. And it’s humbling.”
Hello, Old Friend In 2020, Taylor will celebrate 37 years sober and 25 years with Kim Smedvig, a musician and former director of marketing for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Married since February 2001, she’s been his muse for standout recent songs like “You and I Again,” in which Taylor playfully wonders whether they loved one another lifetime. “When I met Kim, it felt so familiar so immediately that it seemed like we had known each other before. I was so amazed by how synchronized we were and how much we had in common,” he says. “I wouldn’t change anything that I have done or any of the people I’ve been with. I love those women very much, but I’m really lucky I found Kim. That’s what it comes down to for me.”
Their twin sons are preparing to graduate the same Massachusetts school where Taylor dropped out, at the precise moment when his own life “went off the rails.” Yet he doesn’t fear that they’ll endure the same heartbreak he faced at that age. “They have much more strength than I did,” he says with obvious pride. “They do think of the future.”
That’s Why I’m Here The creative forces that first compelled him to write are still going strong. Sometimes they strike while he’s out for a drive. “I’ll have to pull over to the side of the road and put it down,” he says. More often it comes when he’s out for a walk. “That’s a gift out of the blue. Then there’s a second phase where I start to organize the music as an idea for a song,” He starts by making a notebook for each composition, writing lyric drafts on the right side and potential alternatives on the left. The refining continues for 10 pages or more. He repeats the process again and again, going through the cycle until he gets it right. And then he can move on.
Despite all of his success, he sees himself as a humble and dedicated craftsman, in the mold of the tunesmiths found on American Masters. Even though, for many, his music is completely singular, he feels he’s very much part of a continuum. He compares it to Japanese master artisans who produce woodblock prints, monochromatic brush paintings, textiles or pottery. “These art forms are ancient and have been traditionally practiced the same way forever and ever. The artisan will commit their life that art form. Maybe they’ll add one half of one percent change to it. I like that idea that you’re basically picking up something that somebody else put down, and you’re carrying it on. And then whoever wants to pick it up from there. I like that way of thinking about an artist’s life.”
The one half of one percent change that Taylor introduced to the popular songbook has left an indelible mark, earning him praise from the likes of Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan (a big fan of “Frozen Man”), Miles Davis (“You sing like a blind man!” he told him), Garth Brooks (who named his daughter after Taylor), Sting and so many others. He was invited to sing at Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, and performed for the administration more than any other artist, yet Taylor still takes humility to the level of fine art. When recalling the time Aretha Franklin cited him as the artist she’d most like to sing with, Taylor starts to wonder if she was referring to another James Taylor, the lead singer for Kool & the Gang. He is, by all appearances, completely serious — and almost certainly mistaken.
Revisiting his own history though Break Shot and American Standard has helped Taylor make sense of his own tumultuous past and how he broke his family’s cycle of unhappiness through the clarity of music. In this lifetime, he got it right. “An artist is forced by their life circumstances to find a new way of dealing with a problem, and sometimes they blaze a trail that leads to a solution — one that other people can use. It’s hugely gratifying. All I ever wanted to do was to play music and to have people enjoy it, occasionally use it in their lives, and make it part of their world. That’s a great feeling.”
For more on James Taylor’s road to fame and peace through music, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE — on newsstands Friday.
A December Night - Here is an interesting read about the time James and Joni Mitchell went Christmas caroling in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It's a very well written story and quite long, but worth a full read.
Here's an excerpt: A year or so before my mother died in 2013, a vague and ancient memory of that Christmas gathering popped into my head, though I was coming to think that my recollection may have been apocryphal. I had become suspicious of myself as an inveterate embroiderer, the kind of anecdotalist who might trim the truth from a story the way you’d tear the dead leaves from a head of lettuce. Better story, better salad.
I asked my mother if she remembered going over to the Taylors’ to hear James and some woman sing one night a long time ago. She laughed. She still lived in Chapel Hill in the same house, more than a decade after my father had died. She was nearly eighty-five. “That sounds about right,” she said.
“So it happened?”
“Well, I think so.”
“Who was his friend?” I asked. “Was it Joni Mitchell?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, still laughing, the kind of laughter that was a cloud, intent on fogging up all factuality, and ending my interrogation.
It did seem like this would have been an anecdotal miracle—my parents hanging out with James and Joni. And not even caring about the richness of that. Not even knowing that in the cultural universe that was forming then, they could have capitalized on such an evening, at least with my generation.
“Do you remember anything about that night?” I asked.
“I’m sure it was very nice,” she said.
She died soon afterward. I came to believe that I had invented the story of the Christmas sing-along because I had a tendency for mythologizing the past, for wanting a history more glittering than reality. I thought of that gathering in the terms of the last line of a John Cheever story: “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” But maybe it was all bullshit.
A few months ago, in the modern way, I decided to google James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Chapel Hill. A website called “Chapel Hill Memories” came up, with a thread revealing that decades ago, David Perlmutt, the esteemed North Carolina journalist and, as it turned out, a Taylor family friend from childhood on, appeared to have gone caroling with James and Joni around the Morgan Creek neighborhood. I found my way to him, and he told me the story of that night. Mythic it may have been, but it also turns out to be true.
The gathering took place on a bristly cold December night for Chapel Hill. The evening started with a group of carolers, including James and his girlfriend of the moment—yes, it was Joni Mitchell—lighting out from the Taylors’ and rambling through the neighborhood from house to house. Ike went along, too, his voice resonant and booming. It would have been just like my parents to join in such a sing-along. My mother had a beautiful voice, and as my father used to say about singers like himself: If you can’t sing, at least sing loud.
Apparently, James Taylor is releasing some vault material on 9/18. He has been teasing it with 2 videos so far. It is hard to tell what format it will take. I haven't seen anything on release dates of CDs or DVDs? Hoping it will be released in a format us collectors want.
On Sept. 7 he posted this video:
Then on Sept. 14 he followed up with this video:
It appears to be a vault video from the BBC. I am just wondering if it is going to be a digital/streaming thing? I guess we will know in a couple of days?
It looks like whatever is being released will be on James Taylor's youtube channel. He posted this video about an hour ago. I would have liked a DVD or CD, but I guess it's nice of him if he is going to post archive material for fans on his channel?
Any guesses about what James will be launching tomorrow? Here's a hint: you might want to subscribe to his YouTube channel https://youtube.com/JamesTaylor #JT #JamesTaylor
Last edited by ericsen on Fri Dec 18, 2020 2:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
Okay, mystery solved. So far, one video of "With A Little Help From My Friends" has been uploaded to the JT channel on youtube. It is in very clear video and audio. That video is the introduction to the BBC video concert of James from the early 70's. I imagine more of that full video or clips from it will be uploaded to the channel.
On Dec. 20 JT will post the full 1970 BBC concert on youtube, available for 48 hours.
SET LIST: With a Little Help From My Friends (Lennon/McCartney) Fire and Rain Rainy Day Man Steamroller Greensleeves (Traditional) Highway Song Tube Rose Snuff (Arthur Smith) Carolina in My Mind - Long Ago and Far Away Riding On a Railroad You Can Close Your Eyes
James Taylor says “arrogance of youth” helped him audition in front of Paul McCartney and George Harrison
James Taylor has spoken about auditioning to join The Beatles‘ label Apple Records in the late 1960s.
The singer-songwriter said in a new interview that he believes his youth – besides his musical talent – helped him have the confidence to sell himself.
“I had some kind of competence and the arrogance of youth, without which nobody would ever do anything, because you’d hedge your bets,” Taylor recalled to GuitarWorld of auditioning in front of Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
“There’s a stage in our development where you’re allowed to do impossible things, which is why the military looks to people about that age. You can talk people into doing things that if you were asked when you were 35, you’d say, ‘No thanks, I’ll pass on that.’
“I also knew that it was somehow good. It worked for me, and I was a music connoisseur. I thought, ‘This stuff could go somewhere. I want somebody to hear this.’ I’ve had that feeling a few times, at different points in my life,” he said.
Taylor also explained what it felt like to release his 1968 debut self-titled album on The Beatles’ label.
“It was just otherworldly, because I was a huge Beatles fan. And they were at the very height of their powers. They just kept going, kept growing. So, to be in London, the first person signed to their label in 1968, was really like catching the big wave. It was unbelievable,” he said.
Meanwhile, Taylor is set to embark on a UK tour next year. He released his 20th studio album ‘American Standard’ in February 2020, with the album going on to win Best Tradition Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys.
‘Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name’ Concert Doc in Works A new concert documentary on Carole King and James Taylor’s creative partnership and decades-long friendship is in the works via CNN Films and HBO Max. Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name is slated to premiere on CNN.
The Frank Marshall-directed and co-produced film revisits footage of the duo’s concerts through the decades, from their 1970 performance at West Hollywood’s Troubadour, to them reprising that concert during a six-date run for the venue’s own 50th anniversary in 2007, alongside performances from their 2010 reunion tour. King and Taylor reflect on their five-decades of collaborating and friendship during the documentary.
“I’ve been listening to and playing their music my whole life,” Marshall, who recently helmed The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart and The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash, said in a statement. “So it’s especially meaningful to me and such an honor to be able to put together this special reunion concert by these two extraordinarily gifted friends.”
The film includes performances of “So Far Away,” “I Feel the Earth Move,” and “You’ve Got a Friend” from 2007. Their Troubadour reunion led to King and Taylor making plans for their 2010 world tour, Taylor reveals in the documentary per a release.
For all three concert eras featured — 1970, 2007, and 2010 — the pair were backed by the Section, comprising musicians Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel, and Lee Sklar, who also participate in interviews for the documentary.
On October 30th, King will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for the second time, making her the third woman in its history alongside Stevie Nicks and Tina Turner to achieve that status. Taylor is currently on tour with Jackson Browne. https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/ca ... ar-AAPI4oW
Carole King and James Taylor Documentary 'Just Call Out My Name' Airs Jan. 2 at 9pm ET/PT on CNN
Join James Taylor and Carole King for an unforgettable night of music!
'Just Call Out My Name', a documentary about the creative pairing of Carole and James, will air on January 2 at 9pm ET/PT on CNN!
Excerpts from the 2010 Troubadour Reunion Tour, and behind the scenes exclusive interviews are included. "We had a musical language in common," said Carole " It was like we had been playing together our entire lives".
James Taylor shares a surprising backstory to one of his greatest hits, "You've Got A Friend", which also won a Grammy for 'Song of the Year'.
The concert documentary was directed by Frank Marshall and will be available on demand at a later date on HBO Max.
Variety announced in October 2021 that the documentary has been commissioned by CNN and HBO Max.
Carole King and James Taylor Documentary 'Just Call Out My Name' Airs Jan. 2 at 9pm ET/PT on CNN
Join James Taylor and Carole King for an unforgettable night of music!
'Just Call Out My Name', a documentary about the creative pairing of Carole and James, will air on January 2 at 9pm ET/PT on CNN!
Excerpts from the 2010 Troubadour Reunion Tour, and behind the scenes exclusive interviews are included. "We had a musical language in common," said Carole " It was like we had been playing together our entire lives".
James Taylor shares a surprising backstory to one of his greatest hits, "You've Got A Friend", which also won a Grammy for 'Song of the Year'.
The concert documentary was directed by Frank Marshall and will be available on demand at a later date on HBO Max.
Variety announced in October 2021 that the documentary has been commissioned by CNN and HBO Max.
interesting that they tout 'you've got a friend' one of the very songs he did that he did not write, king did.
_________________ Incorrectly is the only word that when spelled correctly is still spelled incorrectly.
Carole King and James Taylor Documentary 'Just Call Out My Name' Airs Jan. 2 at 9pm ET/PT on CNN
Join James Taylor and Carole King for an unforgettable night of music!
'Just Call Out My Name', a documentary about the creative pairing of Carole and James, will air on January 2 at 9pm ET/PT on CNN!
Excerpts from the 2010 Troubadour Reunion Tour, and behind the scenes exclusive interviews are included. "We had a musical language in common," said Carole " It was like we had been playing together our entire lives".
James Taylor shares a surprising backstory to one of his greatest hits, "You've Got A Friend", which also won a Grammy for 'Song of the Year'.
The concert documentary was directed by Frank Marshall and will be available on demand at a later date on HBO Max.
Variety announced in October 2021 that the documentary has been commissioned by CNN and HBO Max.
interesting that they tout 'you've got a friend' one of the very songs he did that he did not write, king did.
Here's a clip of the back story. The line you just call out my name from "You've Got A Friend" is a most appropriate song/title for a documentary about the musical partnership/friendship of James Taylor and Carole King. Carole very generously allowed James to release the song first, which became his no. 1 single. Another back story I have seen on "You've Got A Friend" is Carole said she was inspired to write it off of the line "I've seen lonely times, when I could not find a friend" from James' "Fire and Rain".
Users browsing this forum: Amazon [Bot], Apple [Bot] and 1 guest
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot post attachments in this forum
