A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
James Taylor has had a long and successful music career. After four-plus decades of making music, he’s recorded a string of classics including “You’ve Got A Friend,” “Fire and Rain,” and “Carolina On My Mind,” and he’s sold more than 100 million albums.
Taylor was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 and has won five Grammy awards. But 2015 marked a year of firsts for the singer-songwriter.
Taylor released his first album of original songs in more than 13 years, called “Before This World.” It debuted at number one on the Billboard charts — another first for Taylor. The album is now nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album for this year’s Grammy awards.
The Frame's John Horn talks with James Taylor about how his music affects him, growing older and how he still loves to perform live.
Your music has a profound and emotional effect on listeners. When writing and performing your songs, do you experience your music the way your fans do?
I think that listening to music is so close to the experience of writing it and making it. If you're a songwriter or musician, you know that it's 95% the same thing to listen to music as to make it. As a non-songwriter or non-musician, that may be hard to believe, but it really is. I think the thing that's most compelling when we're performing live with an audience is that there's this sort of shared experience and there's something that happens when you take this emotional ride. It can actually be pretty intense and I'm really strung out on that. I love that communal thing that happens at a concert.
The first song on your album, "Today Today Today," sets the tone of the album. What kind of tone did you want to set for this album and what is this song trying to address?
Well, you know, sequencing an album is really important. The way the song sets up the next song and what the dynamic is, and that's really an important thing to get right. But the song, "Today Today Today," is — on the surface — about getting started and about actually recording this album — as we used to say, "cutting a side."
It is reflective in a way. It talks about starting a new project, trying to put down these songs for my audience. And I'm reminded that this is the sixteenth time I've done this. It's something I've learned to do and gotten better at over time. It is my creative process, so some of it is reflective, looking back over the entire thing.
I think one of the surprising things about getting older and being in the second half of your life is that when I was 20, I couldn't imagine that a 65-year-old was the same person at all. In my mind, they were different species, there was just no point of communication. I think that what you find out as time goes by is that you become who you are in your late teens, maybe, and maybe even sooner than that. That's the person you will be when you're 80.
It just becomes a little harder to reach down and tie your shoe laces.
[Laughs] Yeah, exactly! That's the ultimate test of your character is how you're going to age, but that song, "Today Today Today," does talk about the present moment of getting started and setting forth and, at the same time, it connects the experience with what I've been doing for a lifetime.
The song "Watching Over Me" talks about relapse. There's a lyric that says, "Thought I ought to be dead and gone," yet it's written with this upbeat melody. It's actually kind of an uplifting, feel-good song.
Well, yeah it is. That theme of recovery is so central to me and it's such an everyday part of my life that I've written a lot of recovery songs. There's one, sometimes two on every album since I sobered up 1983. It is a joyful thing, and that particular verse about the damage done is about the wreckage — about the guilt and shame that accompanies that kind of out-of-control life — which is how you know you have a problem because you've lost control of it.
I think that that's something you have to engage and hopefully get beyond, because that kind of negative baggage can really pull you down and send you back for another lap through the mud. I think it's that sort of recovery song I guess.
As people who listen to your music grow older and things around their lives change, the songs they have listened to of yours take on new meaning. It could be "Carolina In My Mind" or "Sweet Baby James." Is there a song for you that keeps finding new meaning as you grow older?
It's funny, there are some songs that I didn't really understand what they meant until I lived with them for a year or so. I know that sounds strange because, after all, I did create them and summon them up and put them down on paper. But sometimes you get the feeling that you're channeling something or that something is coming from a mysterious place that's beyond your conscious comprehension.
There's a song, "Never Die Young," that was one of these songs that just ... I woke up in the morning, sat on my stairway in a little patch of sunlight coming through the window, and the song just came out, it just presented itself. It took me a long time to really understand what the song was about. That's a song that's changed over time — listening to it and performing it, it sort of emerges what it means.
James Taylor's latest album is "Before This World."