How To Book James Taylor For Your Event
James Taylor
may be available for your next special event!
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
-- inducted 2000
Songwriters Hall of Fame
-- inducted 2000
 With
a career that spans more than twenty-five years, it's no great surprise
that James Taylor's musical influence has reached just about
every corner of the globe. Since leading the singer-songwriter movement
in the early 70s, JT has gone on to refine his style, changing over the
years while still maintaining the musical craftsmanship that garnered so
much attention early in his career.
One of my new songs has been under construction for
over a decade. It's called "Another Day." Wake up Susie, put
your shoes on and walk with me into this light. I seem to write a lot
about going from darkness to light. Like longing, it's a theme I find
myself returning to again and again. I state it and then come back to it
and then come back to it. Like a dog barking. Like a folksinger in the
electronic age singing a refrain. It's only the verses that change. So
perhaps I only imagine that I get some sense of closure this time.
It
was on the island of Montserrat that I first tried to cut the song, in
Air Studio's state-of-the-art room. But I'd only written the middle
section and I was too raw and strung out then to complete it. Twelve
years later... on another island, Martha's Vineyard, it finally became
part of this new album, "Hourglass."
 This time the room was just a room, baffled with
lo-tech plywood and plate glass. Seven of us holed up for two weeks in
that chilly summer house. It was May and we were covered with ticks.
Finally, this morning I'm feeling whole again. It was a hell of a night.
I travel enough that it's hard to choose a new place
to call home. Martha's Vineyard might not seem like an easy place to
make a record, and I suppose it's not a very sensible place to live. But
my relationship with the place is mostly a matter of history and not
necessarily what you find there today. So it's home, at least by
default, and, with so much of my life in transition, it was the place I
wanted to return to. I had lost my brother, Alex, and my father, and my
long-time producer and best friend, Don Grolnick. My manager, Peter
Asher, took a job with the record company; and my marriage ended.
Martha's Vineyard seemed like protection.
I wanted to avoid the big recording studio with its
constant messages from the market place, where technology takes priority
and you can hear the meter running. By comparison, moving the operation
to the Vineyard was not so daunting. I told Frank to think of it as an
experiment – a demo session – and anything we got to keep
would be gravy (though I hated saying "gravy").
Frank Filipetti was producer-engineer. He was assisted
by Jill Dell' Abate. John Morrison came up from Maine to provide
technical support. The musicians were Carlos Vega on drums, Jimmy
Johnson on bass, and Clifford Carter on keyboards. I played guitar and
sang.
It took two weeks to lay down the tracks for all
thirteen songs. That's how long I believe an album should take to make,
but it has been many years since I participated in a process as easy and
focused as this one. Although we took it to New York and Los Angeles and
back again and overdubbed solo performances by Michael Brecker,
Shawn
Colvin, Mark O'Connor, Yo Yo Ma,
Branford Marsalis, Edgar Meyer,
Sting
and Stevie Wonder, the album is basically what we recorded on the
Vineyard.
Not all the songs are so plainly self-soothing as
"Another Day," but most of them are about moving from darkness
to light, about regeneration, emerging and transformation and
consolation. Consolation for what? Take your pick. I'm told that this is
what many people respond to in my songs, so I imagine the particulars of
my own life are in sync with some collective process. These songs are my
bio, and its outline is well known to my audience.
Not even that long ago, Martha's Vineyard was a
lovely, quiet island and I was a fifteen year old kid with a guitar,
hoping some girls would be interested in me if I played. Record
companies were small and oddball outfits, and they were really happy to
sell 10,000 records. Making music was not a profession, it was a hobby,
something you did instead of having a career. We can spend a great deal
of time mourning our youth. Or not. More optimistically, we can see the
recent past as having triggered a need to recreate our themes - trick
ourselves into being ourselves again, even if we are a folksinger in the
electronic age.
Hit songs include --
- (What A) Wonderful World
- Handy Man
- How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)
- Shower The People
- You've Got A Friend
- Devoted To You
- Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight
- Everyday
- Fire And Rain
- Little More Time With You
- Long Ago And Far Away
- Her Town Too
- Mexico
- Mockingbird
- Only One
- Your Smiling Face
- Up On The Roof
- That's Why I'm Here
- On The 4th of July
- Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha
James Taylor may be available for your next special event!
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Genre: Rock 1
Styles:
.Adult Contemporary. / AdultContemporary
.Classic Rock. / ClassicRock
.Pop/Rock. / PopRock
.Folk-Rock. / FolkRock
.Soft Rock. / SoftRock
.Singer/Songwriter. / SingerSongwriter
.AM Pop. / AMPop
.Easy Listening. / EasyListening
.Acoustic Guitar. / AcousticGuitar
.Orchestra charts available. / OrchestraCharts
Years active:
x60s, x70s, x80s, x90s, x00s, x10s, x20s
Born: ..in Massachusetts / born nMassachusetts
Born: ..in Boston / born BostonMA
Born: Mar 12, 1948
Based: ..in US
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