Adam Howard

speaker

179 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 7 Jul

Adam Howard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The New Yorker Radio Hour · From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar · 18 Dec 2024 podcast

It had a certain... It hints at things you will write, if not... Everybody, I think everybody here knows that you went off to London eventually and you recorded that first record. How old were you when you did that, James?

Well, speaking of that, one of the things that was so potent about your music when, as a very young man, people first started paying attention to it, was that it seemed to be so amazingly emotionally accessible. It seemed to sum up so many of the longings of a generation, so many people, a song like Rainy Day Man or...

Something's Wrong, and then more famously in the next go-round and the next group of songs, Fire and Rain and those things. Was it strange and difficult to see your own experience turning into songs and then becoming these kinds of universal vehicles for other people's feelings? Very strange indeed.

But it had to be, you were saying, it had to be peculiar. Yes, of course, it's true for everyone, but a writer, maybe six people, read it. When a musician genuinely develops a following, it's millions of people who see your music as their internal, not just as your journal, but as their internal diary. And that's an extraordinarily rich time.

What's the first song of that body of work that you feel, a lot of it you still perform, that you feel is strong, is a finished song that you feel good about?

You still do material from that period, and I know you've talked about it a lot. But one of the things that interests me, if you don't mind, just to fast forward a little bit, as a listener of yours, as a follower of yours, one of the things that seemed to me to be true, and I wonder if it was true, is that in the kind of mid-'70s, you were searching a bit for a sound for work.

And then beginning in the late 70s, you started doing a couple of things. You started doing covers for the first time. You started doing Motown covers, how sweet it is and so on. And it seemed as though there was a kind of rebirth through sort of being free to do other people's work as well as yours and sort of shedding the skin of Sweet Baby James and of that material.

Was that a fantasy or did you feel some of that?

You have that beautiful song, Only a Dream in Rio. Did Brazilian music open up your ears and your musical vocabulary?

That's the part you want to keep quiet if you can, James. That influence. Sorry, yeah.

western musical Bach harmony, that kind of thing.

Of your guitar fingering.

All that inner voicing of the, so now we know.

Beatles chords, Beatles beats, Brazilian chords, and Bach harmonies, and you have James Taylor too. It's just too painful to have James Taylor up here and not hear you play. Would you play a few things for us? Let's go.

I have been playing, I have two children, and for the last 16 years, I've been playing You Can Close Your Eyes for them every night when they go to sleep. And they always ask me, Daddy, did you make up that song? And I say, I did, actually. But now they're here tonight, and they'll be aware that I didn't, actually. James did.

But I wonder if on behalf of this audience, who I know are all moving their fingers, would you teach me to play that song properly? I will, indeed, yes.

Is there a guitar? Could I get one?

Thank you.

So this is, so I'll take it home tonight. Now, we're in D, which Miles Davis said was the key that belonged to you.

The oracle had spoken. The oracle had spoken, so that's it. And D is your key. So we start on D. The sun is short, it's sinking down.

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