James Taylor
speaker
52 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
James Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour · From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar · 18 Dec 2024
podcast
But those first songs weren't written with an audience in mind, except in the most general sense. They really were personal, like diary entries or poems that you write for yourself. But then when you take the stuff to market, and engage the music business and the popular culture and all that stuff. That's a very interesting thing to try to negotiate and to go public with it and to make a living.
I'm sure that writing has a similar, there's a similar thing to it when you take your work to market.
I guess Something in the Way She Moves is probably the first song that I... I had written Knocking Around the Zoo and a song called Sunshine, Sunshine before Something in the Way She Moves. And actually all the songs on the first album, some of them before, some of them after Something in the Way She Moves, but that was the first one that I thought really worked as a song.
You know, it just wasn't very carefully considered ahead of time. All of those cover tunes that I would do were things that would be thought of at the spur of the moment in the recording studio after we had already recorded two songs that day. That's the way it was with How Sweet It Is. That's the way it was with Handyman. And we're going to be paying for it anyway.
So you still feel strong and energetic. And Cooch says, why don't we try How Sweet It Is?
It sure did. You know, I mentioned the Broadway stuff, the folk music and the light classics that my parents listened to and some satirical stuff, Tom Lehrer. The next level of that was what my brother Alex brought into the house. He brought Ray Charles and Joe Tex and Don Covey and the Hot Nuts, which were a beach music band. And his stuff extended into some light jazz.
And one of them was that great... album recorded in 1963 in three days here in Manhattan. Astrid Gilberto, Joan Gilberto, Girl from Ipanema. And that stuff had a huge effect on me. I loved the chords, I loved the, you know, for a guitarist, that Brazilian thing is just a rich vein to get into. And man, I couldn't get enough. So, and I, you know, that song more recently, the...
The idea of that song, it was sort of like one-note samba. It's just that . And then the changes move underneath it, and that's a very Brazilian, very Jobim thing to do. So I was hugely impressed by that stuff, and it was a great source for me. What happened is I developed a little bit of a guitar style from playing Christmas carols and hymns from school.
God, that's Deutschland uber alles, too, isn't it? That is.
No, I only came to realize that later. We can cut, we can edit right here.
So, yeah. No, the... I played hymns, I played Christmas carols, and it gave me that sort of very bedrock kind of...
And from then, I fell into The Beatles and Jobim. And it really, I found that I had enough of a technique to be able to adapt those things into it. But the technique itself, I would I think I'm playing Ray Charles. I think I'm playing Joe Beam. I think I'm playing Paul McCartney, Lennon McCartney. I think I'm playing Holland Dozie or Holland.
I think I'm, you know, but actually, or Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye, but it actually is put through this sort of narrow filter of my technique.
And it makes it sound like James Taylor, like Carol's tune up on the roof, which we did all summer long, and we went back and forth between her version of it and mine. It started being like a...
When this whole world starts a gettin' me down And people are just too much for me to feed Well, when I adapted the tune and we did it, it was like a When this whole world starts a gettin' me down And people are just too much for me to feed I'll climb way up to the top of the stairs and all my cares they just lay right in the... La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la da da
They were circles around the sun, never give up, never slow down, never grow old, never ever die young, synchronized with the rising moon. Even with the evening star, they were true love, all written in stone. They were never alone, they were never that far apart. And we who couldn't bear to believe they might make it, we got to close our eyes and
To cut up our losses into doable doses And ration our tears and sighs You can see them on the street on a Saturday night Everyone used to run them down. They're a little too sweet. They're a little too tight. They're not enough tough for this town, no. We couldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole. No, it didn't seem to rattle at all. They refused to gather body and soul.
Had much more with their backs up against them. Hold them up, hold them up, never do let them fall. Pray to the dust and the rust and the ruin that names us, shames us, claims us all. Guess it had to happen someday soon. There wasn't nothing to hold them down. They would rise from all this like a big balloon. Take the sky and forsake the ground. Guess other hearts were broken.
I know other dreams ran dry But our golden ones sailed on and on To another land beneath another sky Let other hearts be broken Let other dreams run dry Let our golden ones sailed on and on To another land beneath another sky Beneath another sky Hold them on, won't you hold them on?
Thank you. You Never Die Young. I'm going to play that first song, very early song, first presentable song, I think, that I ever wrote.
Showing 21–40 of 52 · page 2 of 3
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