James Taylor’s songs are so familiar that they seem to have always existed. Onstage at the New Yorker Festival, in 2010, Taylor peeled back some of his influences—the Beatles, Bach, show tunes, and Antônio Carlos Jobim—and played a few of his hits, even giving the staff writer Adam Gopnik a quick lesson.This segment originally aired on July 7, 2017.
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The Catholic Church was made for this moment. I think 2,000 years ago, the Catholic Church basically anticipated TikTok, Instagram, X. You don't have those little Swiss guard outfits and think they're not being photographed. Oil painting is not enough.
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From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of The New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you're a James Taylor fan, what would you ask him? If you could ask him anything, the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik got his chance.
James, this evening runs the risk of being an episode in the Chris Farley show. I don't know if you remember Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, when he would have people he admired on, he would just say, do you remember when you wrote Fire and Rain? And say, that was great. And I could go through everything you've done and simply stand here and sweat and say, that was great.
But I will try at least to find out why it's all been so great. Thinking about your music, one of the things that's always sort of stunned me about it is when you first appeared, you had a distinctive way of playing the guitar, which wasn't like anybody else. It's distinctive kind of voicings. And you had an amazing harmonic language.
You know, I always think when I go through your sheet music and see that a wonderful song like Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight starts with an E minor ninth chord. and then goes to a major seventh chord. Those weren't the C, A minor, F, G progressions of pop music at the time. Did you study music? How was it that the language of music came to be the language you speak so naturally?
I studied cello when I was a kid. My parents thought it would be good for... There were five of us. So I got the cello and I played for about four years badly, reluctantly. I was a bad student and it never gave me the kind of feedback that I needed to have it take off and have its own momentum, its own reason to continue. But all along, I noticed that the guitar was going to be it for me.
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