James Taylor

New York Times November 7, 2006
On the Road Again, a Sensitive Singer- Songwriter (and One Man Band)
By ALAN LIGHT

At one point in James Taylor’s show on his current One Man Band tour, which stops at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Thursday and Friday, he brings out a drum machine he built himself. No, he hasn’t turned into some kind of electronics wizard, and he’s not doing a hip-hop remix of “Carolina in My Mind” either.

“When people think of a drum machine, they think of something that’s made up of bits and bytes,” Mr. Taylor said, “but I designed and built this Rube Goldberg thing, this big, kinetic sculpture — bigger than a piano. It’s a revolving drum with big fins attached to the outside that activate and actually play the drums for four bars. It scared the hell out of me the first time we used it, but it works great.”

Though it has been decades since Mr. Taylor went on the road as a solo act — well, almost solo; he’s accompanied onstage by the pianist Larry Goldings — he wanted to do something more than just sit on a stool and play his songs. “I needed things in between, stories, film,” he said. “So we’ve tried to enhance the show and leaven it. But we did it all locally, with friends and family. We didn’t call Las Vegas and ask the Cirque du Soleil expert to come in. It gives it a certain shabbiness, but a certain cohesion too.”

The One Man Band performances offer a look back at the career of an artist who, perhaps more than anyone else, defined the image of the solitary singer-songwriter. Mr. Taylor, 58, has been enjoying working at this smaller scale again and said he felt liberated to find new ways to approach old songs. “I’m playing my first electric guitar solo in 30 years,” he said with a laugh.

On an unseasonably warm afternoon recently, Mr. Taylor sipped coffee in his publicist’s Manhattan office and removed a vest from over a well-worn mock turtleneck jersey. His conversation is much like his songs, soft-spoken and deliberate. It was John Lennon’s birthday, and Mr. Taylor fondly reminisced about his days as the first artist signed to the Beatles’ Apple Records in 1968. (When he made his first record, he shared the studio with the Beatles, working by day as they were making the album almost universally referred to as “The White Album” through the night.)

Mr. Taylor seemed excited, even a bit relieved, about his solo tour. “It’s how I started, and it has an immediacy and an intimacy,” he said. “When we go out with a 12-man band with horns and singers, it depends on a certain economy of scale. But when I’m playing to 15,000 people, there’s some question of how far you can expand yourself. A lot of these songs are well placed in a smaller venue, and there’s something very calibrating about just playing with piano and guitar.”

There are two new Taylor releases in stores: out today is “A MusiCares Person of the Year Tribute Honoring James Taylor,” a concert on DVD that will also be broadcast on Nov. 29 as part of the “Great Performances” series on PBS. “James Taylor at Christmas,” a slightly expanded version of an album he put out exclusively through Hallmark stores last year, was released last month.

“We did ‘Jingle Bells’ as a blues, ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ with a Latin, bossa nova thing,” he said. It also includes his version of Joni Mitchell’s “River,” a song recently covered on new albums by Sarah McLachlan and Madeleine Peyroux.

The tribute concert, filmed at the MusiCares “Person of the Year” dinner in February, features artists including Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, Sheryl Crow and Sting performing Mr. Taylor’s songs. Mr. Taylor himself sings three songs, including “Fire and Rain.”

He said he was extremely skeptical about the idea at first. “This isn’t football,” he said, “and one of the reasons I do it is that it’s not a competitive sport.” But as the lineup came together and the evening progressed, he said he felt “very bucked up, very encouraged and supported by the entire endeavor.”

He singled out Mr. Springsteen’s performance of the song “Millworker” — a relative obscurity, taken from the 1978 Broadway show “Working” — as a standout. “His version was much more fierce and furious, where my version is more resigned and a little more whimsical,” Mr. Taylor said.

In his introduction Mr. Springsteen called Mr. Taylor “an authentic Southern voice.” It’s a surprising characterization: Mr. Taylor grew up in North Carolina but has become very much identified with New England, especially the Boston area, where he lives. “I think he wanted to say that there was something other than country-western music that comes out of the South,” Mr. Taylor said. “There’s also Stephen Foster and William Faulkner and William Styron — not that I put myself in that league.”

It’s been four years since “October Road,” Mr. Taylor’s last new album, and he’s starting to think about his next project, which he hopes to have out in a year or so. “I’ve got a lot of starts on songs I’m feeling pretty excited about,” he said. “I think I’d like to keep it pretty spare this time. That seems to be working for me these days.”