BOSTONGLOBE.COM — James Taylor performs at the White House

By Mark Shanahan

Singer James Taylor was among the performers at a special concert attended by President Obama in the East Room of the White House this week. JT and his wife, Kim, ventured from their Berkshires abode to take part in PBS’s “In Performance at the White House,” which included performances by Queen Latifah, Smoky Robinson, Usher, Esperanza Spalding, and Carol Burnett, among others. If you didn’t catch the live stream of the show, it airs on PBS Jan. 8.

source: http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2015/10/15/james-taylor-performs-white-house/Bgj9LiiDzK3E3Xtzz7g44K/story.html

BOSTONGLOBE.COM — Gertrude Taylor, 92; mother of Taylor singing clan

By Bryan Marquard

For Trudy Taylor, no aspirations were beyond reach, and she made sure her children shared her view of life’s expansive opportunities.

“The thing that stands out most to me about Trudy Taylor was that she took any vision you had about yourself completely seriously,” her son Livingston said by phone. “I remember at the age of 6 telling her that I wanted to dig a swimming pool in the front yard. And I studied her face as only a child can study a mother’s face, looking for signs of incredulity. I did not see the slightest trace then or ever. She supported her children’s visions without reservation. It was a remarkable trait.”

As four of her five children — Alex, James, Livingston, and Kate — turned to music, achieving renown and fame, Mrs. Taylor charted her own path artistically as a painter and a weaver, a photographer and gardener. A world traveler, she trekked in the Himalayas and visited China several times, at one point photographing and cataloging the architecture and kitchens of rural homes. The daughter of a fisherman, “she sailed across the Atlantic a couple of times, up and down the Caribbean, to Newfoundland and among the ice floes up there,” her son James said in an interview. “That was in her blood, too. She was a sailor.”

Mrs. Taylor died Saturday in her Martha’s Vineyard home overlooking Stonewall Pond in Chilmark. She was 92.

“She was quite an artistic person, really,” said her son Hugh. “She was an avid photographer for a period of her life and then moved on once she mastered that. That was a fairly common part of her practice: She would get good at something and then move on to something else, and not frivolously.”

Among Mrs. Taylor’s talents was spinning wool with friends, using material from the Vineyard and elsewhere. The designs on apparel she created often were inspired by “landscapes she could see out her windows, the different colors in different seasons,” Hugh said.

“There wasn’t anything that she tried that she didn’t master,” Mrs. Taylor’s daughter, Kate, wrote in a tribute. “Her artistic flair was manifest in her home — the furnishings, the table she set, the food she served, the art she surrounded herself with.”

To her children, Mrs. Taylor passed along her sense that all things were possible. “She made sure to expose us to all kinds of things,” James said. “She was constantly signing us up for a trip abroad, or an environmental camp, or a French immersion course, or a study the university was doing.”

In the mid-1950s, while the children were young, her husband, Dr. Isaac M. Taylor, served for two years as chief medical officer at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. When he returned, Mrs. Taylor took the five children to Europe. “She was simply fierce in her desire to give her kids as broad an experience of the world as possible,” James said. “She really took that to heart.”

Born Gertrude Woodard, she was the second oldest of five children, and was a teenager when her older sister, Ruth, died.

Mrs. Taylor grew up in Newburyport, where her father “was a fisherman and a boat builder and the unofficial mayor of Ring’s Island,” Kate wrote. “Her mother was a sweet whistling songstress who created a beautiful home for her family, with braided rugs made from their old woolen clothes and colorful and cheerful hooked rugs for every surface of their floors.”

She attended high school in Newburyport and studied voice at New England Conservatory, and met Ike Taylor in Boston. They married and had “four boys and a girl, all born in the span of six years between 1947 and 1953,” James noted on his webpage.

The family moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., where Dr. Taylor was dean of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. In an interview, James recalled that his mother “walked the picket line” protesting segregation in the South.

“She was politically astute,” Kate wrote. “She had a fierce sense of the need for fairness and justice.”

In the early 1970s, Mrs. Taylor and her husband divorced. Dr. Taylor died in 1996.

“I always had the feeling that if she had been born 20 years later, she would have been a fully emancipated woman,” James said, and instead she lived in a time when women were expected to take a secondary role in marriages.

“She knew too much to be comfortable with that, yet she wasn’t born late enough to have the support from the culture to do differently,” he added in the interview. “It was as if she was caught between two worlds, my mom. I think honestly if she had been born later, she would have been independent her entire life.”

Nevertheless, Mrs. Taylor crafted a life of steady adventures, creatively and geographically, once she moved full time to the Vineyard, where her gardens always brought “lots of traffic through her place,” Hugh said. “She was also a really great cook.”

Her kitchen talents “were celebrated by anyone fortunate enough to sit at her table,” James wrote on his webpage. “This included the illustrious James Beard, who introduced the world to her ‘Chilmark Bouillabaisse.’ ”

Kate added in her tribute: “Pity the poor soul who tried to make her a clam chowder! Man could she cook!”

A service will be announced for Mrs. Taylor, who in addition to her children James, Livingston, Hugh, and Kate leaves her brother, Henry Woodard; two sisters, May Atkinson and Jean Woodard; nine grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

In 1993, Mrs. Taylor’s oldest child, Alex, died of a heart attack at 47. “At the death of our beautiful brother Alex I watched as she bent, and I was very concerned that she would break,” Livingston said. “But she did not break. She bent, and then accommodated that pain and continued with her life of adventure and discovery.”

Indeed, to be in the presence of Trudy Taylor at any point in her life “required always that your thoughts be in hyperdrive,” Livingston added, “because no part of your vision was going to go unchallenged.”

source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/10/12/gertrude-taylor-mother-taylor-singing-clan-dies/rjUgas9znOCOJxf64iZ6sN/story.html

LATIMES.COM — James Taylor schools us on the need for clarity, guitar help and boredom

By Mikael Wood

With his wire-frame eyeglasses and slightly rumpled slacks, James Taylor looked more like a kindly professor than a veteran pop star when we met for coffee this week. And in a way the visit had the feel of college office hours.

In town for a string of TV appearances as well as a sold-out performance set for Friday night at downtown Los Angeles’ Grammy Museum, the 67-year-old singer and songwriter had agreed to talk about his latest album, “Before This World,” which entered the Billboard chart at No. 1 when it came out in June. But it wasn’t long before Taylor was dropping knowledge from Noam Chomsky.

The word that most readily describes “Before This World” to me is “transparent.” It sounds like a record where your goal was to be as clear as possible in the lyrics and arrangements and production.

That kind of clarity is really important. But it takes a lot of work. We recorded the 10 tracks over a 10-day period, and we did a lot of experimentation and overdubbing. But it’s the producer’s and my job to sift through it and really find out what works. You have to safeguard the simplicity of the original track, so you’re only keeping a small amount of the stuff you add.

You’re embracing clarity in other ways too. You give free guitar lessons on your website, for instance.

I became aware that people were using my technique and my songs to teach guitar, and in some cases they were doing it wrong. It’s good to pass this kind of stuff on. That’s one of the things you think about at this end of things.

When artists are younger they often protect what makes them unique.

The obfuscation of trade secrets.

Exactly. Isn’t there some advantage to being —

Mysterious? Oh, I think so. I’m just not any good at it.

The new album’s No. 1 debut put you in some unusual company, at least for a week. Behind you on the chart were people like Hilary Duff and ASAP Rocky. Do you still follow the churn of pop music?

I don’t. But I never really did. At one point, I was listening to music that was part of my generation, so it seemed like I was more interested in current music because I was the current music. But it actually hasn’t changed. I was disappointed for a long time with who was at the top of the pop charts. It doesn’t seem to be where you go to look for the music that’s going to mean something to you.

Mean something to you specifically or to anyone?

I think in general. There’s a reason why songs are popular, and sometimes it’s that a lot of people are getting a lot from them all at the same time. I’m not denying that. But I’m old enough that I sort of know where I want to go for music. Now I listen to things I know are going to feed me. I still listen to Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye; I still listen to Jobim and Milton Nascimento. My wife comes from classical music, so she brings a lot of that into the house.

You have twin 14-year-old sons. Do they relate to their favorite musicians in the same way you once did to yours? Or in the same way you imagine your fans relate to you?

People don’t identify with a particular act anymore. They’ll know a song, but they don’t know who it is or what else they’ve done.

Whereas you were trying to establish an idea of James Taylor?

That’s right. Things were within a context. But this was the postwar baby boom, with a dominant age group moving through the culture and affecting the culture radically. In the late ’60s there was a very powerful sense of generation, and it was fighting things like Vietnam and racism and sexism and the hypocrisies that we saw in the establishment. The music had a place in that movement that we can’t expect to happen now.

Why not?

Because there wasn’t that overwhelming spike in population; there isn’t a generation that’s so clearly identified in the culture the things it wants to change. To a certain extent we’re still living, musically and artistically, in the aftermath of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Rock ‘n’ roll is still a late-’60s idea.

But maybe that’s only because so many figures from that era are still around.

The audience too — they’re still present. When Carole King and I went on tour in 2010, we saw our audience come out of the woodwork all over the place. And because it was two of us and we had a pretty good purchase at one point on the popular culture, the music resonated with a lot of people. That was a powerful thing to summon.

Was it more than nostalgia, though? There seems to be a huge appetite for that right now, and it can be satisfied pretty cheaply.

Well, you go to a lot of music. You probably are kind of fed up with hearing people regurgitate things that have been done to death.

It only really bums me out when it comes at the expense of something new. If you have nothing new to say, fine. But if you do — and it’s good — that’s what I want to hear.

We still listen to Beethoven. I know every note in the Ninth Symphony, but still it’s exciting for me to go and hear that performed. It’s quite an achievement for a group of musicians to put that down. So it’s not just that the ’60s were the time. It’s that things that are really great continue to impact people. But I hear what you’re saying. The idea that people are going to re-experience something that’s familiar to them — to say, “I want to go back to sleep and dream the dream I had before” — that’s a drag.

Let’s get back to the idea that we can’t expect music to engage with the culture deeply anymore.

Maybe it has to do with social media, the way it cuts attention into smaller and smaller pieces so that you can’t have a long thought if you’re a certain age. Noam Chomsky said that a very effective way of censoring people was to limit the amount of time they have to speak — that if it’s cut small enough, all you can do is reiterate something that’s already known. And he’s right. It’s a kind of censorship to cut our experience, and our young people’s experience, into smaller and smaller pieces.

Do you see that with your kids?

Sure. I see them on a small screen watching a big screen, and they’re also doing homework, and meanwhile texts are coming in and advertisements are happening. It’s smithereens. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my kids be bored. And boredom was great. Who knew where it might lead?

source: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-james-taylor-20150925-story.html

TIME.COM — Here’s What Happens When You Add ‘In His Pants’ to James Taylor Songs

Jimmy Kimmel is a huge James Taylor fan. In fact, Taylor is his favorite singer (well, right next to his trusty friend Guillermo) so for years Kimmel has been wracking his brain to come up with a way that they can work together. Last night, he finally unveiled their collaborative project—an album of Taylor’s Greatest Hits with a Kimmelian twist. That twist? An album of all of James Taylor’s hit songs followed by “the phrase you love”— in my pants. It’s truly James Taylor like you’ve never heard him before.

Think “Fire & Rain” in James Taylor’s pants. Think “Sweet Baby James In My Pants”. Think every single one of Taylor’s most beloved songs besmirched (or improved!) by Kimmel’s twist. As Kimmel says, “You won’t believe how much music James Taylor has in his pants.” You really won’t.

source: http://time.com/4048059/james-taylor-jimmy-kimmel-in-his-pants/

BOSTONGLOBE.COM – James Taylor gets silly with Jimmy Kimmel

By Mark Shanahan

As serious as he sometimes can seem, singer James Taylor actually has a good sense of humor, which he displayed during an appearance Wednesday on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” In the skit, JT promoted a new greatest hits CD, but added “In My Pants” to the title of some of his classic tunes. So “Carolina In My Mind” became “Carolina In My Mind In My Pants.” Comic gold.

source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2015/09/23/james-taylor-gets-silly-with-jimmy-kimmel/FcTeL5qdnmCjCJgMIZf74L/story.html

BOSTONGLOBE.COM — James Taylor performs at Shoah Foundation benefit

By Mark Shanahan

Never mind Stockbridge to Boston, singer James Taylor traveled to Dearborn, Mich., to perform for an A-list crowd at a benefit for the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation. (The foundation was created by “Schindler’s List” director Steven Spielberg to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.) After the event at the Henry Ford Museum, JT chatted with some of the guests, including the South Shore’s Steve Carell and actress Halle Berry.

source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2015/09/12/james-taylor-performs-star-studded-shoah-foundation-benefit/xa2ws7w55EtOJboMVnomhO/story.html

SYS-CON.COM – Steve Carell, Halle Berry and James Taylor to appear at USC Shoah Foundation’s annual Ambassadors for Humanity Gala with founder Steven Spielberg, to honor William Clay Ford Jr.

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 3, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — On Sept. 10, 2015, Steven Spielberg will present William Clay Ford Jr., executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, with USC Shoah Foundation’s highest honor — the Ambassador for Humanity Award –– at the organization’s annual gala. Ford will be recognized for his leadership and corporate citizenry around education and community.

Golden Globe-winning, Emmy and Academy Award nominated actor Steve Carell will serve as host, with Emmy and Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry joining the evening’s program as special guest. Grammy Award winner James Taylor will provide a special musical performance.

“It is an honor to have the support of these three iconic artists, each role models in their own right, to help us pay tribute to Bill Ford,” said Steven Spielberg, founder of the organization and chair of the annual gala. “Their participation will help bring attention to the Institute’s mission and our joint educational work in Detroit with Ford Motor Company.”

The gala will highlight the Institute’s partnership with Ford Motor Company to expand its IWitness educational platform in the metro Detroit area. Over the next two years IWitness Detroit will provide teacher education, programming for students, and key academic resources to enable students to engage with eyewitness testimony. A portion of the proceeds raised at the gala will support the program.

USC Shoah Foundation has a long history in Michigan. Ford Motor Company was the sole sponsor of the 1997 NBC broadcast of the Academy Award® winning “Schindler’s List,” the film that inspired the establishment of the Institute. The Institute’s Visual History Archive is also available at University of Michigan campuses of Ann Arbor and Flint. In addition, Mickey Shapiro, one of Michigan’s top real estate developers and longstanding member of the Institute’s Board of Councilors, is co-chairman of the 2015 Ambassadors for Humanity Gala.

For more information about the gala call the Event Office at 248-593-9743, the USC Shoah Foundation Benefit at 818-777-7876 or email ambassadorsgala2015@usc.edu. Donations are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by law.

About USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education
USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education is dedicated to making audiovisual interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, a compelling voice for education and action. The Institute’s current collection of over 53,000 eyewitness testimonies preserves history as told by the people who lived it, and lived through it. Housed at the University of Southern California, within the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Institute works with partners around the world to advance scholarship and research, to provide resources and online tools for educators, and to disseminate the testimonies for educational purposes. For more information about USC Shoah Foundation, please go to sfi.usc.edu.

source: http://news.sys-con.com/node/3441707

ALLACCESS.COM – James Taylor Performance To Benefit Grammy Museum Education Initiatives

In a special evening to benefit the GRAMMY MUSEUM’s education initiatives, JAMES TAYLOR will participate in an installment of its “An Evening With” series, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25th. The program will feature an intimate discussion with TAYLOR surrounding his award-winning career and new album, “Before This World,” followed by a special performance in the CLIVE DAVIS THEATER.

“When you think of the defining singer/songwriters of our time, JAMES TAYLOR immediately comes to mind,” said GRAMMY MUSEUM Executive Director BOB SANTELLI, who will moderate the discussion. “We are honored to host such a legendary music figure for an evening that will go toward helping us further our mission of offering the most dynamic and exciting educational programs available from music museums today.”

Tickets for “An Evening With JAMES TAYLOR” are $100, with the AMERICAN EXPRESS pre-sale beginning today at 10:30a (PT), ending WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 9th at 10p (PT). The general onsale begins THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10th at noon (PT). Tickets can be purchased at AXS.com and all proceeds will benefit the education initiatives of the GRAMMY MUSEUM.

source: http://www.allaccess.com/net-news/archive/story/145222/james-taylor-performance-to-benefit-grammy-museum-#sthash.RIMveBXP.dpuf

BOSTONGLOBE.COM — Seiji Ozawa celebrates his 80th with James Taylor in Japan

By Meredith Goldstein

Red Sox fan and former Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Seiji Ozawa celebrated his 80th birthday with a concert during the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival in Nagano, Japan, on Tuesday. Special performers at the big event included BSO friends James and Kim Taylor, and their son Henry, who, with the Tokyo Opera Singers OMF Chorus, sang James’s hit, “Shower the People.” US Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy was in the audience.

source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2015/09/02/seiji-ozawa-celebrates-his-with-james-taylor-japan/i6pEFd15lQYjk9RmpmMEvN/story.html

ROLLINGSTONE.COM — James Taylor: My Life in 15 Songs

By Andy Greene

James Taylor’s new album, Before This World, is his first collection of original songs in 13 years, though he wasn’t exactly taking it easy during that stretch — he toured regularly, released live and cover albums, and helped raise twin boys, now 14. But a few years ago, Taylor realized that he needed to make songwriting a top priority in his life if he was ever going to release another album of new songs. So he borrowed a friend’s apartment and camped out to write what would become Before This World, a sweet, reflective disc that evokes memories of his classic 1970s albums. “I’m not the type of musician who reinvents himself over and over again,” he says. “I am a slow evolution of a style of recording and writing, and I do think that in some ways I get better at it.”

At 67, Taylor is able to look back honestly on his life and career, including the darker moments — from his heroin addiction to his struggles as a parent (he fathered two children, Sally, 41, and singer-songwriter Ben, 38, with ex-wife Carly Simon). “Sally and Ben turned out brilliantly,” he says. “But I can’t take much credit for them. I was a pretty compromised father. Addiction is delayed development, so I may have been late in becoming an adult.”

Sitting in a luxury suite at Fenway Park before his beloved Boston Red Sox took on the New York Yankees one recent evening, Taylor walked us through 50 years of songwriting, going all the way back to getting signed to Apple Records by the Beatles in 1968.

“Rainy Day Man” (1967)

In 1966, I was living at the Albert Hotel in New York with my best friend, Zach Wiesner, who wrote this song with me. We had one of two rooms at the hotel that hadn’t been destroyed in a fire, so it was pretty cheap.

The “rainy-day man” was a dope connection. I had taken my first opiate in 1966. Joel “Bishop” O’Brien, the drummer in the Flying Machine, was an addict. I spent a lot of time at his apartment, so it was just a matter of time before I tried heroin. I was pretty much born to shoot dope — it was the key to my lock, so I really was gone for the next 20 years.

“Something in the Way She Moves” (1968)

I spoke to my dad on the phone while I was living in New York, and he didn’t like the way I sounded. He was right: I was strung out, malnourished and kind of beat. He arrived the next day with the family station wagon and drove me back to North Carolina, where I had grown up. I took time to recover, and around Christmas 1967 I talked my parents into buying me a ticket to London, where I had a friend who agreed to put me up for a few weeks.

I was hoping to sing in clubs or even on the streets, but I ended up getting in touch with Peter Asher, who had just started working for Apple Records. He got me an audition with Paul McCartney and George Harrison, where I played them this song. Paul said to Peter, “You feel like producing this guy?” And Peter said, “Yeah.”

The song is about an early girlfriend and the calm you feel in the presence of someone who knows you really well. When I heard George Harrison used the title for the opening words of “Something,” I was thrilled. I didn’t feel like I was being poached at all — besides, “Something in the Way She Moves” quotes the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine”: “She’s around me almost all the time/And I feel fine.”

“Carolina in My Mind” (1968)

I was making my first album at Trident Studios in London, just as the Beatles were recording the White Album nearby. I realized how lucky I was to be listening to the Beatles playbacks and watching their process in the studio, but at the same time that I was surrounded by this holy host of my absolute idols, I missed my home in North Carolina. This captured that feeling of being called away to another place.

“Sweet Baby James” (1970)

Allen Klein took over Apple Records in 1969. We had it in our contract that we could audit him to see what our sales were, and he didn’t want anybody looking at the books, so he let us go. In fact, he let everybody on the label go except the Beatles.

I came back to the States and found out my brother Alex had had a kid. I decided to write a song for the baby boy, who was named after me. A little cowboy song. It starts as a lullaby, then the second half of the song — “the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston…” — talks about what music means to me. It gets pretty spiritual by the end. I think it’s my best song.

“Steamroller” (1970)

I came back from London with my heroin habit raging again, so I went to rehab. Well, it wasn’t rehab. It was a psychiatric facility in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I’d been in a psychiatric hospital when I was 17, and I think that’s just what my folks knew to do with me. This facility wasn’t meant to handle opiate rehab, but that’s where I went, and I wrote a lot of songs that wound up on Sweet Baby James there.

“Steamroller,” however, was from my Flying Machine days, and it was a joke. There were a lot of white guys playing the blues, college students singing Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, and it seemed comical to me. “Steamroller” was just meant to be a take-off.

One of the effects of being hospitalized a couple of times is that any expectations my family might have had for me — academic or professional — had all been abandoned. They kinda threw up their hands and said, “Well, at least he’s still alive.” They were always very supportive of my music, but I did feel as though I came from a place of being disenfranchised and alienated. So while seeing Sweet Baby James take off was hugely gratifying and everything I wanted, success was a major adjustment.

“You’ve Got a Friend” (1971)

Carole King and I were playing the Troubadour in Los Angeles together. She had just written “You’ve Got a Friend,” which she later said was a response to “Fire and Rain.” The chorus to “Fire and Rain” is “I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend.” Carole’s response was, “Here’s your friend.” As soon as I heard it, I wanted to play it.

Not long after, we were in the studio recording [1971’s] Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. We had already cut two songs that day, but we still had studio time and a lot of energy. Peter [Asher] said, “Well, why don’t you play ‘You’ve Got a Friend’?” We did, and it sounded great.

There was just one problem: I hadn’t bothered to ask Carole if it was OK. I sheepishly called her up and said, “We didn’t really mean to do it, but we’ve recorded ‘You’ve Got a Friend,'” and she said, “Fine, go ahead, put it out,” which was remarkably generous.

“Walking Man” (1974)

I wrote a lot of songs about my dad. It’s probably typical, but I have a sense that he was emotionally sort of frozen. “Walking Man” is informed by my longing for him. He disappeared for a few years when I was seven, eight and nine. He was drafted into the Navy, and then he volunteered to go to the South Pole. We missed him a lot. My mother was a daughter of a Yankee fisherman. She had five kids born within six years in the countryside of North Carolina, and here she was waiting for her husband to come home. That always stayed with me, somehow.

“A Junkie’s Lament” (1976)

I’ve got a lot of recovery songs. This one’s a warning not to think of a junkie as a complete functioning human being. Heroin should’ve killed me about five times, but it never did. My kids suffered from their father being an addict. I think there’s no way they can’t.

People take drugs to be in control. They want to short-circuit any risk that they might take in life, any uncertainty, any anxiety. They just want to find the chemical route, to just push the button that gets the final result. So all of your relationships suffer, no question about it.

“Secret o’ Life” (1977)

I wrote this in a little patch of sunlight while sitting on the stairs of a house I was literally building on Martha’s Vineyard. It took me about 10 minutes. It’s as though the song was just sitting there in the guitar. There aren’t many that come that easily.

One line goes, “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” It’s a preposterous thing to write about, and so the title was supposed to recall Life Savers flavors — Pep-O-Mint or But-O-Rum. It’s a jab at the presumptuousness of writing a song called “The Secret of Life.”

“Only a Dream in Rio” (1985)

I had gone into yet another rehab, to kick methadone after a couple of really nasty “jackpots,” which is where you humiliate yourself and the people who love you by fucking up. I tried to detox at a place in Connecticut, but I fell back and continued to use. It wasn’t until [saxophonist] Michael Brecker got me involved with the Twelve Steps that I got serious. But even after I got clean, I didn’t know whether there was life on the other side of addiction for me. I wasn’t sure I could write anymore, either.

Then I went down to Rio de Janeiro to play the Rock in Rio festival. [Brazilian songwriter] Gilberto Gil had left a guitar for me to play. I walked onstage, and 300,000 people knew my songs. They have this tradition of singing along in Brazil that is so loud, so strong, and so in tune and so in time, it’s sort of like when they pick up a song that they know and sing it back to you, it’s extremely powerful. So I was, like, two feet off the ground coming off the stage, really felt as though I had landed on my feet. It was a turning point in my life.

“Never Die Young” (1988)

This song is written from the point of view of someone who has given up and is looking at the lives of two young people who aren’t caught up in the morass of life as the narrator knows it: “Let other hearts be broken/Let other dreams run dry/Let our golden ones sail onto another land beneath another sky.” It’s a sad song, but also hopeful and celebratory.

“Copperline” (1991)

This is another song about home, about my father, about a childhood that was very peaceful, which is a rare thing today. I felt like I was part of a landscape in those days — the trees, the streams and the rivers, the animals that lived there.

[My wife] Kim and I are raising our kids in the countryside, but it is not the country life that I experienced. It’s connected, constantly connected. Sometimes I feel as though the little snippets of information that we’re always receiving are preparing us to have a hive mind. There may come a point where we basically have a communal mind, which is an exciting prospect.

“Enough to Be on Your Way” (1997)

My brother Alex was also an addict, and in 1993, he died of it. There was a sense of relief when he died, for him and for his family, that one felt. It wasn’t until a year or so had passed that I got back in touch with the totality of his life rather than just the shambles of its end, the pain of it. That’s when I wrote this song.

“Mean Old Man” (2002)

This one was a big accomplishment, because it’s a sophisticated song and a throwback. Paul McCartney called me up and said that when he’d first heard it, he assumed it was Frank Loesser or Cole Porter. I was, of course, absolutely thrilled. At one point, Bob Dylan told me that he’d been listening to [Taylor’s song] “Frozen Man” and really thought it was great, and that’s enough for me. Ten critics can savage me, but I’ll be fine as long as every once in a while, someone like Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney says, “Keep going, kid.”

“Angels of Fenway” (2015)

I finished this in May 2014, but I had the music for about seven years before that. I knew that I wanted to write about this miracle 2004 season against the Yankees. If you’re a Red Sox fan, or even just a baseball fan, it was an amazing event. I cast it as a grandmother who was born the last time the Red Sox won, and she dies on the day they finally do it again.

source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/james-taylor-my-life-in-15-songs-20150820