MUSICRADAR.COM – James Taylor talks new album Before This World

By Neville Marten

Introduction

With Before This World – his first album of original compositions since 2002’s acclaimed October Road – James Taylor is back on form: vocally, as a great fingerstyle guitarist and as composer of deeply personal songs.

James talked exclusively to Guitarist about the new record, his stunning band, and what it’s like for an erstwhile acoustic minstrel working in the digital age…

It’s rare for an artist to define an entire genre, but when it comes to guitarist-singer-songwriters one man stands apart. This quiet, self-effacing minstrel from Boston, Massachusetts came to prominence when the 60s were all but done.

The joyous pop of the decade had given way to self-indulgent blues-rock, deafening stacks of amps and 15-minute guitar solos. Even Dylan had gone electric. The time, it seemed, was ripe for a subtler, more introspective style.

While Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Judy Collins, Carole King and a host of others were plying their trade in the coffee shops of New York and Los Angeles, it was Joni Mitchell and the tall, quietly spoken intellectual James Taylor that defined their respective genders’ role in this new singer-songwriter movement.

A famously troubled individual, Taylor’s life and music would be informed by bouts of depression, psychiatric institutions and chronic drug abuse. Yet his lyrics and music, while deeply personal and often cryptic, connected with a generation let down by hippy promises and hedonistic excess.

His music was sophisticated, too: while Dylan and Donovan played straight major and minor chords, Taylor’s fingerpicked guitar style brimmed with major and minor 7ths, slash chords and intricate trills and figures that stamped their mark on every song. It sent a million wannabes scurrying for that old flat-top under the bed.

Man Of The World

With over 100 million album sales to his credit – his Greatest Hits sold over 12 million copies in the US alone – Taylor has been selling out concerts for over 40 years now.

Attracting the world’s finest musicians like moths to a street lamp, his band is always populated by the finest players of their era. His 1997 Grammy Award-winning Hourglass marked a new high both writing and production for the artist; its follow-up, 2002’s October Road, was similarly well received, but Taylor has not released any original work until now.

Continuing the tradition of fine song construction, state-of-the-art production and fabulous playing, Before This World tackles personal and world issues with equal care. But how does James Taylor go about creating an album in these digital days?

“I’m a bit nostalgic for analogue, but I doubt I’ll ever go back,” Taylor begins. “It’s all going to be digitised eventually. Recording digital gives you much more editorial capacity to manipulate things afterwards, and it’s just too good from the mixing point of view.

“The point about analogue is that the microphones, the speakers, the amplifiers, and all the things that manipulated the signal evolved together. And then when they made this divide, where there was the analogue side going to digital, it took digital a long time to integrate. But with faster sampling rates and higher bit rates, it’s getting so much better.”

Born In A Barn

Taylor now records in a studio in his barn at home on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the Massachusetts coast near Boston.

“Hourglass was the first album we made on available home studio machinery,” he elaborates. “It was totally revolutionary. About $20,000 bought you an entire studio, so from that point on I’ve always tracked in my own space.

“That sense of the meter running in the old studios was a drag, so it’s nice to be able to relax into it and feel as though you have all the time you need. The barn is one I used for storage and rehearsal, but it turned out sounding so good that we’ve used it more and more.”

Is a James Taylor album a layer-upon-layer affair, or do he and his band play largely live?

“I tend to want to track with as many of the instruments playing as possible,” he reveals. “The other way is to write everything out and ask everybody to ‘play the ink’, or put down a drum machine, guitar and voice and then selectively layer things on. But my kind of recording is the consensus approach of teaching the players the tune and seeing what happens when they bring their own take to it.

“They get to use their musical choices and it turns out to be far more interesting. But it takes musicians who are willing to listen to each other and maybe let somebody else have the reins.”

Taylor teaches the songs to the band a number of ways. “Sometimes I make a demo, and the guitar suggests the expanded arrangement,” he continues.

“Other times I’ll cut demos with just Steve Gadd and Jimmy Johnson, to make a good first iteration of a song. They take notes and write their parts out in whatever form they can most readily read and remember it.

“It’s been a long time since I wrote out chord charts but I used to chart out the songs, make copies and pass them out to the band and they would play it and we’d discuss it.”

On bigger shows Taylor takes out as many as 13 musicians, including four backing vocalists, brass and percussion. But the nucleus of the production is a quartet of A-list virtuosi.

“It’s amazing,” says Taylor, as if in disbelief at his own pulling power. “We have Jimmy Johnson and Steve Gadd playing bass and drums, Larry Goldings on keyboards, and Mike Landau playing guitars of all stripes. That’s the basic group, and I have my four singers, plus percussion and horns.

“I did the Covers albums [Covers in 2008 and Other Covers the following year] because I wanted to record those 13 people live. Before This World has those four main players and myself. We cut a track a day for 10 days and that’s 90 per cent of what you hear on the record.”

Refining The Process

Even once they’re learned, Taylor likes to refine the songs further before they’re committed to ‘tape’.

“Well, you’re recording the song for all time, but this is the first time everyone’s played it. If you could tour a batch of songs for 20 or 30 gigs I’m sure that things would settle. In the studio you’re trying to do that first time, so we tend to do a lot of takes – 20 takes or so for each song.”

As Taylor is so involved and knowledgeable about digital recording, the writing process surely involves laptops, iPads or even mobile phones?

“No, no iPads,” Taylor states emphatically. “I buy a notebook for every song I write, open it up so there’s a blank page to my left and to my right, put down what I’ve got now and then start making changes on the left-hand side.

“I use lined paper, and on the line opposite I’ll put an alternative, then flip the page over and do it again. Eventually, you can see the song develop; how the form of it has changed and how I’ve edited the lyric together.

“Things will have a working title,” Taylor continues. “Far Afghanistan was called ‘Irish Heroic’ – I was thinking more about Ralph Vaughan Williams than anything else there. The working title of Montana was ‘Three-Four Folky’, and Angels Of Fenway was called ‘G Nation’, for some reason. So I’m aware of what the character of the song is going to be.”

Star Power

A staggering roster of celebrity singers has joined Taylor on his records over the years, from various Beatles, Joni Mitchell and Carole King, through to his ex-wife Carly Simon, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, Simon, Garfunkel, JD Souther, Crosby, Nash, issue 392 cover star Mark Knopfler and many others.

Sting contributes vocal harmony on the new album’s title track. Taylor becomes uncharacteristically animated when talking about singers and singing – harmony vocals in particular.

“I worked with Graham Nash and David Crosby on two albums – In The Pocket and Gorilla. They sang on Mexico – and that sounds like Crosby, Stills & Nash with those three voices, even though Stephen Stills’ voice has such a strong character.

“The surprising thing is that people in a stack of vocals will glue it together in a way that you wouldn’t expect. Carole King is a great person to have in a stack of vocals, as is [renowned backing vocalist] David Lasley. I’ve worked with a lot of great singers – George Jones, McCartney and Harrison – and that’s a great part of my thing, arranging vocal choral music. I spend a lot of time at it.

“These days I tend to sing all the parts. I use a pitch shifter to drop the key down so I can sing the high parts, then shift it back up so it’s in key, then we’ll re-record it [using the backing singers].

“Actually, on Angels Of Fenway I kept a lot of my Melodyne vocals to build that harmony stack. It’s a great tool to be able to sing all the parts, even beyond your own range.”

Fingerpickin’ Good

We know Taylor to be a fine acoustic fingerpicker. But he also plays electric. Could he surprise everyone by knocking out a stinging solo on a track like Steamroller Blues?

“No, probably not. Sure I can play a solo, but it’s just a slightly punched-up version of what I’d play anyway. I’m not a virtuoso guitar player; I’m an accompanist, not a soloer. I play a bassline with my thumb and play internal lines with my index and middle fingers. I’m basically bracketing the arrangement on the guitar and using it to accompany myself.”

But what about strumming – would he ever grab a pick and bash out a tune?

“Again, no. Thumb and strum is what I tend to do. I very seldom actually strum – I’m always using my thumb in that ‘flailing’ type of style.”

Apart from the occasional drop D, Taylor is not known for open tunings, either…

“I have written a few songs in G tuning – which to me is really an A tuning but down a whole step,” he reveals. “Love Has Brought Me Around [from Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon] and a couple more. So I tend to stay with regular tuning, but I do like the drop D.

“Occasionally, I write on piano – I can’t play it, but I can write on it. Then I show it to a keyboard player and he works out how to play it properly. You And I Again on this album was written that way.”

Cutting The Chords

Since his very early days, Taylor’s chords and progressions have been marked by a harmonic sophistication uncommon in ‘folk’ styles.

“You find that if you play a V chord over a I, that is a I in the bass and a V chord on top – say, a D chord over a G bass – you get a major 9. I love that sound. I also like playing a II chord over a I bass – say, an A chord over a G. It’s a sound that really wants to resolve and you really hear the thing drop into place when it does.

“When I learned to play the guitar, I learned some of my chords from other people, but some of them I’d just construct – like I knew I needed this note in the bass and I needed a chord above it.

“Also, I don’t play a D or A chord like anybody else; I play the 3rd in those chord shapes with my index finger, so you can really pull off and hammer on strong. So, from a very early time I was simply constructing what I wanted to hear, chord-wise.

“It wasn’t unusual for me to play an F chord and take the ring finger and put it over on the G bass note to create a IV over V [or 11th]. The other thing is that my playing is very ‘straight 8ths’, in that it has almost no swing at all. That ‘straight-up-ness’ means I have to really hammer on strong – as on Fire And Rain.”

Take It To Church

Taylor’s list of influences ranges from Cuban and Brazilian to… English Church music?

“I’m a folk player, which means I’m sort of drifting and responding to a lot of different sources,” he points out. “A Cuban ‘tres’ player – that’s a six-string guitar with three pairs of double strings – called Nadar Arsenio Rodriguez was a huge influence on me.

“Then there was Jobim; that sound of the bossa nova guitar was also a huge influence. Then Kootch [Taylor’s guitarist friend Danny Kortchmar] taught me blues and gave me a really strong sense of that stuff, exposing me to it in a major way. So these things come along.

“But I’d say at the base of it all is the Church of England standard hymnal – Jerusalem, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, Once To Every Man And Nation. That very standard Western sound was the first thing I played – Christmas carols, too. I was also exposed to a huge amount of show music – Broadway music – when I was a kid; my parents listened to a lot of that and our record collection was very rounded.

“Angels Of Fenway reminds me of that loping ‘trot’ type meter of Surrey With The Fringe On Top [from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!]. It has a simple melody line and the first iteration is in the key of G; it then has the same melody in the relative minor [E]. That’s a trick I use a lot – the same melody line with different chords underneath.

“The opening song, Today Today Today, uses the same melody line when it falls into the bridge but over very different chords. If you had to play that melody over and over again it would drive you nuts, but it’s a vocal vehicle.

“Far Afghanistan reminded me of a Vaughan Williams Fantasia On Greensleeves or something. How it ended up being a song about a soldier preparing to go to war is because it’s something I just can’t stop thinking about, what it must be like to be in that situation. So, influences come from far and wide.”

World Class

While chatting to one of the great songwriters it seemed obvious to ask Taylor what, in his view, makes a great song, and which tracks on Before This World stand out to him. “A song either hits you or it doesn’t,” he suggests.

“A song can be really carefully prepared and balanced; the lyric can be offset by a contrast in the harmonics beneath it. It can be like Cole Porter’s You’re The Top, that’s just a delight to listen to, or it can break all the rules and still work. But you can’t decide ‘I’ll like this or I won’t’.

“That’s why music is empirically true; that’s why it gives us the release that it does. It’s of the real world; it’s a human language but it follows the laws of physics; and what is harmonic to us, while somewhat culturally determined, in the end I think is more about mathematics.

“On this album I’d say my best songs are You And I Again, Far Afghanistan and Snowtime. But Angels Of Fenway, Stretch Of The Highway and Before This World surprised me also.

“The thing I like to think about it is that this is the thing I’m meant to do. To write, record and perform music. And I just want as many people to hear it as possible. Not to force it down anyone’s ear but to make it available. For some reason I still find that compelling.”

Full Circle

Over his long career, James Taylor has used a variety of guitars to shape his sound. When he first came on the scene in the late 1960s, his guitar of choice was a sweet sounding but light-toned Gibson J-50.

He’s remained faithful to just three main acoustic guitar brands since then, but has been playing instruments built by luthier James Olson of Circle Pines, Minnesota since 1989.

“I used my Gibson J-50 for the first 12 years or so, then John McLaughlin introduced me to a guitar builder called Mark Whitebook [the jazz-fusion guitarist worked with Taylor on his 1972 album, One Man Dog, on which he played a stunning acoustic solo on the track Someone].

“Mark built two guitars, one for me and another for my then wife [Carly Simon]. Hers was actually a little better than mine so mostly I played that one. But when we got divorced, understandably she wanted it back.”

Then in 1989, after a gig in Minneapolis, Taylor arrived back at his hotel only to find a surprise on the bed – a guitar made for him by James Olson.

“He had gotten this guitar into my room, and when I picked it up and played it I knew I had a great new guitar. It’s slightly wider at the nut than normal so it fits my hand better.

“It has a cedar top and rosewood back and sides. It rings and has a very bright sound but it’s balanced, which means you can get a good bass note out of it. The action is low. I like it just on the clean side of buzzy.”

source: http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/james-taylor-talks-new-album-before-this-world-625940

BOSTONGLOBE.COM – For James Taylor, Fenway the ‘ultimate hometown’ show

By James Reed

It’s two hours until showtime, and James Taylor is finally sitting still in his dressing room at Fenway Park on Thursday afternoon. It’s already been a nonstop day with sound checks and meet-and-greets, there’s probably no time for a nap, and he’s wondering how the concert will go.

This will be a big night for him: A native son is, at long last, headlining one of Boston’s most hallowed venues — the place that inspired “Angels of Fenway,” a song from his new album, “Before This World.” The concert, with Bonnie Raitt sharing the bill, sold out in a matter of hours. But he’s not nervous, necessarily.

“It’s just that it’s one of these ultimate hometown shows,” Taylor says. “Everybody but my mom is going to be here from my family.

“It’s funny,” he explains. “It’s hard to play stadiums with music that is as intimate as mine is. There’s a tendency to make everything big. And I think we’re just going to depend on having a great sound system and the video projections. I don’t really have any way to play to . . . what is the capacity here?”

Thirty-five thousand.

“Yeah, to 35,000 people,” Taylor says. “The largest audience that I can sort of feel like I’m relating to is about 5,000. I often play to 10,000 and 15,000, but it’s like anything over 5,000 is the same. There’s not another quantum level for me to approach. But we’ll see how it goes in this large of a place.”

That’s James Taylor for you. At 67, he’s one of the most beloved and influential singer-songwriters of all time — and still eager to please and connect with an audience that has stuck with him since the late 1960s.

On Thursday, Taylor agreed to let a Globe reporter and photographer shadow him and his entourage for the afternoon before taking the stage.

First up is sound check, with the full band running through classics such as “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)” and “Steamroller” and “Shed a Little Light,” an underappreciated hymn from 1991’s “New Moon Shine.”

Around 2 p.m., Raitt emerges from stage left, her thick mane of flame-red locks blowing in the breeze as she hugs everyone in the band. “Man, this is pretty historic,” she announces, surveying the blue skies and vast rows of seating.

She and Taylor have decided to do a few numbers together, and this is their first rehearsal. “Knock on Wood” sounds terrific, funky in a way that’s more attuned to her style than his.

During her own sound check later, she’s not too shy to correct Taylor when he flubs a line of “Thing Called Love.” “You need to change it to, ‘you ain’t no Princess Charming,’ ” she reminds him and he nods and writes it down on the lyric sheet. “That was really great,” she raves when they finally nail it on the second try.

Back on her tour bus, Raitt admits Taylor was a big influence. “When James came on the scene, it was a whole different game,” Raitt says. “He is a unique avatar for the singer-songwriter. We all fell in love with him, too. I won’t lie: We all thought he was dreamy . . .”

After the sound check, it’s time to meet the smattering of people who have filled a few rows in the otherwise empty ballpark. Most of them are survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings, including Jeff Bauman, who lost both his legs and was heralded as a hero who identified one of the bombing suspects.

The bombing struck a deep nerve with Taylor; he was one of the first big acts to sign on for the Boston Strong benefit concert that raised money for the One Fund in 2013. He has since fostered a relationship with some of the survivors, corresponding through e-mail and sometimes at his concerts.

With his wife, Kim, by his side, Taylor navigates the crowd slowly, determined to give as many hugs and hear as many stories as possible. Celeste Corcoran of Lowell is looking him straight in the eye as she points to her two prosthetic legs. She’s getting better, she says, and he listens in between signing hats and posters.

Talking to Kim a few minutes later, Corcoran expresses her gratitude.

“It might seem like a little gesture, but it’s huge. We appreciate it, and we love you guys,” Corcoran tells Kim, who starts to tear up as she pulls away from an embrace.

Next up is a presentation from the top brass at the Red Sox and Live Nation, the show’s promoter. Don Law gives Taylor a mounted home plate — “That’s a real home plate, not the kind you can buy at Dick’s Sporting Goods,” Law says — along with a framed photo of the scoreboard with the names of Taylor and Raitt.

These days, touring is a family affair for Taylor. Kim, whose warm demeanor suggests she’s never met a stranger, is one of his backup singers. Henry, one of his two young twin sons, has also sung backing vocals for his father. And brother Livingston Taylor shows up at Fenway with a guitar in a soft case on his back, offering a hearty “Hey, guys!” before hugging his sibling.

Taylor credits his wife for his connection to Fenway. Although he grew up in Massachusetts, he didn’t start coming to games regularly until around 1996. At the time, Kim was working for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose music director, Seiji Ozawa, was a huge Sox fan — and still is, Taylor reports.

“When the curse of the Bambino was relieved in 2004, I knew I wanted to write about it,” he says, adding that he wrote “Angels of Fenway” before he had booked his performance at the ballpark. “I had never written a song about baseball, and I actually don’t write many songs that I set out to write. Usually I’m just following the song.

“My dad says he brought us to Fenway when we were really little,” he says. “We left Boston for North Carolina when I was 3. So I have this sense that he took us to a game just before we left town — but I can’t remember it at all. But I’m pretty sure I’ll always remember tonight.”

source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/08/06/taylorfenway/F9vQlYjkjDOfTZC3PIaffM/story.html

BOSTONHERALD.COM – ‘Fenway’ faithful: Native son James Taylor elated to play ballpark

By: Jed Gottlieb

James Taylor’s new album has a song that’s, well, tailor-made for his sold-out Thursday show at Fenway Park.

“Angels of Fenway” celebrates the home team and Red Sox nation with shout-outs to the 1918 World Series, the Green Line and a curse reversed. (He also tosses a few knuckleballs at those damn Yankees.) After his new record “Before This World” landed at No. 1 in June — a first for Taylor — many fans might shout out the words with glee at the gig.

“The record will have been out for two months, so I hope people will have heard the song,” James said. “If not, we’ll have the lyrics up on the screen to help people along.”

A nice touch for un-hip fans, but the tune still won’t send chills down the spine when he plays it at the bandbox. Instead, “Sweet Baby James” will tingle 37,000 spines.

When Taylor sings “Sweet Baby James,” when he croons, “Now the first of December was covered with snow/And so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston,” the stadium will melt.

“That’s always a powerful point, whether it’s at Tanglewood or Great Woods,” he said. “Wherever in Massachusetts we play it, it’s special.”

Taylor has played Great Woods a few times (and through a few of the venue’s many name changes), and Tanglewood is his second home. But maybe one of our most identifiable native sons had yet to headline Fenway.

Both Taylor and the Sox front office tried for years, but the timing didn’t work out until this year.

“They have very specific holes in the Red Sox season they can do concerts, and that makes it all very tricky,” he said. “We also did things a little upside down with this album. I expected to have the album done in 2013, but I didn’t finish the lyrics on time. We did a lot of touring when we thought the album would be coming out. Now that it’s out, we’re barely touring.

“But that’s turned out well,” he added. “Because this summer we had lots of time to find a Fenway date.”

After years of popping up as a guest during Sox games, Taylor says he’ll find some deep gratification in doing a full set at the park.

As far back as 2004, during the American League Championship he writes about in “Angels of Fenway,” he began thinking about a gig at the park. While working on the West Coast, he watched as the Sox battled back to beat the Yankees after losing the first three games of that series.

“It was a miracle series,” he said. “To play a show where it happened, and to play it with the great Bonnie Raitt (who will open the show), who I haven’t played with in Boston since 1973 at the Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, will be something special.”

source: http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/music/music_news/2015/08/fenway_faithful_native_son_james_taylor_elated_to_play

PEOPLE.COM — James Taylor Performs ‘Shed a Little Light’ with Charleston Choir in South Carolina

By Alex Heigl

James Taylor was in Columbia, South Carolina Thursday night, performing at the Colonial Life Arena. And while he wasn’t in Charleston, Taylor didn’t miss an opportunity to dedicate a song to the victims of June’s church shooting. He had some help, too, enlisting Charleston choir Lowcountry Voices.

“Ladies and gentleman, I wanna introduce this beautiful choir who have helped us all so much to begin healing, if that’s possible, following the tragic events at Mother Emanuel.”

Taylor and group performed “Shed a Little Light,” from his 1991 album New Moon Shine. “There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist,” the lyrics read. “There is a hunger in the center of the chest, there is a passage through the darkness.”

The video, uploaded Thursday night, is notching thousands of views per hour on Facebook. “The entire audience stood in support,” the post on Taylor’s Facebook page reads. That’s understandable. So is crying a little (or a lot) at your desk.

source: http://www.people.com/article/james-taylor-shed-little-light-charleston-choir

NOISE11.COM – JAMES TAYLOR SPENDS 4th WEEK IN US TOP 10

James Taylor stays in the Billboard top ten albums for a fourth week with Before This World.

This is the first week the Billboard charts are being issued on Tuesday to line them up with the new Friday release date. Billboard made the decision to reuse last week’s sales data and add in Monday through Thursday of last week to realign.

Taylor’s album, which showed a very strong sales hold week-to-week, falls from 5 to 6.

The majority of the other albums didn’t see much change with normal moves of less than ten spots up or down. A notable exception is Neil Young’s new album, The Monsanto Years, which dropped from 21 to 39.

The only new album to debut in the top 200 involving veteran artists is 21 Throwback Jams featuring tracks by the likes of TLC, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, Toni Braxton and Wu Tang Clan. It starts at 179.

On the country side, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler is at the top of the Country Streaming Songs with Love Is Your Name. It remains to be seen if the interest in his first country release is a curiosity or whether the track will have some legs.

The top five albums this week in the U.S.:
Dreams Worth More Than Money – Meek Mill
1989 – Taylor Swift
Wildheart – Miguel
X – Ed Sheeran
Montevallo – Sam Hunt

The top five singles:
Cheerleader – OMI
See You Again – Wiz Khalifa Featuring Charlie Puth
Can’t Feel My Face – The Weeknd
Bad Blood – Taylor Swift Featuring Kendrick Lamar
Watch Me – Silento

 

source: http://www.noise11.com/news/james-taylor-spends-4th-week-in-us-top-10-20150715

BANGORDAILYNEW.COM – James Taylor brings the hits during Portland performance

By Kathleen Pierce

PORTLAND, Maine — If you only caught the first hour of the James Taylor show Tuesday night, you got your money’s worth.

“The hits just keep on coming,” said a relaxed and tuneful Taylor at a packed Cross Insurance Arena. And he made sure they did. The Berkshire balladeer gave the people what they wanted. “Country Road,” “Fire and Rain,” “Your Smiling Face” and “Carolina In My Mind” were delivered with a youthful, tuneful zeal.

“Thank you,” someone shouted after his soulful 1970 hit “Fire and Rain” rang through as honestly and pure as the day it was released on his second album, “Sweet Baby James.”

At 67, this was not a baby James, nor a senior James. It was a gentleman James who opened the show with a bow. Dressed in a sports coat and cap, he sat on a stool delivering his songs like the legendary troubadour he has become.

Taylor joked, jumped and had fun with the crowd and his big band. The voice of summer for 50 years kicked the season off in Maine on a sea of warm vibes.

New twists on “Country Road” added syncopated rhythms to the “pre huggers anthem,” a way of life that views “nature as church.” The crowd favorite was accompanied by a cool video show of trees projected on vertical pillars, giving the sweet song a new edge.

Touring with his first new album since 2002, “Before This World,” Taylor seemed enlivened by new material and riffs on the old. “Today Today Today” and “Montana,” which he wrote while his family was skiing at Big Sky, sound vintage Taylor.

The jaunty “Shed A Little Light” got the crowd on their feet before intermission. When he took a break, fans rushed the stage to get his autograph and shake his hand. Taylor obliged without annoyance or handlers in the way. He sat at the edge and signed each slip of paper and photograph, and he patiently posed for photos.

The sultry “Carolina In My Mind” came with a story. When Taylor, a North Carolina native, signed with Apple Records, the Beatles record label in 1968, his career was launched. At this time he was missing the sunshine and moonshine of home.

“I couldn’t believe my luck,” he told the crowd. “I just wish I could remember it. I think we had a good time,” he said.

“The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time. Any fool can do it. There ain’t nothing to it,” Taylor sang on “Secret O’ Life,” the show’s opener.

He’s got that right.

source: http://bangordailynews.com/2015/07/07/living/james-taylor-brings-the-hits-during-portland-performance/

BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE – Rockin’ a Country Road: James Taylor, at peace in the Berkshires

By Anastasia Stanmeyer

The simplicity is what is so profound about James Taylor, who sits comfortably on his plush, rose-colored sofa in front of a slow-burning fireplace on this chilly afternoon in May. He serves me coffee (“No sweetness?” he asks again, ever so casually), his wife, Kim, carries a platter of freshly sliced fruit arranged in tidy rows, and their family dog, Ting, a gentle-faced nine-year-old pug, sits at her heels, waiting for something to drop. Taylor asks to look at my iPhone, curious about one of its functions. Several minutes later, he positions the device in a nearby bowl of almonds to make sure the recorder, now running, picks up our conversation. He sits back relaxed, adjusts his wire-rimmed glasses, and stretches his long arm across the sofa, touching his wife’s shoulder.

It all seems so very Berkshire, so very comfortable. We begin and end with their questions: How’s the magazine doing? What brought you to the area? Where does your older son go to school? A cursory look around the well-kept living room reveals photographs displaying this handsome couple and their twin boys at various stages in their lives. Look a little closer: There they are with the Obamas. Another with Oprah. One with Taylor Swift. Sheryl Crow, Steven Spielberg.

Back to reality: This is the man who sells out stadium-sized concerts across the globe, whose melodies are forever etched in people’s minds, and who “wrote the song lines to my life,” as one woman puts it. But Taylor wears his celebrated musicianship with an easygoing manner like one of his well-worn flat caps, and, at 67, is reflective while forward looking. “It’s a life’s work,” he says about his music, his head slightly bowed, a contemplative mannerism consistent throughout our conversation. His familiar face belies the miles traveled in his music—weathered, deeply etched lines. He taps his right hand gently on his crossed leg, showing his famous guitar-strumming longish fingernails. “I’ve done it this far, and I think it’s all right to give yourself over to a life’s work.”

The next chapter in his life’s work, Before This World, Taylor’s 17th studio album, was released June 16. It’s his first album of new songs in 13 years—since October Road—and was recorded in-between a grueling 40 weeks of touring. Admittedly, the album was a long time coming—some songs were begun 20 years ago—and he finally had to disengage himself from his life to complete the lyrics. He couldn’t finish it at home, he says, even in his barn workspace (“I self-distract”), so he spent time in a friend’s apartment in Newport, Rhode Island, five weeks in all, in one-week intervals.

Kim, dressed casually like her husband in jeans and a dark sweater, lightly jokes: “It’s too much of a temptation for me to run down and ask, ‘Do you want to have lamb chops for dinner?’” James: “Or the kids want to swing on the rope in the barn. Or there’s a bear in the bird feeder. Just typical Berkshires.”

They both laugh.

Going into this latest album, which he recorded almost fully in his barn,Taylor thought it would be his last of original music. But other songs remain unfinished, and he’s already talking about what’s to come. “I don’t think it’s going to be that long before the next one. I know what to do now. I know how to prioritize it. The only way to do that is actually just stop working until the album is done.”

He performs July 4 at Tanglewood to a sold-out audience. Here, in his Washington home, he talks about his life’s loves—his wife, his family, his band, and his Berkshires, where he can be found shopping at Guido’s, watching his son’s lacrosse games, or perusing Arcadian Shop’s Nordic and cycling sections. People tend to let him be. And it is obvious that his best companion is Kim. Like two old friends, they go off on tangents with one another during this afternoon’s conversation.

“You know, I don’t wish I met her more than ten years before I did because I was really not suitable for marriage for a long time,” says Taylor, who was married twice before, to Carly Simon, with whom he has two children, and to Kathryn Walker. He married Kim in 2001.

James describes a track “You and I” from his new album as “looking for a place in the world but also looking for a partner to share it with.” The song had been on his mind for a long while. “It was this little piece on the piano that I really drove her nuts with playing for a number of years, over and over again. I just needed to knit it together well enough to show it to my piano player so he could put it in a key that I can sing it. But the lyric was a surprise. It came very quickly. The general idea for the tune was that when I met Kim, both of us had a very strong feeling. For me, it was overwhelming. We really do belong together.”

A classically trained singer who sometimes performs with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Kim has joined James onstage to sing backup or a duet of “Close Your Eyes.” Her marketing and PR experience with the Boston Symphony Orchestra comes into play as James goes on tours or releases a new album. “I’m Jack of all trades, master of none,” says Kim, 62. “I’m doing a lot, but I’m not doing anything as well as I could. I forgot today’s lacrosse game. It’s OK, but things like that.”

From quite different directions, the Taylors each share a long history in the Berkshires. Kim grew up in nearby Albany, where her family has roots going back centuries. As a child, she stayed at a best friend’s home on Ice Glen Road in Stockbridge in the summertime and, in the winter, at the friend’s grandmother’s home in Great Barrington. She was a stringer for AP during her four years at Smith College, interned at The New York Times, then worked fulltime at the now-defunct Springfield Daily News. She moved to Baltimore, then made her way to Boston in hopes of working for the Globe. Instead, she took a job as a writer for the BSO.

For the past 35 years, she has been in the Berkshires every summer with the symphony, retiring as director of public relations and media and now serving as a trustee. Kim co-chairs the Organizing for Action Advisory Board, which highlights issues important to President Obama and the grassroots coalition that elected him—issues such as climate change, immigration reform, gun-violence prevention, healthcare, and women’s rights. She also serves on the Presidential Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

James is the son of affluent parents—his father ran the medical school at the University of North Carolina, while his mother was an opera singer. Born in Boston, his family moved to North Carolina when he was three, and they often summered on Martha’s Vineyard. His Berkshire connection goes back to the Austen Riggs Center, where he was admitted in 1968 for drug addiction after returning from London. (There, he was the first non-British singer to sign to The Beatles’s label Apple. He also became a close friend of Paul McCartney and George Harrison and witnessed recording sessions for The White Album.) “I came there to recover from my year in England, and it was terrific for me,” says Taylor. “It was mainly a very sheltering, therapeutic environment for me. As soon as I got back on my feet, I hit the road.”

During that time, Taylor’s childhood best friend and bassist for The Flying Machine, Zach Wiesner, was living in West Stockbridge. Taylor also played at the old Music Inn and at Tanglewood early in his career. “Having a best friend in the community, it really got me into the place,” he says. He was friends with Arlo Guthrie and visited him a couple of times. Taylor wrote the second half of “Sweet Baby James” driving to Boston after visiting Guthrie.

“I just was sort of generally aware of the Berkshires, but it was not until Kim and I met, I followed her around everywhere basically. She’s the one who had the job that required her to live here and there, in Boston and in Tanglewood. I could really live anywhere. I followed her up here, and I love it.”

Kim wasn’t a big fan of James Taylor before they met. Her first encounter with him was when he performed for a John Williams Pops concert, which was being taped for PBS. She prepped the audience. “I was so nervous about going out,” Kim recalls. As was James. “We both noticed each other, but I didn’t know what her scene was,” he says. “It was another year and a half or about before I called her and asked her for a date.” That was spring of 1995.

“I had gone through a divorce, so I was anxious for recommitting,” he continues. “I thought to myself that this was crazy, I had to learn how to live on my own, to be independent, be very careful about getting into another relationship. I was a two-time loser. We both approached it very cautiously. It was bigger than both of us.”

In 2002, Seiji Ozawa was completing his time as BSO conductor, the transition to James Levine was underway, and the Taylor twins, Rufus and Henry, were on deck. “We decided to cast about for a while,” Taylor explains. Both admittedly francophiles, they decided to go to Paris. “We had this naïve notion that the boys would become bilingual by the age of two. It didn’t happen.” They went to Sun Valley, California, and during that time their part-time home in Lenox was being renovated. “We were looking at preschools in Boston; the schools we were looking at for our three-year-olds were talking about where their alumni went to college,” recalls James. “It just seemed like an unnecessary amount of pressure to put on young kids.”

That was when they moved to the Berkshires full time, in 2004, and the children attended preschool at St. Paul’s Children’s Center, across from the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, then on to Berkshire Country Day School, where they just finished eighth grade.

Within this Berkshire landscape, Taylor blends his musicianship with his family life. Their home is just beyond the hum of commerce in Lenox, set apart by a simple metal gate that opens up to a mile-long winding driveway crossing into Washington and toward a state forest.

Parked by the barn is a 40-foot shipping container that Taylor made into an echo chamber, used on the new album. A few steps away from the barn-turned-studio is the Taylor home, with its cedar shingles and bluish-green painted trim, all buildings in harmony and very much a part of the natural setting. The four-level barn is divided into a recording studio, office, and kitchen. A homemade metal bull’s-eye is suspended at one end inside the barn, with little dents near its center. They are from one of Taylor’s favorite past times: slingshot. Nearby is a vacuum, a PVC pipe, and wooden mouthpiece that he whittled, combined to create an instrument. (The end result appears in a video clip on his Facebook page.) He’s always tinkering. During one late-night studio session, his assistant found him taking a break in the basement, running an electric saw.

“Life is so much here,” Taylor says about his Berkshires. “I write and record and rehearse here. This is really home in many ways. The energy from New York and Albany and Boston is exciting, and yet it’s far enough from those places so that it doesn’t feel like a bedroom community. It’s its own place. It’s physically beautiful, of course, but I think it might just be the people.”

It’s amazing what this rural location offers in the arts and the caliber of musicians, he says. Yo Yo Ma, who has a home in nearby Tyringham, plays on two tracks of Before This World. “When I wanted a cello part on this album, I got to call my friend up on the phone, and he drove 15 minutes,” says Taylor.

Does James Taylor ever tire of his songs? “I wouldn’t sit down and just for my own recreation play a lot of the greatest-hits songs. But you put it in front of an audience, and the kind of response that you get, the audience energy is really what it’s all about.”

Drug addiction is a recurring theme. He kicked his 20-year heroin addiction for good in the 1980s. “It’s not like you’re cured, and it’s behind you. It has to be sort of a constant part of your life,” he says. And it’s something that he wishes he understood earlier in his life. “Like so many people at that period of time, in the mid- to late-’60s and early ’70s, the casual and recreational use of addictive substances of all kinds were just a part of the zeitgeist,” he says. Whenever he drives by Austen Riggs, he oftentimes finds himself reflecting on how fortunate he was to get help. “I think of Riggs often when I play ‘Fire and Rain.’ I wrote that there. ‘Sunny Skies,’ I wrote there. ‘Walking on a Country Road.’”

As far as life now, it also can be a challenge at times, says Taylor. “There’s a tug between my life at home and my life with my family, and the family that I work with on the road that I’ve been a part of for decades,” he says. “Trying to balance that properly. It’s a big wheel, and it tends to roll. The only way to do it is to plan into the future. Lock things, including vacations—empty time alone at home just being dad and being a husband. You have to book those things as if they were a contracted obligation.”

He talks about joining Kim and the boys in A Christmas Carol a few years back with Berkshire Theatre Group. Kim also performed in Roman Fever; and Rufus will be in the chorus in the August production of Mary Poppins. They can’t say enough about Berkshire Country Day School, which Rufus and Henry will be completing next year, after ninth grade. The family has started exploring schools near and far, which means possibly moving. “We don’t foresee boarding them. We just don’t want to let them go,” Taylor says. “A year from now, we will know. We have a great range of possibilities.”

At this point in our conversation, Rufus clambers in and plops himself between his parents. He catches the two off guard with his clothes covered in clay from a school activity. He’s asked about his day, his homework load, and to change his pants. Meanwhile, Ting has become my good friend and drops a little toy at my feet. A short silence lends itself for James to fill, and he does ever so gently. “People fetch up here in the Berkshires for various reasons. It is a crossroads, you know. I myself have lived in the northwest corner of Connecticut, which was great. But I really felt as though the compass needle was always pointed to Manhattan. It’s different here. It really is its own place.” What does his future hold? He’s happy to perform as he can. “There’s more road behind me than there is before me, but I still love that life.”

source: https://townvibe.com/rockin-a-country-road/

FORBES.COM – The Story Of How James Taylor’s First Album Of New Music In 13 Years Was Finally Written

After a thirteen year hiatus of releasing original music, James Taylor, one of America’s greatest songwriters, is finally back to doing what he does best. The singer-songwriter’s seventeenth studio album, Before This World, is quite the glorious return to the music world. Though Taylor has been a major figure in the music world for decades, only this week has he secured his first number one album.

Even though he’s one of the most respected performers out there, Taylor hasn’t lost a single bit of his trademark cool demeanor, nor has he become any less humble than he’s ever been. During a performance and interview at iHeartRadio headquarters in New York City earlier this week, Taylor opened up about his lengthy career, and on why it took him so long to come back to writing and recording new material.

The legendary artist explained that he had to take time off because it just didn’t feel right to make music. In 2008, he released the album Covers, which featured his take on classics from the likes of Glen Campbell, The Temptations, and Leonard Cohen. While the record was certainly critically-acclaimed, it wasn’t the original compositions his fans so longed for. That wouldn’t come for many years, until the singer-songwriter finally forced himself to get back to work.

Surprisingly, the music for Before This World was demoed and ready to go in 2010, but it was the words that really stumped Taylor, and his creative block held the album back for several years. In order to write the lyrics for most of the new record, the songwriter had to seclude himself from the rest of the world and force himself to put words to paper, even if they didn’t all stick. He borrowed a friend’s place in Newport, Rhode Island, and he did almost nothing but work. In between weekly sessions on the coast, Taylor said he made sure he was always ready to record a melody or a bit of lyrics, both carrying a recorder on him at all times and even calling home and leaving a message on his own answering machine. Whatever it takes to write the best songs possible, I suppose.

Why did the singer-songwriter have to go through so much just to make Before This World?

“It took a lot of doing. I’m very distractible I guess” he joked to the intimate crowd.

At the age of 67, Taylor is still going strong, and his talent certainly hasn’t waned in the slightest. Though he had come down with a bout of laryngitis during the concert (which prompted him to only perform three of almost ten tracks live for the 150-plus audience earlier this week), Taylor still pulled off wonderful renditions of tracks from the new album (“Montana”), as well as his well-worn fan favorites like “Shower The People”. In addition to a slew of promotional appearances to support his new album, Taylor is also playing a sold-out show at Fenway Park in Boston, and he’ll perform at his annual Fourth of July show at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.

source: http://www.salon.com/2015/06/16/james_taylor_man_out_of_time_i_feel_like_i%E2%80%99m_a_messenger_from_a_prior_world/

SALON.COM – James Taylor, man out of time: “I feel like I’m a messenger from a prior world”

By Stephen Deusner

Despite its austere white artwork, James Taylor’s “Greatest Hits” may be one of the greatest greatest hits ever — or at least one of the most durable. Released in 1976, after seven hits album, the collection distilled Taylor’s literate songwriting and wistful melodicism for subsequent generations. It has been a back-catalog best-seller for decades, certified Diamond (10,000,000 in sales), and, more important, a means for younger and younger listeners to dip a toe into Taylor’s expansive, era-defining oeuvre.

Taylor was still a teenager in 1968 when he signed with Apple Records, the label owned by the Beatles, and couldn’t legally drink when he released his self-titled debut. During the 1970s, he embodied the archetype of the American singer-songwriter: bookish yet outdoorsy, not quite a hippie but definitely not a rocker, more apt to express his deepest emotions in song rather than in conversation. On such albums as 1970’s “Sweet Baby James,” 1971’s “Mudslide Slim & the Blue Horizon,” and 1977’s “JT,” he exhibited a soft-spoken intelligence, a precise guitar-playing style, a deep musical curiosity, and most of all a laid-back demeanor that would set the template for sensitive dudes for years to come.

Perhaps for that reason, it’s been too easy to write him off as Granddad Rock: too mellow, too sensitive, too old. Which is not an entirely accurate impression. In fact, Taylor is perhaps one of the few music superstars whose catalog still has dark corners to explore. “Greatest Hits” may have included some of his best songs, but it may have misrepresented him to subsequent generations by omitting some of his more extreme material, such as the genially goofy “Gorilla” and the devastating “A Junkie’s Lament.” His music is darker and funnier, more varied and self-deprecating than you might think.

“Before This World” is Taylor’s 17th album in 47 years, but only his first collection of original material in 13. However, in the time since 2002’s “October Road” he has recorded two Christmas albums, two covers comps, a live album and a collaboration with Carole King—all while touring heavily. “Before This World” is a finely crafted record, melancholy at times (“Montana”), bawdy at others (“Stretch of the Highway”), and generally celebratory.

It is a record by a man who sounds like he can’t quite believe his long stretch of good fortune. Fans keep turning up for shows; the songs keep coming, perhaps a little more slowly than they once arrived; and his longtime band can still translate them into spry, sophisticated arrangements. The musicians are crucial, says Taylor. “The band is a big part of what’s going on here,” he says. “It’s not just five backing musicians. It’s a musical community.”

Obviously you’ve developed a comfortable rapport with your band. Does that come into play when you’re writing new songs?

I started out writing just for guitar and voice, because that’s all I had. As time passes, when I write, I do think of them, of this community playing these songs. I record with the same people I tour with, so a lot of this album was recorded on the road. I had booked a tour to support the album, but I just drove the album into the tour, so we had to finish it on the road. We set up studios in adjoining hotel rooms or found studios along the way. I’d say we did six or seven different sessions in that way. Maybe that’s why I get a lot of highway songs. There was one on the last album and the album before.

It does seem like there are a lot of songs on here about travel, specifically missing certain places like Montana or Chicago.

I find that as I write, it’s a sort of process that’s out of my control. It’s often as though rather than writing the songs, I’m just the first person to hear them. One of the things I keep coming back to is the pull between home life and life on the road. That’s what “Stretch of Highway” is about. But I’ve had many songs like that. “My Traveling Star” [from the 2002 album “October Road”] is a recent one. And there’s “Daddy’s All Gone” [from the 1976 album “In the Pocket”]. I became who I am as a musician and as a person in the mid ‘60s. I’ve evolved since then, for sure, but when I was starting out, I thought that anyone who was 65 was a completely different creature that you couldn’t really speak to. The surprise now that I’m in my late 60s is that I really am the same person. You remain the same person. What we’re so attached to is our individuated consciousness that we live in. We don’t want to let it go.

Does that change the way you relate to older songs? When you revisit a song you wrote 40 years ago, does it mean something different to you now than it did at the time?

I’ve played some of these songs so many time, but it still feels like yesterday. If I’m playing them in front of an audience, their reaction and connection to the song is a really big part of it. But I do see different things about them, and I do amend them somewhat. “Carolina in My Mind” has a whole new end part that is now a crucial part of the song. I see people in the audience singing along to it. They know it now. I wish that I could tour an album for 20 or 30 gigs and play these songs in front of an audience 20 or 30 times before going into the studio and putting them down. It’s odd that the first time that they’re played is the time that they’re recorded for posterity. But you get better and better at that. This is the 16th time I’ve gone in with a batch of songs, and I think I’ve gotten better at realizing the things the first time, in their first iterations.

This is your first album of original material in more than a decade. Have you been continually writing during that time, or are these more recent songs?

Both things. Songs start constantly. Every time I sit down and play, there’s a possibility that a chord change or a chord progression will become a song. I put a lot of stuff down on Dictaphone, pocket recorders, on my cell phone. There’s a lot of that instantaneous catch-it-while-it’s-here stuff. Sometimes you get an entire song from one of those sessions. It’s rare but it happens. More often there has be a long phase of sequestering off. You get in a cage somewhere without any distractions. One of the things I found this time is that I actually need a week of defended empty time before lyrics really start to come through. It used to be that I could find a place near my home, set up all my notebooks and recorders and my guitar, and work away from three hours before lunch and two hours after lunch, maybe take a long walk. Now I find I actually have to drive a couple of hours away from home and set up camp for a whole week, and after a couple of days, things start to flow. That’s new since the last time. Now I know what it takes. It takes these little sabbaticals. It’s rare that I know what a song will be before I write it. It’s rare that I set out to write a song. There are a couple of exceptions. I knew what “Far Afghanistan” and “Angels of Fenway” were doing to be about before I sat down to write the lyrics. But usually I’m just following the song and I’m surprised by where it leads me.

I wanted to ask about those two songs in particular—especially “Far Afghanistan.” It stands out on the album due to its subject matter, among other things.

That one is in a minor key, and I don’t often write in a minor key. It also has a kind of Celtic feel to the music. Every song gets a title as I’m working on it. “Angels of Fenway” was called “G Nation,” because it’s in the key of G and is about Red Sox Nation. “Far Afghanistan” was called “Irish Heroic,” because that’s how the music felt to me. I don’t know if you know the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, but I feel his influence in the song musically. I’ve written other songs about soldiers, including one early song called “Soldiers” [from 1971’s “Mud Slide Jim and the Blue Horizon”] and another called “Native Son” [from 1991’s “New Moon Shine”], which was about soldiers trying to come home and trying to re-engage with normal civilian life. I’ve been obsessed with what it takes to prepare yourself for something so extreme—for such an extreme sacrifice. It occupies me a lot. “Far Afghanistan” is definitely a fiction, although I’ve known lots of friends who’ve done serve and I’ve lost some, too. But the idea of putting yourself in harm’s way is what the song is about. What would it take for a young soldier to prepare himself or herself to kill or be killed?

I do come back to some of the same themes. I suppose you could say that all songwriters are just writing the same 100 songs over and over again. I’m not saying anything new. No words are coming out of my mouth now that haven’t come out of my mouth many times before. So it’s all repetition and reexamination and regurgitation, I guess. There are songs that are palliative—that seek to comfort—and there are songs about recovery. There are love songs and road songs, and there are songs about show business—like “Company Man” [from 1979’s “Flag”] or “Hey Mister That’s Me Up on the Jukebox” [from “Mudslide Jim”]. And there are songs that are just outright celebrations, like “Jolly Springtime” on the new record or “First of May” [from 1988’s “Never Die Young”]. There are songs that are like hymns for agnostics. I have songs about my dad. And I even write songs about music. The new song “Snow Time” is about the restorative power of music. That theme… all of these themes have been in there a number of times.

Does that become problematic after a while? Do you ever stop writing because you’ve heard it before or written it before?

That’s the thing. I don’t seem to be able to finish a song if I’m not compelled by it. So yeah, sometimes I’m writing and I feel myself on the same subject again, but sometimes I’m still excited by it. I’ve written three or four love songs to my wife Kim, and they always new to me. You’re coming at it from a different angle. You’re casting it in a different scene and different musical context.

Tell me about “Angels of Fenway.” I have to say, I did appreciate the line about the Yankees overspending.

It’s what everybody says when they’re going on their tirade: The Yankees are fantastic. In fact, they’re the best two teams in baseball. After I wrote the song, I sent it to a friend of mine at the Red Sox, who himself is a songwriter, and we launched it from Fenway Park. They did a little video for it, and we debuted it during a series with the Yankees in which they shut us out, of course. But it was great. I’m going to play Fenway this summer, and I can’t wait to play the song for them.

That thing that happened in 2004 was an amazing moment whether or not you’re a sports fan or a baseball fan or even a Red Sox fan. It was miraculous that we would be down three games to the Yankees and win the next four—the next eight, in fact, because we went to St. Louis and could not be denied. I remember seeing pictures in the newspapers of tombstones and graveyards all over New England where there were little messages to the departed: Congratulations, Granddad, we finally did it! Baseball gloves and newspaper clippings and banners and pennants were all over the place. It was a real release, so I knew I wanted to try to write about it.

That song is more about the characters, though—the grandmother and the grandson. Just the line, “even after Granddad died,” suggests a whole thing that’s happening in her life. It defines her character—that she went to the games even after he died. It suggests they went together and even though it was his thing, she kept going after he died. She continues that tradition and takes her grandson along with her, which turns him into a fan. So the song traces her life span: She’s born in 1918 [when the Red Sox last won the World Series], and she watches from her hospital bed as they finally are victorious. I’m actually really happy with how it came out. Musically it’s like that song from “Oklahoma!”—“The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” It’s not a modern-sounding song. It’s got some giddy-up.

It’s funny you should mention “Oklahoma!” because I thought the bridge—where the boy sings the vocals—sounded like a bit of musical theater in the middle of the song.

That’s right. You get the crowd coming in and the ambient noise of Fenway. That was my producer’s idea. Dave O’Donnell came up with that little tableau. My wife sang in the chorale part on the chorus. She has a beautiful high soprano voice and she doubled the melody on top. I have two sons, twins 14 years old, and they were always hanging around the barn when we’re recording. So I just drafted Henry, whose voice hadn’t changed at that point last year. He could still sing that high part. Rufus had already gone down an octave. So I said, Sing this part for me, Henry. I thought he did a great job. There’s such a strong family connection at Fenway Park, especially between grandparents and grandchildren. That’s a lot of who’s coming to games.

The game has such a leisurely and unhurried pace. I think it’s more fun than watching basketball or football, which people say is more exciting. I guess it’s just nice to have a minute to follow what’s going on and take it all in.

I totally agree. I don’t look for a lot of excitement in life. Maybe I shouldn’t broadcast that. But excitement isn’t what’s missing. Modern life is distracting. I remember being a kid and there were long open weekends when you had time on your hands, time to have long thoughts. Now it’s really cut up into smaller and smaller fragments of attention. At the same time, that kind of technological accessibility allows me to record an album in my barn or in a hotel room if I want to. There are definitely some things that I wouldn’t want to go back to. It’s one of the meanings of the title “Before This World.” I feel like I am before this world. I come from 1965. When I became who I am it was another world. A previous world. I was in London in 1968 in the studio with the Beatles, but that was another time. It was exciting in ways and it was insane. But I feel like I’m a messenger from a prior world.

source: http://www.salon.com/2015/06/16/james_taylor_man_out_of_time_i_feel_like_i%E2%80%99m_a_messenger_from_a_prior_world/

BILLBOARD.COM – After 45-Year Wait, James Earns His First No. 1 Album on Billboard 200 Chart

After a 45-year wait, legendary singer/songwriter James Taylor has earned his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart with Before This World. The album, which was released on June 16 through Concord Records, arrives atop the chart dated July 4 — more than 45 years after Taylor arrived on the list with Sweet Baby James (on the March 14, 1970 list).

The new album launches atop the Billboard 200 with 97,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending June 21, according to Nielsen Music. Of its start, pure album sales equated to 96,000 copies sold — Taylor’s best debut week for an album since his last studio effort, 2002’s October Road, launched at No. 4 with 154,000 sold.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).

Taylor surpasses Black Sabbath for the second-longest wait for a No. 1 — the rock band’s first chart-topper, 2013’s 13, came 43 years after their self-titled debut bowed on Aug. 29, 1970. Tony Bennett’s 54-year wait for his first No. 1 remains the longest — between the Feb. 23, 1957 debut of Tony and the No. 1 launch of Duets II on Oct. 8, 2011.

Notably, Taylor achieves his first No. 1 after racking up a staggering 11 previous top 10-charting albums. Among all acts, only Neil Diamond accrued more top 10s before his first No. 1: 14 leading up to the chart-topping bow of 2008’s Home Before Dark.

Taylor’s fruitful chart career before his first No. 1 can be compared to other acts that have tallied major chart success — but have fallen short of a No. 1. For example, rock band Rush and conductor Ray Conniff have each clocked 12 top 10 albums without topping the list. They are tied for the most top 10s without a No. 1.

Other acts without a No. 1 — but with a bevy of top 10s — include Sting, The Who (both with 10 top 10s), 311, Brad Paisley, Brooks & Dunn, Kiss and Sheryl Crow (all with nine each).

Although Taylor lacked a No. 1 album until this week, he has earned a chart-topping single on the Billboard Hot 100: “You’ve Got a Friend.” The tune topped the Hot 100 for one week on July 31, 1971. It’s one of 21 Hot 100 hits for the singer.

source: http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/6605803/james-taylor-first-no-1-album-billboard-200