THIS STAR WON’T QUIT
James Taylor still touring
“When I started, I never gave any thought whatsoever to what I would be doing when I was 70,” James Taylor says. “I never thought I’d live this long.”
For the veteran U.S. singersongwriter, a short British tour culminated in an event at Hyde Park performing with Paul Simon for his fellow troubadour’s final British show.
“I can certainly empathize” with Simon, Taylor says. “At this age, most of life is in the rear-view mirror. You do get the sense of a finite amount of time.”
There has been a wave of farewell tours announced this year as aging musical stars contemplate retirement, including Elton John and Joan Baez.
“Hopefully, they ’ll be around for a long time yet. I can’t believe any of them will quit music entirely.”
Taylor himself has no plans to stop. “Music has kept me alive, that’s for sure.”
Taylor is an iconic figure, the model of a certain breed of sensitive singer-songwriter using his voice and acoustic guitar as a panacea against life’s troubles. The hit songs Fire and Rain and a definitive version of Carole King ’s You’ve Got a Friend made Taylor a superstar in 1971 and his gentle soulfulness left an indelible imprint on the Californian soft rock of that decade. It is a template that has endured, resonating in the pop songwriter styles of James Blunt and James Bay, or Ed Sheeran at his most mellow. Yet one thing that set Taylor apart was a sense that beneath the laid-back surface lurked dark depths.
“I would not consider myself mellow,” he says. “But I don’t enjoy stress and confrontation in music. I get plenty of that in my life.”
As a teenager in North Carolina, Taylor suffered depression and was hospitalized. He began using hard drugs and, even while rising to become an apparently wholesome household name, spent over a decade struggling with heroin addiction. While he acknowledges that a recurring theme of his work has been “addiction and recovery,” he “wouldn’t characterize (mental health) as a lifelong battle.”
Mental health issues, he thinks, can be a double-edged sword for an artist. “In dealing with it, contemplating it, trying to get relief, a lot of art is generated,” he says.
In some ways, Taylor has actually had a charmed life. At age 20, he was discovered and nurtured by The Beatles, recording his 1969 debut during dead time at Trident Studios in London while the Fab Four made The White Album. “It was a thrill but I can’t really recall it in any order. London was pretty intoxicating, on all levels,” he says. He wrote Carolina in My Mind during a short break in the Balearic Islands because The Beatles themselves had all gone on holiday.
“It was very quiet. There was no electricity. You got around on a bicycle or you walked. And the song just came to me.” The Karen of the song was a girl he had met on his travels. (North) Carolina was his childhood home.
One particularly haunting line stirs the ripples of homesick longing: “Ain’t it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind?” “That (song) was a lucky one,” he says. “It may be my favourite that I’ve ever written. It still means a lot to me.”
The word “friend” is a touchstone of Taylor’s work, recurring throughout his canon. Carole King wrote You’ve Got a Friend in response to the bereft line “I’ve seen lonely days when I could not find a friend” in Taylor’s Fire and Rain. He seems momentarily taken aback when shown how often he uses the word.
“I guess I don’t have a whole lot of friends,” he says. “It’s hard to make new friends as you get older. The closest I get is working on music together with other players.”
For a decade at the height of his fame, Taylor was married to fellow singer-songwriter Carly Simon.
They were a golden couple, appearing together on the cover of Rolling Stone and singing on each other’s recordings. They met in 1971 and divorced in 1983. But Simon’s 2015 autobiography Boys in the Trees paints an unflattering picture of a relationship complicated by Taylor’s drug addiction and infidelities.
“I haven’t read it,” Taylor says dryly. “On balance, I’d say maybe I’ll leave that till later.”
They have two children, Sally and Ben Taylor, who are both singer-songwriters like their parents. Simon claims Taylor has refused to speak to her since the relationship ended, and banned their offspring from giving her his phone number. “That’s sort of the point about divorce, that you go your own ways,” Taylor says. “I don’t know when she has determined that the relationship ended, but we communicated closely for years about the kids.” He points out that “Carly was important to me. But it did end. And I’ve been married three times.” Taylor married actress Kathryn Walker in 1985, and she helped him conquer his addictions. He has now been sober for more than 30 years. He and Walker divorced in 1995, the same year he met Caroline (Kim) Smedvig, the director of PR and marketing for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They married in 2001 and have twin boys, Rufus and Henry.
“I was lucky to meet my soulmate later in life,” Taylor says.
His most recent album, Before This World, reached No. 1 in the U.S. (and No. 10 in Canada) on the Billboard charts in 2015. He is ambivalent on the question of whether there will be another collection of original songs. “Maybe, as you get older, you just run out of things to write songs about,” he says. He is planning an album of acoustic versions of other people’s songs for early next year, however, and has no plans to stop playing his own classics.
“I wouldn’t sit in this hotel room and take out the guitar and just enjoy playing Fire and Rain for myself. But people want to hear it. They don’t want to hear some outside version or deconstructed play on it, they want to hear the song. And, somehow, playing it for them really does something for me. It’s a shared emotional experience that reanimates it for all of us.”
And besides, he says, “it’s really the only thing I am qualified to do. I had a job in a leather workshop for a while, but aside from that, I’ve never done anything other than music. And for me this is a great job. So I think I’ll just keep doing it.”