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Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

“James Taylor songs have a soothing quality — his heroin addiction seems incongruous”

One of the great songs of our time, Sweet Baby James by James Taylor, is basically a lullaby.

And it’s also a song about heroin addiction.

Indeed, I would suggest that the heroin addiction came first, because according to legend, the song was written when Taylor was trying to get off the drug, staying with some friends of his — ‘baby James’ was their child.

Yes, the lullaby part is obvious — So goodnight you moonlight ladies, rockabye sweet baby James/Deep greens and blues are the colours I choose/Won’t you let me go down in my dreams/And rockabye sweet baby James. And the first verse sounds like something from a classic children’s story: There is a young cowboy who lives on the range/His horse and his cattle are his only companions/He works in the saddle and he sleeps in the canyons/Waiting for summer, his pastures to change...

But this wouldn’t be a great song if it was just aimed at sending a child to sleep. Superficially, it sounds like that, yet there is this tremendous depth to it, that is coming from somewhere else.

It starts to take you there in the next verse: Now the first of December was covered with snow/And so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston/The Berkshires seemed dreamlike on account of that frosting/With 10 miles behind me, and 10,000 more to go...

This is Taylor driving to the house of his friends for sanctuary, literally with 10 miles behind him and 10,000 more to go. But if it’s literally 10 miles for someone in the early stages of recovery, spiritually it’s the start of a very long trip, too.

Now you can also hear the resonance in these lines — he sings out a song that is soft but it’s clear/As if maybe someone could hear — there’s this deep need for someone to hear that voice.

Indeed, by calling the baby James, you can sense that Taylor is making a direct identification with the child, that he is longing for that time in his own life when the only things he had to worry about were the doings of cowboys who lived out in the range in bedtime stories.

This is what I’m hearing anyway, guided by the stuff I’ve been reading about James Taylor over the years. But I would still contend that even if you know nothing about James Taylor, or his addictions, it will always sound like a great song because it is so artful in the way that it mixes the darkest of thoughts with these visions of serenity.

Indeed, even the notion that you could build these layers of desolation into such a song of serenity has a kind of genius in itself. Moreover, the complete works of James Taylor have this soothing quality which makes his addiction to heroin seem incongruous. But apparently addiction ran in the family — his father was an alcoholic, and a doctor, described by Taylor in a recent interview with Jenny Stevens as “a remarkable and powerful and beautiful guy who selfmedicated with alcohol”.

Taylor went for heroin in his youth, as “a juice that solves your internal stress — one of the signs that you have an addiction problem is how well it works for you in the beginning”. So he used the drug to “get normal”.

He was still taking it during his relationship with Joni Mitchell, which lasted about a year, a time when his own career was going fantastically well — again we find this strange truth that a person can be ‘successful’ and still struggling.

Taylor then became addicted to the methadone he was using to get off heroin, telling Jenny Stevens, “It really lives in your bones. I mean, it just takes forever to get over it.”

It lives in the bones of Sweet Baby James too. As if maybe someone could hear.