Adding the James Taylor touch

OMETHINGHAPPENSWHEN James Taylor covers a song. It gets all James Taylor-y.

“People often tell me, ‘It sounds like you wrote that song’ or ‘That sounds like a James Taylor song.’ Andthat's because basically it’s been translated into mylanguage,” the singer-songwriter says.

“Not all songs work inmylanguage, but the ones that do— if they’re interesting or worthy of being recut— it’s because it’s nice to hear them in James Taylor.”

Fans are getting more classics translated into James Taylor on Friday with the digital release of three songs — Over The Rainbow from

The Wizard ofoz I’vegrown Accustomed to Her Face frommyfair Lady and

Never Never Land from

Peterpan.

The trio of tunes never madeit to Taylor's

American Standard album earlier this year, which contained such covers as Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat andgodbless the Child. Instead of leaning on a piano, they are guitar-led reinterpretations, often wistful and airy.

Taylor, 72, (left) says he was intimately familiar with the songs picked for the album andnewep, having first heard manyof them from his parents' record collection growing up in North Carolina.

“I’d just try them on for size,” he says. “It was so easy and natural to pick up an instrument and start learning songs and reinterpreting songs and developing a sort of a simple guitar technique.”

Thenewbatch of songs lean heavily on Broadway musicals, like the songwriting teams Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, as well as Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. “I think they had a profound effect onmysongwriting. They basically aremy teachers,” says Taylor.

During the interview, Taylor was effortlessly thoughtful, moving easily from topics like the gentrification of Boston’s suburbs to what a revelation Chartres Cathedral must have been to a peasant hundreds of years ago. He’s well versed in Thomas Mannand Tolstoy.

Several times he noted that his guitar skills were limited and that his natural tendency to James Taylor a song is to lean on hisowninfluences: Latin music, bossa nova and Afro Cuban. “It’s interesting to put songs into that vocabulary,” he says.

Heis modest about hisown songwriting, saying he usually sitsdown with a guitar and plays until he finds a melody— or “catching an idea”, as he puts it — andmaybe a scrap of lyric. That is howmasterpieces like Carolina inmy Mind and Fire and Rain cameabout.

“There have been a fewtunes that I just thought of while I was driving the car and I would reach formyphone and putdownthe line of lyric or melody— that has happened, too. Butmyfeeling is thatwhen that’s happening, I’m still inhabiting that place that I discovered and built by sittingdownplaying the

guitar.”

The American Standards batch of recordings reunited Taylor with master guitarist and producer John

Pizzarelli. The two worked on Taylor's 2002's album, October Road, and his2006 Christmas album.

Pizzarelli, whoalso has worked with Paul Mccartney, Michael Mcdonald and Rosemary Clooney, calls Taylor an amazing guitar player and a talented harmoniser. “Whenyou listen to the collection, he really James Taylor-ised them and not at the expense of the songs. He makes the songs better.”

Whether he's sittingdownto rework someoneelse's song or creating one, Taylor evokes feeling with his voice. “You sing it and it summonsthe emotion.

That’s the magical thing,” he says.