James Taylor makes a song his own
Something happens when 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.’ And that’s because basically it’s been translated into my language,” the singer-songwriter said.
“Not all songs work in my language, 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 recently got more classics translated into James Taylor with the digital release of three songs — “Over The Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from “My Fair Lady” and “Never Never Land” from “Peter Pan.”
The trio of tunes never made it to Taylor’s “American Standard” album earlier this year.
Taylor, 72, says he was intimately familiar with the songs picked for the album and new EP, having first heard many of 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.”
The new batch 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 on my songwriting. They basically are my teachers,” says Taylor.
He noted that his guitar skills were somewhat limited and that his natu
ral tendency to James Taylor a song is to lean on his own influences: Latin music, bossa nova and Afro Cuban. “It’s interesting to put songs into that vocabulary,” he says.
He is modest about his own songwriting, saying he usually sits down with a guitar and plays until he finds a melody — or “catching an idea,” as he puts it — and maybe a scrap of lyric.
“There have been a few tunes that I just thought of while I was driving the car and I would reach for my phone and put down the line of lyric or melody — that has happened, too. But my feeling is that when that’s happening, I’m still inhabiting that place that I discovered and built by sitting down playing the guitar.”
Taylor says he recorded the covers not only to honor them but also to educate — reminding some younger listeners who might be looking for the
next good thing of sonic past triumphs.
“I’ve got four kids, and they’re all musical to a greater or lesser extent. So I’m constantly saying, ‘Go listen to Lee Dorsey, listen to Ry Cooder, listen to Neil Sedaka,’ ” he says.
Whether he’s sitting down to rework someone else’s song or creating one of his own, Taylor somehow evokes feeling with his voice, a process that baffles even him. “You sing it, and it summons the emotion. That’s the magical thing,” he says.
Nov. 28 birthdays: Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr. is 91.
Singer Randy Newman is 77. Musician Paul Shaffer is 71. Actor Ed Harris is 70. Actor S. Epatha Merkerson is 68. Actor Judd Nelson is 61. Comedian Jon Stewart is 58. Actor Gina Tognoni is 47. Actor Daniel Henney is 41. Singer Trey Songz is 36. Actor Bryshere Gray is 27.