Latest album won’t be Taylor’s last
Before This World is songwriter’s first collection in a dozen years
TORONTO — How sweet it is: James Taylor says he wants to keep making new music and promises it won’t take another dozen or so years to release it.
That’s how long it took the soul-soothing singer-songwriter to put out Before This World, just released. Some fans wondered if this might be his last collection of original songs and the 67-year-old admits he once thought the same thing.
“There’s definitely more road behind me than there is ahead of me,” he said in a recent telephone interview.
“And I thought going into it, ‘Well, it took 12 years to get in there the last time. Let’s see, do the math: I’d be 79 by the time I got back in the studio. Is that likely? Well, maybe not.’”
But the five-time Grammy Award winner found it “so satisfying and so much fun to cook up a new batch” of tunes that he changed his mind.
“I definitely want to get back to it and do it again,” said a genial Taylor, from his home recording studio in Washington, Mass.
“I’m not sure what form it will take, but it’s not going to be another 12 years. There will be another one.”
Before This World is Taylor’s first album of new tunes since 2002’s platinum-selling October Road, but he has toured and had several releases in the interim, including a Christmas collection.
Taylor said some of the tunes on Before This World, produced by Grammy winner Dave O’Donnell, have been in the works for even longer than 12 years.
You And I Again, for instance, began over 20 years ago as a simple piano piece he’d play every time he sat down at the keys. It drove his wife, choral singer Caroline (Kim) Smedvig, “crazy,” he said with a laugh.
“Kim said it was something Bach would’ve written when he was three.”
Eventually the piece turned into a love story about the first time he and Smedvig met.
“She didn’t know I was writing it about her,” said Taylor. “She didn’t know it was a love song to her until it was finished. Of course she recognized this music that I had been driving her nuts with for years, but I scored some points.”
Taylor has also scored points with his Canadian fans with the tune SnowTime, about being in economic exile and trying to reignite a cultural flame in downtown Toronto in the winter.
He said the song was inspired by positive examples of the immigrant experience he saw in Montreal and Toronto.
“I love Canada,” said Taylor. “I’ve always had a strong connection there, so I wanted to place this song there.”