James Taylor
Appearances
Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder
Ep. 46 | Celebrities Who Were Killed By Their Fans
And James was even reported saying, the guy had sort of pinned me to the wall and was glistening with maniacal sweat and talking some freak speak about what he was going to do and stuff with how John was interested and he was going to get in touch with John Lennon.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
The idea of that song, it was sort of like one-note samba. It's just that . And then the changes move underneath it, and that's a very Brazilian, very Jobim thing to do. So I was hugely impressed by that stuff, and it was a great source for me. What happened is I developed a little bit of a guitar style from playing Christmas carols and hymns from school.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
God, that's Deutschland uber alles, too, isn't it? That is.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
No, I only came to realize that later. We can cut, we can edit right here.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
So, yeah. No, the... I played hymns, I played Christmas carols, and it gave me that sort of very bedrock kind of...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
And from then, I fell into The Beatles and Jobim. And it really, I found that I had enough of a technique to be able to adapt those things into it. But the technique itself, I would I think I'm playing Ray Charles. I think I'm playing Joe Beam. I think I'm playing Paul McCartney, Lennon McCartney. I think I'm playing Holland Dozie or Holland.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I think I'm, you know, but actually, or Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye, but it actually is put through this sort of narrow filter of my technique.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
And it makes it sound like James Taylor, like Carol's tune up on the roof, which we did all summer long, and we went back and forth between her version of it and mine. It started being like a...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
When this whole world starts a gettin' me down And people are just too much for me to feed Well, when I adapted the tune and we did it, it was like a When this whole world starts a gettin' me down And people are just too much for me to feed I'll climb way up to the top of the stairs and all my cares they just lay right in the... La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la da da
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
They were circles around the sun, never give up, never slow down, never grow old, never ever die young, synchronized with the rising moon. Even with the evening star, they were true love, all written in stone. They were never alone, they were never that far apart. And we who couldn't bear to believe they might make it, we got to close our eyes and
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
To cut up our losses into doable doses And ration our tears and sighs You can see them on the street on a Saturday night Everyone used to run them down. They're a little too sweet. They're a little too tight. They're not enough tough for this town, no. We couldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole. No, it didn't seem to rattle at all. They refused to gather body and soul.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I studied cello when I was a kid. My parents thought it would be good for... There were five of us. So I got the cello and I played for about four years badly, reluctantly. I was a bad student and it never gave me the kind of feedback that I needed to have it take off and have its own momentum, its own reason to continue. But all along, I noticed that the guitar was going to be it for me.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Had much more with their backs up against them. Hold them up, hold them up, never do let them fall. Pray to the dust and the rust and the ruin that names us, shames us, claims us all. Guess it had to happen someday soon. There wasn't nothing to hold them down. They would rise from all this like a big balloon. Take the sky and forsake the ground. Guess other hearts were broken.
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I know other dreams ran dry But our golden ones sailed on and on To another land beneath another sky Let other hearts be broken Let other dreams run dry Let our golden ones sailed on and on To another land beneath another sky Beneath another sky Hold them on, won't you hold them on?
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Thank you. You Never Die Young. I'm going to play that first song, very early song, first presentable song, I think, that I ever wrote.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Well, there's something in the way she moves Looks my way or calls my name That seems to leave this troubled world behind And if I'm feeling down and blue, or crippled by some foolish game, she always seems to make me change my mind. I feel fine anytime that she's around me now. She's around me now, almost all the time.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I'm well, you can tell She's been with me now She's been with me now Quite a long, long time And I feel fine Every now and then the things that I deem don't lose their meaning And I find myself convening into places where I should never let me go
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
She has the power to go No one else can find me And silently remind me Of the happiness and good times that I know, you know Well, I guess I just got to know them It isn't what she's got to say How she thinks of where she's been To me the words are nice the way they sound. I like to hear them best that way. Doesn't much matter what they mean. She says them mostly just calm it down.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I feel fine anytime that she is around me now. She's around me now I mean just about all the time If I'm well you can tell That she's been with me now She's been with me now Quite a long, quite a long time Quite a long, long time And I feel fine
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
And I finally prevailed on my folks. We lived in North Carolina. My mother would bring little groups of us up on the train to Manhattan to expose us to something other than trees. And we... Was it art or music or... Yeah, it was the shows that she took you to? Museums and shows. Yeah. And the city itself.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Get a guitar and plug it in.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Thank you. I bring two in case. These are Olsen guitars made by a guy in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and he managed in 1985 to get one into a hotel room that I was checking into in Minneapolis, and I've never looked back. So this is the first one, and this is the most recent one he built, so...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Well, it's true. I met Miles Davis once up on 94th Street, and it was, you know, it's one of those things that you take with you as a great, the great man, indeed, that he noticed me enough to mention, he said, you know, D is your key.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Actually, before we go any further, I sing this song at home too. And I've actually more and more recently gotten used to singing it with my dear wife, Kim, who is here. And I'm going to pull it. She's going to pull me up. Pull her up on stage. She's here somewhere. Yes, she is here.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
When the sun is surely sinking
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
The moon is slowly rising So this whole world must still be spinning around And I am still alone
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
You know, my folks loved the Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, My Fair Lady in South Pacific and Oklahoma, and some light classics and some folk music, too. And of course, I loved Elvis, and I loved the Beatles, and I loved Ray Charles. When I was exposed to those things, that's sort of the second tier of stuff I was exposed to.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
That amazed me too and it just opened my eyes and I wanted to explore that music and I wanted to sing it, I wanted to play it. But I was 12 when I got a guitar here in Manhattan at Schermer's. Really? The Schermer Music Company. So you drove up with your mother to... Well, we took the train up and I think it was my mom and my dad on that trip. And we went to Schermer's and found a guitar.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I saw the Fender Electrics, the shape, the amazing finish of them, the way they looked, the chrome, the mother of toilet seat. But they wouldn't go for it. So it was a classic guitar. And immediately, I got, I'll show you what the first thing I ever played on it was. Simple, but... It spoke to me, and it just immediately started making sounds that I wanted to hear more of.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I don't know what happened to that damn cello. It's got to be around somewhere. I hope someone's playing it.
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I wrote a song called, when I was 13 or 14, called Roll River Roll. It's pretty awful. I can play it for you.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
No, it hasn't been widely covered. And the fact that nobody here tonight has ever heard it is proof of how lame it was. You know, it was really... This is something called Travis picking that we all learned.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Sort of a walking thumb. And then the one or two fingers thrown in.
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
Roll, river, roll Long as you can be Longest river I've done seen Rolling to the sea
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I guess I was 19 when I went to London and got my recording contract with Apple Records, with the Beatles. And that was such an amazing reversal of fortune for me. That was the door that opened and let me through to the life that I've lived ever since. It was my big break. I'd been at it since, you know, when I came to New York in 1966, and instead of graduating high school, I came here and I
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I started with Danny Kortschmar, a band called The Flying Machine. It was ill-fated, and we had problems, typical problems, and never got our recording deal that we needed. We signed one, but the people who signed it, they couldn't follow through with it. And after that fell to pieces in 66, when I was 18, I went home to North Carolina to recover a little bit. I needed soup. I needed a bed.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I needed my parents. I needed to go home. My dad actually heard me on the phone. I called him in North Carolina from from New York, and the band had been broken up for about a month, and he could hear that I wasn't well, and he said, you just stay right there. He got my address. He said, you stay right there. I'll be there in 10 hours, and he was.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I just sat there for 10 hours, and my dad showed up in a station wagon and took me home. That's one of my, you know, my treasures, that little, that memory, that thing he did. I wrote a song about it called Jump Up Behind Me.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
This land is a lovely green. It reminds me of my own home. Such children I've seldom seen, even in my own home. The sky's so bright and clear.
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
And I think that that's, obviously, you want success. You want to be heard. You want to be listened to and encouraged.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
But it's always that moment of going from the private thing, and in the case of a singer-songwriter who doesn't have a band who's sort of going there with him, sort of a posse or a crowd or a tribe that you're running with and doing it with, when you're doing it alone and by yourself, it is a very strange transition to make.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I wrote songs about that too, Hey Mister That's Me Up on the Jukebox or Fading Away or Company Man. Those are songs about the difficulty of starting off with a very private and personal thing. As my friend David Crosby says, the first album you make is the result of 10 years of work, then you've got a year to make the next one.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
But those first songs weren't written with an audience in mind, except in the most general sense. They really were personal, like diary entries or poems that you write for yourself. But then when you take the stuff to market, and engage the music business and the popular culture and all that stuff. That's a very interesting thing to try to negotiate and to go public with it and to make a living.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I'm sure that writing has a similar, there's a similar thing to it when you take your work to market.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
I guess Something in the Way She Moves is probably the first song that I... I had written Knocking Around the Zoo and a song called Sunshine, Sunshine before Something in the Way She Moves. And actually all the songs on the first album, some of them before, some of them after Something in the Way She Moves, but that was the first one that I thought really worked as a song.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
You know, it just wasn't very carefully considered ahead of time. All of those cover tunes that I would do were things that would be thought of at the spur of the moment in the recording studio after we had already recorded two songs that day. That's the way it was with How Sweet It Is. That's the way it was with Handyman. And we're going to be paying for it anyway.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
So you still feel strong and energetic. And Cooch says, why don't we try How Sweet It Is?
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From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
It sure did. You know, I mentioned the Broadway stuff, the folk music and the light classics that my parents listened to and some satirical stuff, Tom Lehrer. The next level of that was what my brother Alex brought into the house. He brought Ray Charles and Joe Tex and Don Covey and the Hot Nuts, which were a beach music band. And his stuff extended into some light jazz.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
And one of them was that great... album recorded in 1963 in three days here in Manhattan. Astrid Gilberto, Joan Gilberto, Girl from Ipanema. And that stuff had a huge effect on me. I loved the chords, I loved the, you know, for a guitarist, that Brazilian thing is just a rich vein to get into. And man, I couldn't get enough. So, and I, you know, that song more recently, the...