"I'm breaking my brain over what it might mean just to claim the time and to turn away, to make today today." (Link)
That article I posted yesterday touched me. It included this picture on the left. Time flies and while he not feel so different, he looks a bit different, as do I. That was one of my favorite lines, that James Taylor even grew bald along with the rest of us. Pete Fornatale was once interviewing Taylor and said that he was about
to ask a question that might throw James. of course James said that it would be fine. Pete asked, James got thrown; the question was how James Taylor felt about being bald. He said he didn't think about it, didn't mind it, that his father had been a handsome bald man and it just was what it was. He sounded like he could have lived without
that question being asked.
posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 9:57 AM
2 Comments:
JT played outdoors at my college's Spring Weekend my freshman year. What a beautiful young man he was, making that sweet music -- sometimes out of personal pain. He looked the way he does in that first picture (well, not the fun colors!). I admire bald men who don't obsess over it -- I probably would, alas -- and I count my own dad as a good-looking man who was bald by the time I was born. He was about 31 then.
The music of the latter half of the 1960s and the first year or two of the 1970s was, IMO, unparalleled in any era since then. It doesn't get old. Nor does James. (nor Carole)
Thanks. Agreed. You put it well. Cool to have seen him. They are talented.
When I was a preteen Taylor's name came up in my shul's youth group and a kid said, "He's a typical junk musician." He meant to criticize Taylor's music, I suspect that he was parroting an arrogant older sibling (and that the original comment may not have been just a critique of the sound of his music). I disagreed with the dismissive attitude of Taylor, still do.
His stuff runs deep, (as does Carole King's). I like the song cited in the title of this post - Line 'Em Up, which is from (I think ) the early nineties and already looking back about twenty years - to the early seventies(although deep songwriters have a way of growing old young; Taylor seems to have been looking back in songs like Fire and Rain and Carolina and others in a way that was wise and aged beyond his years). I think his work of the seventies and on is under-rated.
I don't know why this author just focussed on Taylor, but King is amazing too. The song Tapestry and every song on that album (album!) was a keeper (particularly the slower ones). Theirs is my kind of music and some newbies try to replicate the singer-songwriter style, but those people, in and of that time and place, will never be again.
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