From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you're a James Taylor fan, what would you ask him? If you could ask him anything, the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik got his chance.

James, this evening runs the risk of being an episode in the Chris Farley show. I don't know if you remember Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, when he would have people he admired on, he would just say, do you remember when you wrote Fire and Rain? And say, that was great. And I could go through everything you've done and simply stand here and sweat and say, that was great. But

I will try at least to find out why it's all been so great. Thinking about your music, one of the things that's always sort of stunned me about it is when you first appeared, you had a distinctive way of playing the guitar, which wasn't like anybody else. It's distinctive kind of voicings. And you had a

an amazing harmonic language. You know, I always think when I go through your sheet music and see that wonderful song like "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight" starts with an E minor ninth chord and then goes to a major seventh chord. Those weren't the C, A minor, F, G progressions of pop music at the time. Did you study music? How was it that the language of music came to be the language you speak so naturally? - I studied cello when I was a kid.

my parents thought it would be good for there were five of us and So I I got the cello and I played for about four years badly reluctantly I was a bad student and I never gave me the kind of feedback that I needed to have it take off and and and have its own momentum its own reason to continue but all along I noticed that I

that the guitar was going to be it for me 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. Yeah.

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.

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 Shermer's. Really? The Shermer Music Company. So you drove up with your mother to...

And we went to Schermer's and found a guitar. I saw the Fender Electrics, the shape, the amazing finish of them, the way they looked, the chrome, the mother of toilet seat, you know. But they wouldn't go for it. So it was a classic guitar. And I, you know, immediately I got, I'll show you what, the first thing I ever played on it.

Simple, but...

It spoke to me, and it just immediately started making sounds that I wanted to hear more of. And the cello never did it. You sold the cello at that point and pawned it on 46th Street. I don't know what happened to that damn cello. It's got to be around somewhere. I hope someone's playing it. And you started to compose just the way kids do, teenagers do on the guitar. You just chord to chord and idea to idea. What was the first song you ever wrote that you thought was a good song?

I wrote a song when I was 13 or 14 called Roll River Roll. It's pretty awful. I can play it for you. Would you please? I don't think this has ever been heard. James Taylor's first song. Has this been widely covered, James? 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. It was really...

This is something called Travis picking that we all learned. Sort of a walking thumb and then the one or two fingers thrown in. Roll, river, roll, long as you can be. Longest river I've done seen, rolling to the sea.

Went like that. And then... But you know, the strange thing is, James, I never heard that, it sounds like a James Taylor song, you know? I mean... Yeah, it does. You know? I mean, not the oompa part, maybe so much at the beginning, but the way that the bass line goes down and goes to all of that. And it's on the minor. And it's on the minor, exactly, yeah. And that...

Yeah, it does. It had a certain... It hints at things you will write. Yes. I think everybody here knows that you went off to London eventually and you recorded that first record. How old were you when you did that, James? I guess I was 19 when I went to London and got my recording contract with Apple Records, with the Beatles. Right.

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've been at it since...

When I came to New York in 1966, instead of graduating high school, I came here and I started with Danny Kortschmar, a band called The Flying Machine, which 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 just couldn't follow through with it. So...

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. I needed my parents. I needed to go home. My dad actually heard me on the phone. I called him in North Carolina from Texas.

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. That's wonderful. 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 treasures, that little memory, that thing he did. I wrote a song about it called "Jump Up Behind Me."

Well, speaking of that, one of the things that was so potent about your music when, as a very young man, people first started paying attention to it, was that it seemed to be so amazingly emotionally accessible. It seemed to sum up

so many of the longings of a generation, so many people, a song like "Rainy Day Man" or "Something's Wrong," and then more famously in the next go-round, in the next group of songs, "Fire and Rain" and those things. Was it strange and difficult to have, to see your own experience turning into songs and then becoming these kinds of universal vehicles for other people's feelings? Very strange indeed, and

You know, I think that that's, obviously you want success, you want to be heard, you want to be listened to and encouraged. 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. And 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.

And 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. 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 this 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. I'm sure that writing has a similar, there's a similar thing to it when you take your work to market. It had to be, you were saying, it had to be peculiar. Yes, of course, it's true for everyone, but a writer may be six people

read it. When a musician genuinely develops a following, it's millions of people who see your music as their internal, not just as your journal, but as their internal diary. And that's an extraordinarily rich time. What's the first song of that body of work that you feel, a lot of it you still perform, that you feel is strong, is a finished song that you feel good about?

I guess "Something in the Way She Moves" is probably the first song that 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. You still do material from that period and

I know you've talked about it a lot. But one of the things that interests me, if you don't mind, just to fast forward a little bit. As a listener of yours, as a follower of yours, one of the things that seemed to me to be true, and I wonder if it was true, is that in the kind of mid-70s, you were searching a bit for a sound for work. And then beginning in the late 70s, you started doing a couple of things. You started doing covers for the first time. You started doing Motown covers, how sweet it is and so on.

And it seemed as though there was a kind of rebirth through sort of being free to do other people's work as well as yours and sort of shedding the skin of Sweet Baby James and of that material. Was that a fantasy or did you feel some of that?

you know it it just wasn't very uh 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

So you still feel strong and energetic. And Cooch says, why don't we try How Sweet It Is? How sweet it is to be loved. How sweet it is to love. James Taylor talking with Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival. Ahead this hour, we'll hear a live performance from James Taylor. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Needed someone to understand my ups and downs. Where's sweet love?

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James Taylor joined Adam Gopnik in conversation at the New Yorker Festival, and they talked there about how Taylor formed his very distinctive sound, which was so influenced by Brazilian music, and in particular, Antonio Carlos Jobim. You have that beautiful song, Only a Dream in Rio. Did Brazilian music open up your ears and your musical vocabulary? 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, and one of them was that great...

recorded in 1963 in three days here in Manhattan. Astrid Gilberto, João Gilberto, Girl from Ipanema. ♪ And ten and young and lovely ♪ ♪ The girl from Ipanema goes walking ♪ ♪ And when she passes, each one she passes goes ♪

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... Da-da-la-da-da-da-da

da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da

The idea of that song is it was sort of like one note samba. It's just that and then the change is 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, you know.

What happened is I developed a little bit of a guitar style from playing Christmas carols and hymns from school.

God, that's Deutschland uber alles, isn't it? That is. That's the part you want to keep quiet if you can, James. That influence. I only came to realize that later. We can edit right here. So, yeah.

No, I played hymns, I played Christmas carols, and it gave me that sort of very bedrock kind of Western musical Bach harmony, that kind of thing. 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 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, 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. Of your guitar fingering. 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...

♪ When this whole world starts a getting 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 getting me down ♪ ♪ And people are just too much for me to feed ♪

All that inner voicing of the... So now we know. So it gets really...

Beatles chords, Beatles beats, Brazilian chords, and Bach harmonies, and you have James Taylor tuned. It's just too painful to have James Taylor up here and not hear you play. Would you play a few things for us? Let's go. We were ring-a-round the rosy children 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 To cut up our losses into doable doses And ration our tears and sighs You can see them on the street on a Saturday 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

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. That much more with their backs up against the wall. 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. I guess it had to happen someday soon. There wasn't nothing to hold them down. They would rise from on the slack of a big balloon. Take the sky and forsake the ground.

Yes, other hearts were broken, and 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 sail on and on

♪ To another land beneath another sky ♪ ♪ Beneath another sky ♪ ♪ Hold him up, hold him up ♪ ♪ Hold him up, hold him up ♪ ♪ Hold, won't you hold ♪ Thank you, "You Never Die Young." I'm gonna try, I'm gonna play that first song, very early song, first presentable song, I think, that I ever wrote. ♪ 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. Troubled by some foolish game. She always seems to make me change my mind. I feel fine anytime that she's around me. She's around almost all the time.

Well, you can tell she's been with me. She's been with me now quite a long, long time. And I feel every now and then things that I deem don't lose their meaning. And I find myself leaning into places where I should never let me go.

She has a powder gold door, no one else can find me And silently remind me of the happiness and good times that I'd known 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 to calm me down I feel fine anytime that she's around me 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 quite a long, quite a long time, quite a long, long time, and I feel fine. I have been playing, I have two children, and for the last 16 years, I've been playing You Can Close Your Eyes for them every night when they go to sleep.

And they always ask me, "Daddy, did you make up that song?" And I say, "I did, actually." But now they're here tonight and they'll be aware that I didn't, actually. James did. But I wonder if on behalf of this audience, who I know are all moving their fingers, would you teach me to play that song properly? I will indeed, yes. Let's get a guitar. Is there a guitar? Can I get one? Get a guitar and plug it in. There it is.

Thank you. I bring two in case... These are Olsen guitars made by a guy in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and he managed to, 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 I'll take it home tonight. Now, we're in D, which Miles Davis said was the key that belonged to you. Well, it's true. I met Miles Davis once up on 94th Street, and 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 oracle had spoken. The oracle had spoken, so that's it. And D was your key. So we start on D. So it's...

♪ The sun is short ♪ ♪ It's me and Kim now ♪ That's good. Actually, before we go... That is. 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... She's going to pull me up. Pull her up on stage. She's here somewhere. She is here. Hi, Kim. Hello. Good. Good.

So this is sort of like open mic night. It's open mic night. That's right. We are. We're going to go out with a whimper here. Again. Well, the sun is surely sinking down, but the moon is slowly rising. So this whole world must still be spinning, and I still...

So close your eyes. You can close your eyes. It's all right. Great. I can't sing the blues anymore. That was Adam Gopnik on the guitar, accompanied by James Taylor and his wife, Kim. I'm David Remnick. Please join me next week. And until then, have a great week.

Thank you.

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