James Taylor: The Creator Series #1

How he does what he does as a songwriter and performer

Today I’m starting what I intend to be a new series of articles about the art and craft behind being a rock-and-roll songwriter and performer.

I’ve always been fascinated by creativity and artistry, and as I’ve researched the artists and songs, I’ve run across material on how the performer thinks about and carries out the different creative elements of their process, as well as observations by key others — fellow artists, producers, recording engineers being the most prevalent.

I’m also interested in the artistry and creativity supporting them. In other words, the people enabling the making, performing, and distribution of the music we love. So I intend to write on the industry and key players within it as well. The music industry is pretty crazy as far as industries go. The stories, oh vey, the stories I’ve read.

Rather than letting what I’m learning disappear into the shadows of my mind, never to see the light of day again, I’ve decided to capture it in this stack (and later a book). It’s like a filing cabinet for me, with you getting to read the memo I’m filing if it’s of interest to you.

I’m not intrigued by everything, and I’m not doing a deep research dive as I don’t have the time. This will be more along the lines of “listen to this cool stuff I ran across about how they write songs.” You get the picture.

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I find James Taylor remarkably inspiring, and in particular I appreciate the fact that he’s been so generous in sharing his experience and the lessons he’s learned with others. One of the ways he’s done this is by doing Oprah’s Master Class — a veritable motherlode of information. If I don’t mention the source of a quote, that’s where it’s come from. (I transcribed the valuable bits myself — arrgh! The things I do for love of music.) I think it’s well worth watching the 40-minute Master Class if you’re a James Taylor fan. You can find it here.

Learning to play

James came to the guitar at the age of 12 with knowledge and experience grounded in listening to his family’s record collection and playing the cello for four years, but decided to go the self-taught route and “invented” his own chords. In his words:

“I came from a musical family. My mother had studied singing for a while and both my folks really have always loved music. We grew up in North Carolina, and there was a lot of empty time to listen to music and to think about it. The family record collection was a real treasure. My mother encouraged all of us to pick up an instrument. And I played the cello for about four years until I swapped over to the guitar. I pleaded, I begged. I got a guitar for my twelfth birthday and essentially never looked back. I’d had very few lessons on the guitar. I mostly just sort of found my own way of playing it. I actually constructed chords. I’d play the bass note to a chord because I knew that was what I needed next if I was trying to sing a song. And I just would go through the strings of the guitar putting my fingers wherever it seemed to work with that bass note. As a result, my D chord, my A chord, my G chord, my E, all of them are a little bit backwards. That’s because I invented my own chords. But in those days, the amount of time that you had to consider things, experiment with different tunings without distraction, was a lot, lot longer. And it’s very easy today to be distracted.”

James explains his technique in this video from Guitarist magazine, and the camera gets in close so you can see his hand position and fingerwork as he demonstrates and plays:

According to bassist Lee Sklar, who’s played with James since the late sixties, James could play perfectly even when he was strung out on heroin or methadone, never getting a word or chord wrong. “The minute he would start doing what James does, it was total clarity. He was in the moment, never fucked up. And then when he would be done playing, then he would go fuck up his life.”

James used a Gibson J-50 acoustic guitar, which he bought in a music store in Durham, North Carolina (near where he lived), to write and perform his first songs, including “Something in the Way She Moves,” “Fire and Rain,” and “Carolina in My Mind.” It was also the guitar he used when he played with Paul McCartney and George Harrison at Trident Studios in London. This was his second guitar. His brother Alex had absconded with his first guitar and spray-painted it blue, and James never used it again. That guitar is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.

After using his Gibson for about ten years, James replaced it with a Whitebook. This was followed by a Takamine with built-in pick-up, a Yamaha (with the same), and an Olson, which he’s stuck with since receiving it as a surprise gift in his hotel room from James Olson. He has also played two electric guitars, a Fender Duo Sonic while he was performing with the Fabulous Corsairs (his brother Alex’s band) and with his own band, the Flying Machine, and a Seymour Duncan design for Fender Telecaster, which he loves because it has a wide neck like an acoustic guitar. You can see James perform on each of his guitars and explain their histories, show off a tattoo he got with his sister, and issue an appeal for another Seymour Duncan Telecaster in this video, which I found quite fascinating:

Songwriting

Like many artists, James experiences songwriting as an unconscious and mysterious process that comes from somewhere else:

“Once I got deep into the guitar, I would play anything that came to mind. It started as self-expression, saying things that I wanted to hear said, playing music that I wanted to hear. And I’ve always felt as though it was an unconscious process, that I was, rather than writing the songs, I’m just the first person to hear them.”

“Songwriting is my joy and a great thrill and a source of deep frustration and will drive you crazy. It’s a mysterious thing and something that’s out of my control. Often it takes a long time before I understand what a song is really about.”

How he writes

His songwriting process, as he now explains it, requires quiet time alone to “push around” what he calls the “pieces,” “clues,” and “breadcrumbs” that have come to him in order to put together a song, and then continuing to work on that song to improve it:

“When writing a song I need quiet. I need those three days of boring nothing happening before I start to hear them. You know, you get these pieces. And then you’re going to have to sequester yourself somewhere, find a quiet place and start to push them around. I think in order to create, artistic people need to be alone, they need to have time to themselves. Isolation is key.”

“Writing songs, you just follow the clues. You follow the breadcrumbs. It is an unconscious process and it’s hard to describe it with language.”

“Nowadays you can find a way to record your music, and that’s great. You put it down. You can listen back to it. You can improve it. Continue to work on it.”

It’s interesting that in James’ early days, when he was on drugs and his life was more chaotic, he would write a song in pieces over time and in different locations. Per quotes from James in Timothy White’s biography, Long Ago and Far Away: James Taylor - His Life and Music, he wrote “Carolina in My Mind” in a friend’s flat in London, on vacation on Formentera, an island next to Ibiza, and overnight in a closed-down cafe in Ibiza with a girl named Karen when they missed the boat back to Formentera, where he “wrote the rest of it…on a piece of paper that was lying around there.” Likewise, as covered in my previous post on James, he wrote “Fire and Rain” in a basement flat in London, at a hospital in Manhattan, and at the Austen Riggs psychiatric treatment center he checked himself into in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Ultimately, for James it’s about the excitement of performing that song that’s come to him:

“You know, you can’t predict where the song will take you and how it will end up, but I really love it when a song comes through and I put a puzzle together and it gets on its feet and works. It’s really exciting to play those things.”

What he writes

James believes that he writes about the same themes over and over again, with the spiritual being a major theme:

“I’ve written 170 songs, something like that. In many ways I look at it as having written 25 songs over and over again. There are themes that I keep getting drawn back to. I think that happens in general with songwriters, that they’re always rewriting a song that they’ve heard before.”

“I have a spiritual need and music satisfies a lot of that. It’s not a mistake that music lived in the church forever and ever. The church knew about the spiritual appeal of being in music…So I do write songs that are spiritual. That’s definitely a major theme of mine, over and over again.”

But he also stresses that music is a physical thing that has direct, powerful, and often predictable effects on its listeners:

“There are lots of cliches about music. ‘Music is the universal language.’ I think that’s actually true. Generally speaking, I think that when a person hears a major 7^th chord, they have a certain relationship emotionally to that chord. You hear a song and you weep, you know. I mean that’s happened to me numerous times before. It’s not something you decide on like language is. I mean, when you use language and have a conversation or try to make a point, it’s up for grabs. It’s analytical. It’s a cerebral process. But music either connects with you or it doesn’t. You feel it, because it is a true thing in the world. It’s physics. An octave is twice the frequency of the note of the octave below it. That is a physical reality. So there’s something empirically true about music, and that means that it’s a relief from the isolation of life. Because humans live in their own assembled world that’s in their brain, and it’s an isolation. It’s a prison. It separates us and we want to give that the slip and fall back into what really is. Music allows us to do that.”

The incredible singer-songwriter Carole King, a longtime friend who has performed and toured with James, has been inspired in her own songwriting by his songs. As she noted in her autobiography, A Natural Woman, “James’s songs can be deceptive in their simplicity. They’re actually quite complex and not always predictable. James creates subtle distinctions that make every verse and chorus not quite like any other, yet each new section feels completely familiar and natural. I was so inspired by James’s writing style that I began to incorporate it into my own songs.”

Performing

When James started out, he valued the opportunity to sing his songs in front of small audiences in low-key and low-risk venues in order to develop performance skill:

“I started playing music in the early sixties. Folk music was a big deal. Folk music was so accessible. And all you had to do was pretend you could do it and maybe you could. And the same thing went for writing songs. You’d say I’m going to write a song like that, and then it takes its own direction, and surprise, you’ve got something. So it was easy to play music with just the guitar and voice, and there were also places you could get up in front of an audience and test yourself. You know, try it out and see if you had any effect on people, and sort of develop a little performance skill. Open mikes at coffee houses and community centers and church basements — those were good training, really important. And we need more of those. We definitely need more of those. Opportunities for people to play to just a handful of people. Just get your stuff out in front of an audience. It was really important to me.”

He finds that performing the songs he wrote long ago still affects him emotionally to this day:

“When I perform these songs, some of which I wrote 40 years ago, 35, 30 years ago, it does, it takes me back. It reconnects me to where I was, what I was feeling, what was going on with me.”

Music as a profession and a community

One of the things he emphasizes is that he always saw music as his job, but he also recognized that he succeeded not on his own but as part of a musical community that provided support and inspiration:

“I saw myself as a working musician, as a person with a job and a skillset and a craft and a series of relationships that were important to me. That has helped me sustain what I do. So part of it is key friendships along the way and people who helped, like a musical community. They have a huge influence on my process.”

That community extends to the audience, a relationship that, in his experience, can bring about common purpose, the sharing of deep emotion, and even a state of transcendence:

“I remember when we were on the road during 9/11. Those concerts that we did in that next month, it was deep. There were some deep moments there. Because it’s musical and emotional, it’s kind of a bonding, kind of a community thing that happens at a concert. Having a common experience with like-minded people you know it’s a real thing that happens. And it is transcendent. And it can be quite deep…To have met the people I met, and to have evolved this relationship with an audience that sustains me in the world, and with whom I have a common purpose, I feel as though we’re joined by something. It’s great to have a life in music.”

But he also admits that the life of a musician has its challenges, the struggle for him (and many artists) being “how to balance home life with time on the road.”

Being tuned in to the zeitgeist

Whether intentional or not, when James started out, he was in perfect tune with the times. As bassist Lee Sklar said in this video interview with Sunset Sound:

“James was like the perfect artist for something new happening in music — the singer-songwriter movement. Even though you had Dylan…Phil Ochs and all these people during the folk era, what came next was different. James was like the figurehead, spearhead, benchmark for this whole thing, because one day nobody knew who he was, and the next day he’s on the cover of Time magazine. You know, they’re talking about ‘this is the new movement in music.’”

Of course, as a mass media publication, Time reflected a cultural wave that had already begun almost two years earlier, in July 1969, when James played at the Troubadour, a ‘happening’ club for new musical acts in West Hollywood, and almost two weeks later at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, in both places to enthusiastic audiences. At the Festival, he shared the bill with Johnny Cash, June Carter, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, the Everly Brothers, and Taj Mahal (among others), in this video calling it “pretty much the beginning of my career.”

Explanations for the immense popularity of James and the singer-songwriter movement vary, with someone in the documentary Troubadours: Rise of the Singer-Songwriter (my notes are unclear who said this!) suggesting that rock was exhausted after the traumas of the counter-cultural sixties, including the anti-war movement and the assassinations of political leaders. There was a turning inward, from the social and political to the personal and contemplative. Carole King said much the same in her autobiography, attributing the success of her Tapestry album and the albums of other singer-songwriters, such as Sweet Baby James and Joni Mitchell’s Blue, to “their release at a time in twentieth-century cultural history when people were beginning to turn inward to explore the emotions about which other songwriters and I were writing.”

Whatever the explanation, the music of James Taylor, Carole King, and the other singer-songwriters of the late sixties onwards was, and continues to be, meaningful and even precious to me. When I go through a period of “Fire and Rain” or I’m “Running on Empty” (Jackson Browne), I take heart that these guys have been through it themselves and come out the other side. And I also remind myself, ‘Hey kid, no matter how hard things get, don’t forget, whether it’s God, another human, your cat (dog, gerbil, pet tarantula), or even yourself, you’re not alone in this crazy universe. As James and Carole have both reminded you, “You’ve Got a Friend.”’

Dear readers, please let me know your thoughts, reactions, and random musings in the Comments section. And please ‘Like’ the post if you like the post, so I know you like this new series so far.

A special thanks to my paid subscribers, who have enabled me to buy more books and access more documentaries for use in this and my other series. Greatly appreciated!