0.39.0 - You never knew a girl who had as many James Taylor records as you
I was driving with Matt through the streets of suburban Birmingham to go collect an Indian takeaway for the group of friends we were hanging out with for the week at the UK Games Expo, and we were talking about music. Matt had asked me what my favourite song of all time was, prompted by the fact that the extremely lengthy and highly eclectic playlist which I put on in the car when I can't think of anything else to play had delivered a motown standard which had been played at his wedding. I told him it was an impossible question; I've got a hundred favourite songs and it changes from minute to minute and mood to mood, and is highly dependant on what is top of mind when I'm asked. I could give you a list of 20 albums which are my favourites, maybe 100 songs I'd consider the pinnacle of my musical tastes, but they're all tied for joint first; or at least, they shift places so often based on my whims that they may as well be.
He asked me what it was right then, at that moment, and it might have been the perfect subconscious test case; I was paying attention to driving an unfamiliar city, was on a weekend break with people I liked, not feeling pressure or stress or worry; I didn't have time to second guess or pick apart my answer; I just reached into my brain stew and pulled out a response. As I write this now, I can think of twenty songs I could have said, but right then, with no forethought or special consideration, I picked a James Taylor song. I'm pretty sure Letter In The Mail probably doesn't bother any lists of top ten, or twenty, or fifty James Taylor songs (the man has 20 studio albums to his name) amongst scholars of his work, but it's my bone-deep favourite for reasons I've spent some time trying to put into words.
What I love, have always loved about James Taylor's music is the marriage of the poetic, the narrative and the emotional in his work, and in Letter In The Mail all these sit in a kind of idealised balance which makes it the absolute centerpoint of the Music Which Makes Me Feel Things bullseye. It's not a song that I can relate to personally; it's about going back to a small town where you grew up (don't have one of those) and realising its slowly falling apart from the inside; the people there are keeping it alive through inertia and habit and a single catastrophe would destroy the place; a fire at the sawmill does just that, and he realises the town he grew up in is going to be swallowed by the tides of time and progress. It's a song of melancholy reflection and idealised nostalgia, it's a beautiful short story that takes you to this tiny vignette, this stage play in your mind, and it teeters between winsome and celebratory in a beautiful counterbalance. That's a lot of words to try and explain somehow why it's one of my favourite songs of all time, but there's a quality to it I can't find a good way to express. I love to sing along to it, to live in the moments it creates, and that's how I know that it's my favourite even if I have to sit down and interrogate my own feelings to come up with a justification for why.
I'm not going to do an album by album breakdown of the 12 James Taylor albums I listened to, and instead I just want to talk holistically about my relationship with James Taylor's music overall. In part, and this is not said with any form of criticism, that's because there's a consistent through line in the form of his music which started in 1970 and hasn't significantly changed direction in the intervening 55 years. While his music will take on different influences across albums; sometimes it's more blues; more gospel; more protest and folk song influenced, but his stock in trade as the troubadour of country acoustic Americana remains unchanged and unassailable in his primacy. Every album I covered, from 1971's Mudslide Slim and The Blue Horizon to 2000's October Road brings alive that feeling.
For me, listening to James is like slipping into a warm bath for your brain; it's being under the covers on a chilly night being read a bedtime story, it's being sat by a roaring fire with a glass of wine, it's staring out of the window at the falling snow in wonder. For me, its as close an approximation as you will get to audio anxiety medication. His songs, his voice, the gentle picking of the guitar are my safe space, my happy place, my secret garden which only I have the key to.
I've been listening to a lot of James Taylor for the last couple of years.
My connection to his music comes ultimately and completely from my Dad; a dab hand at the acoustic guitar himself, he'd sit in our front room and play Carolina On My Mind and Fire & Rain and Sweet Baby James for the pleasure of it. When he wasn't playing James, he was listening to him, along with the rest of the family. Like many of my early musical influences, I would spend my time in musical immersion, sat motionless with my Dad's giant headphones on as I listened to James Taylor tell stories about cowboys and broken hearts for hours. By the time I had some agency in my own music listening world, I'd still listen to James by choice; New Moon Shine and Never Die Young, his albums spanning the late 80s and early 90's is where the root of my personal love for James comes from (Letter In The Mail is from Never Die Young), where I would be gifted James Taylor albums on cassette and listen to them in my room, the only 12 year old reading Transformers comics and listening to James Taylor in the whole world.
When I moved out, I lost access to the back catalogue of vinyl my father had accrued so I took it upon myself to replace them; years and mismanagement have left my collection incomplete, but to this day my CD rack has copies of Sweet Baby James, One Man Dog, Flag, and That's Why I'm Here scattered across it, dusty from lack of use*. But owning those songs for me wasn't even a consideration - without access to them myself, how would I recommend them to others**, or revisit them when I needed them most? So I tracked them down, the only 20 year old arriving at the counter of the HMV with copies of Soundgarden's Superunknown, Stone Temple Pilots' Purple, and James Taylor's Dad Loves His Work.
In every album of his from JT and Flag in the 70's all the way to Hourglass and October Road, the throughline which keeps coming back to his music is the way in which it makes me believe in the idea of kindness and empathy in the world. I'm not a religious person by nature, either in upbringing or personal outlook, but I'd think seriously about joining any church James Taylor founded. There's a fundamental decency in his perspective that emanates from everything he does like an aura, a glow which says "these are songs about how the world could be better and how we can make it better and how we should feel about one another". Before, or maybe in spite of, all culture became politics, before everything had to choose between self interest and hate and success or decency, morals, and an endless struggle, James somehow took what country music was and kept that spirit alive while Jason Aldean and Aaron Lewis*** set fire to it for political points.
I can't tell you if you'll like James Taylor's music, if it will speak to you like it speaks to me with 30 years of history and exposure and memories all wound up and through the music he makes. It's corny, it's sincere, it wears its heart on its sleeve and it tells you that sometimes people are good. It's cringe, in the parlance of the kids; it fails the cool, the cynical, the test of aloofness that makes us as sophisticated and switched on and disconnected and lonely. For me, it's crucial, critical, a bedrock of faith that somehow music and be sincere and hopeful and that's OK.
So if you're down, and troubled, and you need a helping hand, you've got a friend in James Taylor.
* When the Spotify Black Swan event comes and all streaming music platforms crumble to dust as the exploding AI bubble destroys the internet entirely, then I'll be glad I hung onto them though.
** I have never successfully recommended James Taylor to anyone for what its work. I've been with Catherine for 17 years and I think at best she thinks some of his albums are OK.
*** Why anyone would take any kind of political, moral, or life direction from Aaron Lewis, who pivoted into country after being the lead singer of 'Like-Creed-But-Worse' early 2000's alternative rock band Staind is beyond me, but there's a lot about 2025 that I don't quite understand.
