The New Yorker Radio Hour - From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

James Taylor’s songs are so familiar that they seem to have always existed. Onstage at the New Yorker Festival, in 2010, Taylor peeled back some of his influences—the Beatles, Bach, show tunes, and Antônio Carlos Jobim—and played a few of his hits, even giving the staff writer Adam Gopnik a quick lesson.This segment originally aired on July 7, 2017. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

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. But 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 stunned me about is when you first appeared, you had a distinctive way of playing the guitar, which wasn't like anybody else. It's a distinctive kind of voicing.

And you had an amazing harmonic language. 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 it. 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 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. 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. You know, my folks love the Rogers and Hammerstein, Rogers 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 Shermers really in the and the Shermer music company so you drove up with your mother to well we took the train up and and I think it was my mom and my dad on that trip and we went to Shermers and found a guitar I I saw the the fender electrics, the shape, the amazing finish of them, the way they look, 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 was.

Simple. but it spoke to me and it was 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 What was a good song? 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. Would you please? I don't think this is ever here. 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. You know, it was really... something called Travis picking that we all learn. Sort of a walking thumb. One or two fingers thrown in. Roll, river, roll, long as you can be.

Longest river I've done seen, roving to sea. Went like that. 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, it...

Not the umpah part, maybe so much at the beginning, but the way that the baseline goes down and goes to the... And all of that. And it's on the minor. It's on the minor, exactly, yeah. In that... Yeah, it does. It had a certain...

It hints at things you will write. Yes, if not. Everybody... I think everybody here knows that you went off to... London eventually and you and you recorded that first record. How old are you when that, when you did that, James? I was, I guess I was 19 when I went to London and got my, 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 went to, when I came to New York in 1966, and instead of graduating high school, I came here and I started with Danny Courchmore, a band called The Flying Machine, which was, it was ill-fated, and we had problems and, you know, typical problems and never got our recording deal that we needed. signed one, but the people who signed it just, they 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 was, I needed soup. I needed a bed, you know, I needed my parents, I needed to go home. You know, my dad actually heard me on the phone. I called him in North Carolina from New York. 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. I just sat there for 10 hours, and my dad showed up in a station wagon and it took me home. That's one of my treasures, that little, that memory, that thing he did. I wrote a song about it called Jump Up Behind Me. 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 clean 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 and 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 and sort of a posse or a crowd or a tribe

that's 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. Mr. That's Me Up on the Jukebox or Fading Away or Company Man. Those are songs about, you know, the difficulty of starting off with a very private and personal thing. And as my friend David Crosby says, you know, 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, it can be a, that's a very interesting thing to try to negotiate and to make, 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. But it had to be, you were saying, it had to be peculiar. Yes, of course it's true for everyone, but a writer, maybe 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 must be, you know, 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,

the way she moves. But that was the first one that I thought really worked as a song, yeah. You still do material from that period, and I know you've talked about a lot. But one of things interest 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 some, 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.

He started doing covers for the first time. He 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 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. So you still feel strong and energetic. And Cooch says, why don't we try how sweet it is? 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. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

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, and your, in 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 Lair. 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 and the, you know, which were a beach music band. And his stuff extended into some light jazz, and one of them was that great album recorded in 1963 in three days here in Manhattan. Astrid Gilberto, Juan Giroberto, girl from Ibanima.

Tall and ten and young and lovely, the girl from Ibanima goes walking, and when she passes, each one she passes goes. And that stuff had a huge effect on me. I love the chords. I love 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... The idea of one-na-da-da-da-da-da-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.

The idea of that song is, it was sort of like one-note samba. It's just that... Da-na-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then the changes... The harmony. Underneath it, and that's a very Brazilian, very Jobeam 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 Alas, too, isn't it? That is. That's the part you want to keep quiet if you can, James. That influence. You really want to. No, I only came to realize that later. We can cut, we can edit right here. Hi. So, yeah. No, the, I played hymns. I played Christmas carols,

and it gave me that sort of very bedrock kind of Western musical. Bach harmony. 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, 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, Lenin McCartney, I think I'm playing Holland Dozy or Holland, I think I'm, you know, but actually, or Sam Cook or Marvin Gaye, but it actually is put through this sort of narrow filter of my technique. Of your guitar, of your guitar fingering. And it makes it sound like James Taylor, like, you know, 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 to getting me down,

And people are just too much for me to fade Well, when I adapted the tune and we did it, it was like a When this old world starts are getting me down And people are just too much for me to fade I climb way up to the top of the stairs and all my cares he just knew right in

all that inner voicing of the so now we know so it gets really Beatles Beatles chords Beatles beats Brazilian chords

and Bach harmonies and you have James Taylor tune it's just too painful to have James Taylor up here and not hear you play would you play a few things for us

that's okay We were raised children They were circles around the sun Never give up Never slow down Never grow old, never ever die young Synchronized with a rising moon Even with the evening star

They were true love all written in stone They were never alone They were down 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 and to doable doses And brass and our tears and sighs You can see them on the street on a Saturday night

Everyone used to run them down their lives Too sweet. They're a little too tight. They're not enough tough with this town, though We couldn't touch him 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 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 was nothing to hold them down. They would rise from on this like 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 one sailed on and on To another land beneath another sky Let other hearts be broken

Let other dreams run dry Let our golden one sailed on and on To another land beneath Another sky Another sky Gold I'm going to 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 it calls my name That seems to leave this trouble World behind And if I'm feeling down in blue I'm troubled by some foolish game She always seems to make me change my mind

I feel fine any time That she's around me She's around me Almost all the time If I'm well you can tell She's been with me She's been with me Quite a long, long time

and I feel fine. Every now and then the things that I don't lose their meaning and I find myself convening into places where I should never let me go. It has a power to go to no one else can't find me

and a silent ear the happiness and good times that I know. Well, I guess I just got to to know them it isn't what she's got to say how she thinks of where she's been 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 I feel fine any time that she's around. She's around me.

I'm 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 for you. 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? Could I get one? A guitar and plug it in. There is. Thank you. I bring two in case these are Olson 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 that, and this is the most recent one he built. So this is 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 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's your key. The Oracle had spoken. The Oracle is spoken, so that's it. And Dee was your key. So we start on D. So it's... The sun is shorty singing him here and down.

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 sing it with my dear wife, Kim, who is here, and I'm going to pull it. She's going to go and pull me up.

Take her up on stage. It's here somewhere. Yes, she is great. Hi, Kim. Hello. Good. So this is sort of like open, open mic night. That's open mic night.

That's right. We are. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to go out with a whimper here. So. Again. The sun is surely sinking down. Moon is slowly. So the world must still be spinning.

That was Adam Koppnick 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. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrio, Riannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, and Stephen Valentino. We help from Rhonda Sherman, David Ohana, Bradley G, Terence Bernardo, Emily Mann, and Monk Faye Chen. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.