James Taylor, the chronicler of a generation’s soul-woes, who has, over four decades, held the affection of an audience, woke up this year to find himself, at the age of sixty-three, suddenly revered. First, Carnegie Hall offered him a series of retrospective concerts at its halls, large and small, which begins this week. (One, a big gala, will feature Steve Martin and Bette Midler; another, a demonstration of guitar technique, will be intimate; a third concert will be devoted to his music’s roots.) Then, while preparing for the Carnegie season, the news came that President Obama had awarded him the National Medal of Arts, which he accepted at the White House on March 2nd. The double dose of appreciation has placed Taylor—who somehow manages, in life as in song, to be both wryly reticent and emotionally overflowing—in a reflective state of mind.
Despite his formidable record at communicating emotion, Taylor chooses his words with an almost professorial deliberateness, inflected by quick backward looks in the rearview mirror of self-consciousness—his style is equal parts self-mocking, cosmic, and precise. “I’ve been amazingly lucky to have survived to be sixty-three at all,” he said over lunch the other day. “I think of my life as happening in nines—I like the number. I was addicted for eighteen years, and things tended to happen in cycles of nine years.” (He’s been married to his current wife, Kim, for just over that span.)
Taylor, who has, with Kim, twin ten-year-old boys, has a sense that this is his “harvest season.” “Carnegie Hall! It’s a cliché for success,” he said. “I think a lot about how lucky I am in so many ways. Just that we should be born into a human form on this planet is so unbelievably unlikely, given where our molecules might have been—I mean, given the fact that the fillings in my teeth were once the inside of a star. And then to be born into my family, and to have been alive to follow my own path, and then to have survived the inevitable drug addiction, and to have gotten into recovery, and then to have met Kim.” He went on, “If I went online and tried to find the perfect mate—and I think that that probably is an excellent use of the Internet—I couldn’t have done better. That’s such a smart way to do it, by the way. I think that a couples therapist and a computer geek should form a company and shepherd people through it. For so long, there’s been this terrible process where we find a mate through our very worst instincts and our reiteration of all our family mistakes. We always become one parent and marry the other one.”
Taylor’s last few albums have been devoted to covers, but he is ready to record a set of new compositions. “In the beginning, when I was writing, the songs were forcing their way out. I’ve written most of these songs two or three times now. And that’s fine, to have the same dozen songs you write over and over. There are some odds and ends—a song about Australia, a song about a traffic jam—but generally there are just a dozen or so themes. There are love songs, songs of unrequited yearning, songs about going home, songs about my father. It just takes a little bit of material to assemble a decent father cycle.”
Despite having arrived at the collecting moment of life, he still has ambitions. Recently, he went on the road with his thirty-four-year-old son, Ben, who is also a singer-songwriter. “He and I are sort of sharing the bill,” he said. “Something that needed to happen for a long time.” He went on, “I’d still like to write a musical with Randy Newman. I’d like to sing ‘Shed a Little Light’ with Aretha Franklin—I already did that, but I’d like another crack at it—and I’d like to record an album of French songs.” He paused. “You know, that President’s medal—if it’s round and can be set into the headstock of a guitar, I’ll do that with it. That seems like a very country thing to do.”
Just then, a nervous waiter spilled a full glass of water into Taylor’s lap. Taylor leapt to his feet and began to apologize. “This happens to me all the time,” he said. “You chose the right guy.” He collared the waiter with a very James Taylor look, and added, “Besides—it’s water.” ♦
