“We are riding on a railroad”, sang James Taylor, back in 1971. “Singing some else’s song”. It was a song from Taylor’s stupendously wondrous 1971 album Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. Another song on the album was You’ve Got A Friend, borrowed from Carole King’s Tapestry. You might have heard it. Just a year before Mud Slide Slim, Taylor released Sweet Baby James. This album included Fire And Rain. If that was all he ever did,us music fans would be happy people indeed, but he did more, so much more.
From 1971 until 2002, I would contend that Taylor’s output was erratic to say the least. There were some great tunes along the way – Shower The People, Up on the Roof and Mexico to name but three, but nothing came close to those two subliminal records. In 2002, Taylor released October Road which wasn’t up there with the other two records, but it was pretty damn good. And in September Grass, the great man proved beyond reasonable doubt that he still had an ear for a tune, albeit someone else’s tune. I played it to death.
At the age of 67 – him not me! – I did not expect him to once more scale the dizzy heights of the early 1970s, or get anywhere near them, but, joy upon joy, it looks like he has.
Recent years have seen the old boy dabble with Christmas records and covers, “singing someone else’s song”. Ineffectual enough, vaguely listenable, albeit in small doses, but it did sound like he wasn’t really trying. All too easy. I had myself a merry little christmas, thanks to James, but the thought did occur to me that this was his christmas album, as many artists do when they run out of steam and his covers records were born of laziness or simply the loss of his hunger to write songs. How lovely to read that this may not be true.
The great Danny Baker has encouraged me greatly by saying that Taylor’s new record Before This World is the record that should have come between Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim. If that’s true, then wow!
It appears that Taylor has become concerned that he might never again write a new album so he locked himself away, alone in a waterside apartment in Newport Rhode Island and wrote one. Then, he took it to a barn on his land in Massachusetts with two other musicians, one of whom was the greatest of great drummers Steve Gadd, and recorded it. Early reports suggest this could be a highlight not just of his later career, but of his entire career and what an achievement that would be.
I like new music and I like old music. I like old artists who continue to make new music, but I have nothing against heritage acts who don’t make new music and just play the old songs. There’s a market out there for everything. But I am glad that James Taylor has been inspired to mix up the old with the new. People will want to hear knock out the old tunes because that, for many people, will be why they go to see him play in the first place. Me? I get as much pleasure from the new songs, as I did when Toto played no less than five brand new tunes in Hammersmith last month.
Sweet Baby James is back, it seems, singing and playing like the great troubadour he is. I can’t wait to hear the new album.
