{"id":7999,"date":"2021-12-27T09:17:49","date_gmt":"2021-12-27T09:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=7999"},"modified":"2021-12-27T09:17:52","modified_gmt":"2021-12-27T09:17:52","slug":"james-taylor-talking-america-standards-with-american-songwriter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/12\/27\/james-taylor-talking-america-standards-with-american-songwriter\/","title":{"rendered":"JAMES TAYLOR TALKING America Standards with American Songwriter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

JAMES TAYLOR TALKING<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

America Standards with American Songwriter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman Warwick learns more from an excellent music magazine.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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W<\/strong>hen James Taylor emerged in 1970 with remarkably poignant masterpieces of song-writing, including Fire And Rain, he represented a new kind of American songwriter. For Taylor was, as the world was soon to discover, not only a singularly expressive songwriter but also a wonderful vocalist with a voice of warm resonance and grace, one which has become one of the most beloved in the history of popular music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before then, most American artists were singers who recorded the songs of others or songwriters who wrote those songs for singers. Yet here was an artist who could do both \u2013 and beautifully. His first American hit, Fire And Rain, aligned with his dear friend Joni Mitchell\u2019s Blue as quintessential representatives of this new school of singer-songwriters. By both writing and recording their own songs, they forever expanded the lyrical scope of popular songs forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But it was his second hit, You\u2019ve Got A Friend, written by his friend Carole King (right),<\/em><\/strong> that changed this trajectory. Along with her husband, Gerry Goffin, King was a tremendously successful songwriter in the traditional mode, crafting ingenious hits for others. Becoming the \u00a0singer of her songs was never her chief aim. It was always about writing great songs. In fact, it was Taylor who was key in encouraging her to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when she wrote You\u2019ve Got A Friend,\u201d which she said flowed out of her all at once, words and music, something which rarely happened, she knew there was no one who could do the song justice with more soul and genuine warmth than Taylor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was right. Rather than try to have a hit with it herself, she knew what was best for the song, and it went to No. 1. Taylor became one of the most beloved and top-selling recording artists of all time, selling more than 100 million records. Since then, he\u2019s written his own songbook of greatness over the decades. But he\u2019s also recorded classic songs by others, always with that soulful touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither Taylor nor King ever let go of their devotion to the songwriters that preceded them, those who filled the Great American Songbook with timeless classics of sophisticated song-writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taylor also possesses boundless reverence for the songs and songwriters of this era, which he considers an apex of American popular song. Since he doesn\u2019t read music, he devised his own beautiful guitar arrangements of these famous songs as he grew up, a process which informed his own song-writing forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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All of which led to recording the album American Standard, a collection of his renditions of a broad range of his most beloved standards. It was made because of his love for the songs and the process of devising new harmonic landscapes for their tuneful timelessness. But it was intended to remind people just how great songs can be. With friend and fellow guitarist John Pizzarelli (left)<\/em><\/strong>, Taylor created beautiful dual-guitar arrangements as the basis of each track, and then added the beauty of his vocals. The result is a love letter to classic song-writing, and an ideal invitation for American Songwriter magazine to talk to him about this era of song-writing and the rare ancient craft elements at its heart, which resonate so powerfully to this day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Taylor explained that \u00b4Back in this era, when you wrote a song like this, you passed it on with sheet music for the piano and a lead sheet for the vocal and the lyrics to it. That\u2019s all you had in order to hold people\u2019s interest. You had to have a really clever lyric and a compelling combination of melody and harmonic context. And that’s all you had to sell the song.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: Back then a hit was never one recording; it was always a song that many artists \u2013 vocalists, big bands, everyone \u2013 could make their own.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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photo 4<\/em><\/strong> Yes. You didn’t have the production values of the great recording possibilities we’ve got today. Now you can capture a single performance that itself becomes the song. These days, the performance is almost more important than the song. But back then the song had to be able to go through multiple iterations of other people performing it, some of them well, some of them not so well. A song had to survive that and stand on the merits of the song. These songs are from that generation of music with a degree of sophistication and complexity. Things tend to dumb-down from that point. Obviously, there are exceptions, songwriters such as Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, (above right)<\/strong>. People who are playing with the entire tool kit. These days when one hears a hit song, I think that you have to ask yourself, “Am I hearing the product of a song-writer here, or am I hearing a performance?” And now that we can make such great records, and now that we can say anything, a performance can be 90 percent of what the song is \u2013 and whatever the chords are, who cares? Who even cares whether or not the thing rhymes or if it has any structure to it or if it’s amusing? The performance is the main thing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That might be a great thing. But it’s not the songwriter’s craft. So this is an album of that time in American popular music that has been really important to me. There’s not one of these songs that I haven’t been playing since I was a teenager.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: \u00a8Were you coming up with your own arrangements back then?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. I don’t read music, so everything I do, I do by ear. It\u2019s really interesting to know the melody of something and then to fill in the harmonic context yourself. Sometimes it can lead you in very different directions. If you listen to the covers I have done, my versions always are about supplying a different set of chords, though the melody stays the same.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s like having a song that\u2019s like a landscape with the light shining on it from directly behind you, and then suddenly you listen to the song with the light coming in from 90 degrees to your right, and then 90 degrees to your left. The shadow lines change for everything, and it becomes three dimensional. That’s really what I do when I do covers of songs, more often than not. I’m totally rewriting the harmonic context of the songs they’re in and finding a different way to go at the song.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: Hearing those arrangements as well as your singing on these is just glorious, such as Moon River. It doesn\u2019t get better.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I’m so glad you like it. It’s a corny old song for sure, but there’s no question that it has huge emotional power. It refers to Huck Finn on a<\/em> raft with the river carrying him into his own life, into his future.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s so much about my own twin boys, who are 18 years old on the cusp of going off to college. They\u2019re about to finish high school. When you’re that age \u2013 or say 23 years old and you’re leaving college and maybe you’re going to go into the military, maybe you’re going to get married, maybe you’re going to try to get a job in some business, but embarking on the adventure of your own lifetime. That song evokes all of that. And there\u2019s a series of chord changes that start with it. It\u2019s a cascading sort of a series of chords descending from a high diminished. The way he moves those chords in an interesting way against the melody and the way it complements the lyrical content of the song, that brilliant lyric, it\u2019s really sort of like casting your faith to the wind, or casting bread out on the water. Taking the giant leap of faith. That’s what the song is about, but it’s so much more because <\/em>of the emotion.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: And like many of your songs, it\u2019s been a part of our lives for a long time, which is comforting. Like an old friend.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. One of the wonderful things about our popular culture is that we move through it and choose things to build our own personal mythology. And we call upon that to have a kind of heroic support throughout our lives. So these songs are our allies. Say you get on a plane and fly out to a job interview in Chicago, and in the back of your mind is Moon River. There\u2019s a self-communication, a kind of self-realization, that we use to develop our sense of ourselves and to identify ourselves. It\u2019s a kind of shopping for our growing mythology<\/em> in popular culture. Say you lost someone and you’re feeling real grief, maybe you put on Fire and Rain and you listen to that, and somehow it helps you settle it, it helps you accept it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: It helps make sense of life, too. Your songs provided that mythological underpinning to our lives. I remember being enchanted with the western imagery in your songs and other romantic exotica to a kid in Chicago.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I was a kid, I remember singing Oklahoma over and over again. And it\u2019s [Richard] Rodgers and [Oscar] Hammerstein again, an absolutely brilliant collection of songs. Spending a lifetime devoted to a study of song-writing is a good thing to do. It really is an ancient craft. But it\u2019s also right at the centre of the current popular culture. It\u2019s very alive.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u00b4s no question songs continue to make a powerful impact in our culture. <\/em>And I think that we need to keep our connection with this American Songbook. I\u2019m not suggesting that it’s like eating your  spinach. It\u2019s not like it’s a chore. It’s a delight. But I don’t want the future songwriters to lose that rich vocabulary that the other guys had.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Interviewer: When you get that [Henry] Mancini (left)<\/em> melody with the Johnny Mercer words, \u201cWaiting around the bend, my Huckleberry friend,\u201d it\u2019s just such a beautiful completion. That\u2019s the essence of great song-writing, art and craft together.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s right. And when the melody repeats itself three times in a row but changes the context underneath, it builds up a pressure that wants a resolution. And the resolution gives you a real sense of completion. It\u2019s very satisfying.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: Though you came from the next generation, you often showed that great love of craft \u2013 but in a new kind of song \u2013 such as the rhyming in Sweet Baby James.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the best rhyming scheme that I ever did. If you look through<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

those lyrics, it was highlighted with various colours and with internal<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

rhyme. It\u2019s a virtual cat’s cradle of rhyming schemes. That was like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle getting all of those points to rhyme across the song.The thing is stitched-up, and as sophisticated or<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

craft-intensive as anything I’ve written.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: What led you to do that kind of rhyming for this song?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those rhymes started to suggest themselves as I was writing the song, and I realized that I needed to continue it. That was like a challenge. but it doesn’t mean anything unless it’s got an emotional message. It finishes cosmically with,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A song that they sing when they take to their home in the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s about just how spiritually satisfying it is to sing, just to make music. That music itself is the end-point. It\u2019s a very human thing. They say whales sing and dolphins, perhaps, certainly birds sing, but they<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

don’t write songs. They\u2019re born with a song, basically.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

interviewer: Why do rhymes matter in songs, do you think?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rhyming is fun for me. It\u2019s a very satisfying word game. Maybe we were first used to it in a kind of lyric poetry, and then that translated over into lyrics being set to music. Maybe it\u2019s just a sort of a cultural artifact that we\u2019ve inherited, a love of rhyme. But whether it\u2019s innate or something we\u2019ve arrived at culturally over time, it\u2019s still very satisfying to have things rhyme. It can be surprising too. You can choose a rhyme that you didn\u2019t expect. It\u2019s part of the word game that’s satisfying. It’s got a symmetry. Part of it is that our human consciousness is looking to recognize things. It\u2019s looking for a repetition. It’s looking to put things in context to understand the truth and the implications of what we see. It probably was a defensive mechanism to start with, and that’s why we’re constantly looking for trouble, to find out where the threat comes from.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the nature of night and day and the wheel of the seasons and the wheel of procreation and reproduction, all of these things are repetitive. They’re like spirals. As the sun and the galaxy expand into the universe and we trace a spiral through space, repetition and recognition is an important part of consciousness. Rhyme is satisfying in that it gives us a real taste for symmetry. The fact that we have a line that goes from the top of our head right down through the center of our pelvis and up our back means we’re bilaterally symmetrical along that line. It\u2019show we form as creatures, as do all animals. So there\u2019s a symmetry that seems like home to us. That symmetry is reiterated or recapitulated by a rhyming scheme. Symmetry is beautiful when you make it, and it\u2019s beautiful when you break it. <\/em> <\/em>There is an energy when you interrupt it as well. It’s just a really interesting dynamic.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: It\u2019s been fascinating to learn that people like you or Bob Dylan didn\u2019t re-invent songs. You honoured the song form \u2013 verse, chorus, bridge \u2013 but did new things within that structure.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yes. And then you\u2019re returning again to the form. It is, it\u2019s a wonderful form. It is a great art form. When you say nobody invents it, there are musical forms that have quarter tones, but we’re basically chromatic in our acclimation to music. And music is not just random noise. It’s an organized sound. To me, the thing that\u2019s most satisfying about music is that it is empirically true. When you and I have a conversation we employ language. We\u2019re basically relying on a history of agreement about what things mean. What I call that is a consensus reality. It’s a reality because you and I agree to it. And in all of our literature, that’s a large degree of what human beings are doing, comparing their truth with other people to see whether or not they can believe the conclusions that they\u2019ve reached.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is important to humans because our consciousness allows us to survive. It\u2019s our tooth and claw. We\u2019re very reliant on it. Most of what we are dealing with is consensus reality.<\/em> The closest we get to true reality is science. But music, it is a language. We do manipulate it. We do organizeit in ways that are meaningful to us, and we do have consensus about it. There are cultural implications to what things mean emotionally when we hear them musically. But an octave is two times the frequency of the octave below it and half the frequency of the octave above it. It follows the rules of physics.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It follows the rules of the universe. It is non-negotiable. A major third and a minor third have different emotional suggestions; it’s not a matter of consensus.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an underlying, empirical truth to music that is unlike other languages and unlike other consensus processes, because it has something actually true. The laws of physics lie at the base of it because of how frequencies behave. And that empirical truth means that music is a link to the natural world, to the actual cosmos that we\u2019re not responsible for.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, we don’t have to question it. There is something about it that is real, that is so rooted in reality that it allows us to escape the prison of the self, which is constantly questioning everything around us and analyzing it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is why, as I wrote long ago, singing works just fine for me. That\u2019s the real root of music for me, that it\u2019s a human language  that we do manipulate. But it is empirically true. And, therefore, it allows us an escape from the prison of the ego. That’s getting sort of absurdly cosmic about it, but I really do feel that that’s true.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interviewer: After hearing this album, it helps us understand better where you came from, as your songs, though belonging to a different era, always were informed and inspired by this level of artistry.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you. These songs are all from a generation of music that\u00a0 preceded rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. They represent the high-water mark of American popular music. I never would have written many of my songs without being exposed to this music. It\u2019s important that this music not be lost because it’s a national treasure. It is delightful stuff. Also, as a songwriter, it\u2019s good to have that in the back of your mind, even if you’re writing a 12-bar blues.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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coming soon logo<\/strong> Don\u00b4t forget that over the next weekend, for one week only, we will add daily posts on both Saturday and Sunday. I am sure you have guessed that we are giving our desks the annual New Year clear-out of articles we couldn\u00b4\u00b4 \u00b4t squeeze in to 2021 but we are also just trying to ensure our readers can find articles to enjoy whilst taking a well-earned rest from Auld Lang Zine and his gang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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please note logo The primary source for this article was \u00a0published by American Songwriter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our occasional re-postings Sidetracks And Detours are confident that we are not only sharing with our readers excellent articles written by experts but are also pointing to informed and informative sites readers will re-visit time and again. Of course, we feel sure our readers will also return to our daily not-for-profit blog knowing that we seek to provide core original material whilst sometimes spotlighting the best pieces from elsewhere, as we engage with genres and practitioners along all the sidetracks & detours we take.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article was collated by Norman Warwick, a weekly columnist with Lanzarote Information and owner and editor of this daily blog at Sidetracks And Detours.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman has also been a long serving broadcaster, co-presenting the weekly all across the arts programme on Crescent Community Radio for many years with Steve, and his own show on Sherwood Community Radio. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC Radio Merseyside and BBC Radio 4.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a published author and poet he was a founder member of Lendanear Music, with Colin Lever and Just Poets with Pam McKee, Touchstones Creative Writing Group (where he was creative writing facilitator for a number of years) with Val Chadwick and all across the arts with Robin Parker.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Monday to Friday,<\/strong> you will find a daily post here at Sidetracks And Detours and, should you be looking for good reading, over the weekend you can visit our massive but easy to navigate archives of over 500 articles.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The purpose of this daily not-for-profit blog is to deliver news, previews, interviews and reviews from all across the arts to die-hard fans and non- traditional audiences around the world. We are therefore always delighted to receive your own articles here at Sidetracks And Detours. So if you have a favourite artist, event, or venue that you would like to tell us more about just drop a Word document attachment to me at <\/strong>normanwarwick55@gmail.com<\/strong><\/a> with a couple of appropriate photographs in a zip folder if you wish. Beiung a not-for-profit organisation we unfortunately cannot pay you but we will always fully attribute any pieces we publish. You therefore might also. like to include a brief autobiography and photograph of yourself<\/strong> in your submission. We look forward to hearing from you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sidetracks And Detours is seeking to join the synergy of organisations that support the arts of whatever genre. We are therefore grateful to all those share information to reach as wide and diverse an audience as possible.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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songfacts                                           en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SongFacts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Taylor took Carol King\u00b4s You\u00b4ve Got A Friend to the top of the charts he became one of the most beloved and top-selling recording artists of all time, selling more than 100 million records. Since then, he\u2019s written his own songbook of greatness over the decades. But he\u2019s also recorded classic songs by others, always with that soulful touch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7999"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8013,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7999\/revisions\/8013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}