And I can't help but think

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Sweet Baby JamesJames Taylor

Sweet Baby James - James Taylor

It’s unfair, if not uncommon, for a whole lot of young people to think of James Taylor as some kind of grandfatherly wimp, a bald-headed and bespectacled gentle-voiced singer who wouldn’t know a rough day if it bit him.

Alas, the truth is an altogether different story. While Taylor may now seem almost buddha-level calm and centered - a perpetually smiling middle-aged fount of easy-going warmth, your Mom’s favorite singer/songwriter, approved by lite-FM and Starbucks - the fact of the matter is that, once upon a time, he spent nine whole months hospitalized for clinical depression (“It’s an inseparable part of my personality that I have these feelings”), was a down-and-out heroin addict, then, later, a recovering, struggling one. The road he traveled to get to where he’s ended up in today’s popular culture has been an interesting one.

He was the first non-British artist signed to the Beatles’ Apple Records (recording his debut record, James Taylor, at the same time as The Beatles were recording parts of The White Album at Trident Studios), fell back into heroin addiction during these recording sessions, was hospitalized again - and thus, unable to promote his record when it came out - and then, once fully recovered and released, JT went off and got himself into a motorcycle accident that broke both of his hands and both of his feet.

In other words, James Taylor was a bad ass.

Good times were, of course, just around the corner. A year or so after the accident he released his breakthrough record, Sweet Baby James, which, buoyed by the career-defining hit, “Fire and Rain”, quickly became a best-seller. He married Carly Simon in 1972, and released a string of reall good, interesting records throughout the 70s. And thus James Taylor - though with a good deal more hair and still not quite sober (he remained on a methadone maintenance program until finally kicking drugs for good in 1983) - started becoming the James Taylor you now know and (possibly) love.

None of this shows up in the music, or not really any way, at least not in the past 30 years. But that’s okay. The original JT (step off, Timberlake) doesn’t feel the need to parade his past troubles around in his songs to gain any credibility, artistic or otherwise. Instead, he more often concerned himself with a nice finger-picked acoustic melody and the gentle spirit that pervaded even his ‘rougher’ numbers. Still, his gentleness was hard-earned, his peace hard-won. And for a few years there, he was writing some of the best songs in the land.