That is how masterpieces like “Carolina in My Mind” and “Fire and Rain” came about. He is modest about his own songwriting, saying he usually sits down with a guitar and plays until he finds a melody - or “catching an idea,” as he puts it - and maybe a scrap of lyric. “It’s interesting to put songs into that vocabulary,” he says. Several times he noted that his guitar skills were somewhat limited and that his natural tendency to James Taylor a song is to lean on his own influences: Latin music, bossa nova and Afro Cuban. He’s well versed in Thomas Mann and Tolstoy. They basically are my teachers,” says Taylor.ĭuring the interview, Taylor was effortlessly thoughtful, moving easily from topics like the gentrification of Boston’s suburbs to what a revelation Chartres Cathedral must have been to a peasant hundreds of years ago. “I think they had a profound effect on my songwriting. The new batch of songs lean heavily on Broadway musicals, like the songwriting teams Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, as well as Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. “It was so easy and natural to pick up an instrument and start learning songs and reinterpreting songs and developing a sort of a simple guitar technique.” “I’d just try them on for size,” he says. Taylor, 72, says he was intimately familiar with the songs picked for the album and new EP, having first heard many of them from his parents’ record collection growing up in North Carolina. The trio of tunes never made it to Taylor’s “American Standard” album earlier this year, which contained such covers as “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and “God Bless the Child.” Instead of leaning on a piano, they are guitar-led reinterpretations, often wistful and airy. “Not all songs work in my language, but the ones that do - if they’re interesting or worthy of being recut - it’s because it’s nice to hear them in James Taylor.”įans are getting more classics translated into James Taylor on Friday with the digital release of three songs - “Over The Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from “My Fair Lady” and “Never Never Land” from “Peter Pan.” “People often tell me, ‘It sounds like you wrote that song’ or ‘That sounds like a James Taylor song.’ And that’s because basically it’s been translated into my language,” the singer-songwriter told The Associated Press in an interview this week. NEW YORK (AP) - Something happens when James Taylor covers a song. The new songs are “Over The Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from “My Fair Lady” and “Never Never Land” from “Peter Pan.” (Photo by Dan Hallman/Invision/AP, File) Taylor released “American Standard” in February and on Friday offers three ones that never made the album. FILE - Singer-songwriter James Taylor appears during a portrait session in New York on May 13, 2015.
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