One of the unique joys of popular music as an art form is the way certain
songs etch themselves into your life's memories. A decade and a half down
the road, three familiar chords can snap you back to the moment you first
stepped into your college dorm room, or bared your drunken soul to a
new-found friend, or kissed that intriguing young someone who was destined
to become a fixture in your life. Songs become temporal bookmarks that
way -- put your finger on the marker, flip the book open, and boom, you're
back where you left off fifteen years before. The album that performs
this minor miracle for me, again and again, is James Taylor's Greatest
Hits.
The first time I was really exposed to JT, in my first month of college,
his brand of gentle, introspective folk-pop did nothing for me. I had
headed off to UC Davis in full head-banger AC/DC rebellion mode, certain
if the music didn't make your eyeballs bulge on the downbeats, there
wasn't any point. It was around the fourth late night I was forced to
spend hanging out in the student lounge, thanks to my roommate's
resounding success with the ladies, that his secret finally dawned on me
it was that damned acoustic folkie romantic crap he threw on the
turntable every time he "entertained" in our room. "Don't Let Me Be
Lonely Tonight," indeed.
But I discovered over time that there was a lot more to "Sweet Baby James"
than romantic noodlings and pleasant acoustic guitar melodies. The man
frequently wrote from the depths of his soul, from deep blue and white hot
interior landscapes few artists are brave enough to explore with his
degree of honesty and sincerity. When he sings "I've seen fire and I've
seen rain, but I always thought that I'd see you again," it doesn't matter
whether you know he wrote the song after the suicide of a young woman he
had gotten to know during his own stay in a mental institution -- just the
feeling in his voice tells you he is doing a lot more by singing it than
simply entertaining. This performance is an exorcism of grief; the song,
his tool.
JT unflinchingly shows you both sides of the coin of life, always carrying
on, rhyming the bad with the good, the sad with the sweet, the absurd with
the devastating. The wonder is that as he winds into his late 40s, hair
nearly gone, new albums an increasing rarity, his audience stands intact,
waiting impatiently for the annual summer tour. After all, what could be
more comforting and uplifting to a person feeling beaten down by the
brutally alienating 90s than to know that they aren't alone, that someone
has visited the same dark corners of the soul they have, and come back
singing about it?
Taylor's greatest hits album covers every major single from his fertile
early period (1968-1976), including songs that capture in three minutes' time the
essence of solitude ("Country Road"), of solace ("Something in the Way She
Moves") and of the redeeming power of love ("Shower the People"). Among
the most underappreciated of these familiar tunes is the melancholy
"Carolina in My Mind," sprinkled with references to friends who "hit me
from behind" and other tangled relationships, culminating in the
narrator's flight back inside his own imagination. One of its brighter
moments goes like this:
Karen, she's the silver sun
It's been more than fifteen years now since I kissed that intriguing young
someone named Karen -- and almost twelve since we married. Thanks, JT --
and you, too, roomie.
You'd best walk her away and watch it shining
Watch her watch the morning come.