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RELATED LINKS

• Mr. Taylor's official site
• "2006 Grammy MusiCares Person of the Year"
• Article on "One Man Band"
• "A Tribute to James Taylor"

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Watch unaired highlights of Tavis's conversation with the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. (9:06)
 

Watch an extended interview with the five-time Grammy-winning artist. (24:46)
 

Tavis: I am pleased and honored to welcome James Taylor to this program. His stellar career as a singer-songwriter has produced the soundtracks for many of our lives during his forty-plus years of music. In 2000, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Last year, he was named MusiCare's Person of the Year. His latest CD is also a live concert DVD called "One Man Band." Here now, some of the performance of his classic "You've Got a Friend."

[Film Clip]

Tavis: So anybody who knows me, J.T., or anybody who saw our program last night with Babyface knows how I love James Taylor. I say it unabashedly, unapologetically. I am the biggest - I know we're going to argue about this, but I am the biggest James Taylor fan in the entire world.

I have stalked this guy all over the country. I stalked him in Italy. I sit in the rain and hear him perform outdoors, most recently this summer in fact. So for five years doing this show on PBS, my boy Prince came through to see me a number of times. A lot of great artists come through.

You should know this, J.T., but there was a contest on this show amongst all my producers. The person who got James Taylor booked first was going to win a huge prize. I wonder what that prize is going to be, but Carol wins because James Taylor is here. Good to see you, man.

James Taylor: Tavis, it's great to see you. It's great to be here and it's good to see you again.

Tavis: Delighted to have you on the program. I had a chance to catch this show, this tour, the "One Man Band." We were in Chicago. I got in Chicago and had a speech to give that night and was driving by the theater and saw on the marquis "One Night Only - James Taylor." So I called your people and ran backstage after my speech.

I'm sure I disappointed the people I was speaking to that night because I ran through the speech so fast to get backstage to see you. It was a great show. To see it on DVD, though, it evolved from when I saw it in Chicago. It's a great DVD, though.

Taylor: It has changed. We toured it for about two years before making this. You know, it changed just before the summer. It was last summer that we recorded this, that we put this down. We had been in England and I think that that trip abroad helped sort of refine it and sort of distill it down to what it is now.

Tavis: That's a fascinating segue. I'll take that and jump with it. So you go back to England to tour again and, for those of your hardcore fans, we know that your career really in some ways got started in England. The first person, the first artist, to ever sign to Apple Records, the Beatles label. Take me back to England those many years ago and how that happened.

Taylor: It was amazing really. I was a huge Beatles fan. I mean, we could talk about who I listened to growing up and what my sources were, but certainly the Beatles were a late important resource for me. I took my guitar and a handful of songs and I decided, well, I'll just go over and travel around Europe and see what comes of it.

Shortly after I got there, some friends I met, some people I know there, got very taken by my tunes and my playing and encouraged me to make a demo disc. It was funny. It was a small, two-track studio in Soho. They actually cut a disc live as you were singing.

I took that around to a number of different people and eventually Peter Asher, who lives here in Los Angeles and was my manager for many, many years and produced many of those early albums, heard that disc. He had just signed on as A&R person for Apple Records and took the disc to Paul McCartney and George Harrison. They heard it, they gave it the green light and I was in. That was it.

Tavis: It's an amazing story of that connection.

Taylor: It is. It was like the mother of all big breaks. For me, it was just like, you know, someone opened a door.

Tavis: And yet, as amazing as that story is, that's not how the world - that wasn't the moment that we got to become aware of James Taylor. You didn't become a hit based upon that deal.

Taylor: The first album got me enough recognition to be able to come here to Los Angeles with Peter Asher and pick up a record deal with Warner Bros. Records. That's when we made "Sweet Baby James." That had "Fire and Rain" on it and on it went.

Tavis: I wonder, James, whether or not - and I suspect this question could be asked of any artist who is as iconic as you are - whether or not as often as you sing these songs - and unlike a lot of artists, you tour all the time. You're always on the road, whether it's with the "One Man Band" or the big band.

You're always on the road and I wonder whether or not you ever get tired of singing these songs. Fortunately for you, the stuff you put out is always good, but your fan base wants to hear - well, you know what they want to hear.

Taylor: Well, it's true that there are probably a dozen songs that I should do a handful of.

Tavis: A dozen (laughter)?

Taylor: Well, but I mean -

Tavis: - like two or three dozen that you have to do, yeah (laughter).

Taylor: If you think that there is like a greatest hits list that's maybe, you know, twenty songs or so that people really know me well for, I try to do seven or eight of those songs in a show. Sometimes you can rotate them out if they get a little stale or change up the arrangement of it.

The main thing is that, when you get that sense back from the audience that they're hearing something that really resonates with them, that just invigorates it. That reanimates it and I surprisingly almost always make the same emotional connection with the material that I had when it was written.

Tavis: And that comes across in every performance that I've seen. I've lost count.

Taylor: It's important not to stay out too long. It's important to break every two or three weeks. You know, that's the ideal way to do it. Traveling in Asia or Europe, you can't afford to sort of just take time off. Once you're out there -

Tavis: - but why the need, do you think, for the break every two or three weeks?

Taylor: Well, you know, you get refreshed by it and it keeps the process from getting tired.

Tavis: Babyface, as I mentioned earlier, was on this program last night. The irony of it is just totally ironic that he was on last night and you're on tonight. But part of our conversation last night was spent talking, reminiscing in fact, about the fact that both of us are from the Midwest, from Indiana, the same place, as a matter of fact. Babyface and I are both from the same place.

Taylor: I didn't realize that.

Tavis: You're not going to win a prize for knowing anyway (laughter).

Taylor: Well, I read your book, so I know your half of it (laughter).

Tavis: Babyface needs to write a book or something so they can understand his half of it. I appreciate your reading the book, thank you.

Taylor: It was great.

Tavis: Thank you, man. So Babyface and I grew up in the same place in Indiana. You know, we don't know each other. Both of us are growing up in these cornfields listening to James Taylor, which is why he wanted to cover two or three of your songs. Have you heard his stuff yet?

Taylor: It's such an honor.

Tavis: You like it?

Taylor: It's such an honor. I love it, I love it. I get very few covers. You know, I think we approach music probably from a very similar direction. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he and I had the same influences growing up.

Tavis: Well, you were his influence. He said that very candidly last night. So we're both in Indiana listening to J.T. and one of the things we had fun talking about last night was that we got so turned on as kids in Indiana by the soulfulness of your sound. There are a lot of great artists, but as a matter of fact, this camera can't see the studio. We have a little mini audience here today and there's some Black faces over there.

I raise that because, if you ask a bunch of Black people, "Give me white guys who you like to listen to who have soul," James Taylor's at the top of the list. Kenny Loggins is on the list. We could run the list. Phil Collins is on the list. There's some white boys who got a whole lot of soul and you're at the top of that list. How does that happen for you? Where does that soul come from?

Taylor: I think that, you know, American music for me - I mean, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things, but for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about Black music, about soul music.

Then when I first started playing with Danny Kortchmar, an old friend of mine from New York who I used to know from summers on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, he and I when we first got together, he was all about blues. He gave me an entire education really along with my older brother, Alex, who was a blues singer until he died.

Anyway, that and the sort of Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, Caribbean kind of connection, those were really my main sources. That's what I was interested in listening to and that's what I wanted to sound like.

There has been this thing about white people stealing Black music. I mean, I think there's no doubt about that. But there are also white musicians, Eric Clapton, Ry Cooter, Phil Collins you mentioned. You know, many, many players who just were brought up on and loved Black music and just want to sound that way. That's the way, when I sit down and sing, that's what comes out because that's what I'm trying to emulate.

You know, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, huge giants and people who I listened to and just studied at length as a kid and all that empty time that we used to have. I think that may be something that you and I had in common growing up. There was a lot of empty time.

That's not the case now for kids. It's all shattered into little smithereens. You're distracted so frequently. You don't get a chance to really listen and reflect. That Marvin Gaye approved of my version of "How Sweet It Is," for instance, was a great relief.

Tavis: You mentioned our growing up. You mentioned your brother Alex earlier in this conversation. I got turned on many, many years. I actually like your brother, Livingston. Livingston has done some good stuff over the years. But until I started researching years ago, I did not know the extent to which your family was so musical. Your sister and your family, a music family you come out of.

Taylor: Yeah, that's really true. It's sort of a mystery because my dad was in public health all of his life. He was a doctor. My mom, you could say, was just a housewife. They both loved music and we grew up with music in the house. There was a Leadbelly record, there was a Weavers record, there was a couple of light classics like Appalachian Spring, a lot of show tune records, a Woody Guthrie record.

You know, sort of a wide range and, with all this empty time, remembering these big unlikely stacks up at the top of that little tiny spindle sorting of dropping down like that. You'd lie on the floor with your ear right next to the speaker and just sort of like drift away and listen to it.

Tavis: From listening to that stuff on the floor, how then did you craft your own songwriting style and how does James Taylor go about writing songs that he doesn't oftentimes figure out what they mean until years later (laughter)?

Taylor: (Laughter) That's a sort of reference too. It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is. In the case of this DVD, there's an introduction to a song called "Never Die Young" that refers to that, the sort of mysterious nature of writing songs.

For me, I don't have much direction or control over it. I've only written a couple of commission things, one thing called "Millworker" written for Stephen Schwarz for a musical that was an adaptation of Studs Terkel's book, "Working." That was about a woman who worked in a shoe manufacturing plant in Lowell, Massachusetts.

But generally speaking, I am visited by songs. They usually happen to me either while I'm sitting and playing guitar or sometimes when I'm driving the car. "Sweet Baby James" happened while I was driving down south.

Tavis: Kind of hard to write it down while you're driving, though (laughter).

Taylor: It is. It's probably illegal come the beginning of the year in California, but I drive with one of those little digital voice recorders and you hit the record button, so it takes notes for me. I don't read music. I don't write or read music.

Tavis: That's amazing that all the songs you've written and the way you play that you don't read.

Taylor: It's a block at this point (laughter). I think it's like - you know, there's an old sort of joke. Not very funny, but I don't like jokes that are terribly funny. I just like mildly funny jokes. There's a joke where they ask a jazz musician whether or not he reads music. He says, "Yes, but not so it gets in the way."

There was a thing, though, if you - I'm often surprised by classical musicians. I've met a large number of them because my wife works for the Boston Symphony and I'm in that world a lot now. I'm surprised at how difficult it is for people who are classically trained to read music or to memorize music, how difficult it is for them to improvise or just to go off and play. It's like terra incognita.

Tavis: Probably no more surprised than Kim is that she can read and you can't and yet you're this massive mega star.

Taylor: Yes, it's true that she does. She reads music and she doesn't believe that I can't. Our friend John Williams says, "Oh, of course, he can read music. Anyone can read music." But, you know, in fact I can't.

Tavis: One of the things that I celebrate about you and revel in is your humanity. I absolutely revel in the humanity that's found in your lyrics, particularly when you juxtapose that against the difficulty you had in your life on occasion checking yourself in and trying to deal with health challenges.

How is that - trying to find the right way I want to phrase this - how have those challenges helped you in your writing, helped you in becoming a man, helped you as a father? Just talk to me about that.

Taylor: Well, my family suffers, as many do, from addiction problems. You know, also I think some emotional problems, anxieties or depression. Those are present in my family and, you know, sort of historically as a matter of family history.

So it's not surprising that that sort of cropped up in my generation a lot and it does between myself and my brothers. It killed my brother, Alex, alcohol did. I was an active addict for a long time and it should have killed me about five times. It really should have. I'm very lucky to have survived it.

I think there was a lot of wasted time there, for sure, and there was a lot of unavailability because I just was sealed off to the rest of the world, but somehow I had to come by the route that I did. Sometimes I think that it almost saved my life, that period of time when I was dancing with that particular devil.

As a kid - there's a very difficult in late adolescence. It's a very fragile time and young men can easily die during that period of time. It's the period of time when we send people into battle. It's the period of time when you first get behind the wheel of a car, and they first let you drink. You know, there's a sort of touch-and-go period.

I've got two grown children who have made it through that period and I breathe a huge sigh of relief. Then I have two six year old twins that will come to that point again. It's almost like that "Catcher in the Rye" kind of idea of, you know, just hoping that kids get through this stretch in time.

For me, it was very trying. It took me a long time to get through it, twenty years really of being active. But somehow in spite of it, I managed to write a good deal of tunes, to play to a lot of audiences, to travel a lot, to father however imperfectly two kids and eventually to make it into recovery, thank God. So thank God and one day at a time, as they say.

You know, it's part of my story. It is part of the experience that I write about. I've written a number of songs about the kind of - I think that it's connected to a cosmic human question of human consciousness.

The nature of human consciousness and the nature of knowing things and the degree to which we are responsible for and in control of our own lives is connected to this personal difficulty in a sort of mirrored way. So I write songs about that too, about letting go, about surrender.

I think of myself as a highly spiritual person, but without - I was never really given a religion or religious experience or a community to sort of subscribe to and I think I missed the boat. I envy people who have a strong faith and a community of faith that they live in. I know that reading about your upbringing, that was a huge rock and solid defended high ground in your upbringing.

I had a very moral upbringing and spiritual in a sort of not very specific way. One of the kinds of songs that I write is a sort of agnostic spiritual, you know. It's a sort of a hymn for people who are still looking a little bit.

Tavis: It sounds almost oxymoronic and yet you pull it off, an agnostic spiritual.

Taylor: That's right. To me, it's about whether or not you can stand the mystery. You know, whether you can stand to have things be unresolved. I think people want answers, particularly when there's a threat to it, when not knowing might kill you. It seems to me as though human consciousness evolved to look for trouble, to look for problems, to look for threats. It's the nature of human consciousness to look for trouble constantly, you know, and we find it. We find it.

Tavis: I got to go wrestle with that. "Can you stand the mystery?" James Taylor getting philosophical on me (laughter).

Taylor: We can back right off that if you want to and talk about the State Fair (laughter).

Tavis: If I had my druthers, I would sit here and talk to James Taylor for at least five consecutive nights on PBS because we have not even scratched the surface of what makes him such a special human being, such an iconic artist. But I am delighted for the first time, and I pray not the last, to have him as a guest on this program.

For more of my conversation with James Taylor, you can log onto our website, of course, at pbs.org. Some stuff there that you want to see that James and I had a chance to talk about that we couldn't bring you tonight, so go to pbs.org for more of our conversation.

The new CD from James Taylor, "One Man Band." Some of your favorites. "Something in the Way She Moves" and "The Frozen Man," "Never Die Young," wow, "Carolina in my Mind," "Sweet Baby James," "Shower the People." So much on this CD, nineteen tracks, and, of course, a DVD as well. J.T., I love you and there ain't nothing you can do about that, man.

Taylor: Me too, Tavis. Thank you, man. Thank you so much.

Tavis: Glad to have you here. I appreciate you.

Taylor: My great pleasure.