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• Mr. Taylor's official site
• About "Covers"
• "James Taylor: 'I never did feel like I was the cool one'"
• Mr. Taylor's bio

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Prolific singer-songwriter breaks out his guitar, shares the story behind it and strums a few tunes. (3:56)
 

Full interview. (23:06)
 

Tavis: Trying to find the right word here - pleased, honored, just overwhelmed to welcome JT back to this program again. The legendary singer-songwriter has put together a new project featuring his band of legends. The 12-song disc features cover songs from an eclectic mix of songwriters and genres, for that matter.

The CD is called "Covers." Go figure, JT, you're so creative, man. (Laughs) "Covers." And that's a nice cover, by the way. I'm sure I have Kim to thank for this, don't I?

James Taylor: Yes, I'm sorry - she chose that picture, yeah.

Tavis: The CD is called "Covers," in stores now. Here's some of the recording session for the Junior Walker classic, "Road Runner."

[Clip]

Tavis: So there are two things I want to get to right quick regarding the session we were just looking at. So we got a studio full of people because you're here, everybody on the lot wants to see James Taylor, so everybody watching the monitor, as was I during that session, you were nodding your head, you were listening to the sound, but you didn't look up. Does that mean that JT doesn't like looking at himself, doesn't like to -

Taylor: Oh, yeah. I don't - I tend not to look or to listen that much, either, once a project is done. I pretty much listen to it and I've got it. (Laughter)

Tavis: So if you're in the car and the radio was on, nine times out of 10 you flip a few stations, you're going to hear some classic JT. So you're in the car and you hear that, or you're on your bus on tour all the time. So you turn the radio on and the satellite or whatever and you hear you, you do what?

Taylor: Generally speaking I keep - I hit the scan button one more time. I don't know, sometimes I will, I'll listen to it to see what it sounds like on the radio, or if it's something that doesn't get played often I'll listen because I'll want to hear it. But it's always great. You never really get over the surprise of hearing yourself on the public airwaves.

And sometimes - that's the thing about recorded music, is that of course - I was talking to my mother about this the other day. When she was growing up, she said if you wanted to hear music, somebody had to pick up an instrument. There had to be somebody actually there, playing some music. Now we hear music almost sort of constantly.

It's in the elevator, in their automobile, it's more of a passive experience to hear music than it used to be, and it changes. That's one of the great things about going to a concert is that you're there for the music. The music isn't happening while you're doing your correspondence or your ironing or whatever else, or in a waiting room or something like that. It's there to focus on the music.

Tavis: I was in - I know who it was, I was trying to think of who it was - great singer-songwriter Linda Ronstadt. Linda was on this program some years ago and I remember - I was thinking about this as you were talking - we were in a conversation and she was making the same point, JT, that you were making about how music is now such a passive experience and you pretty much hear it everywhere.

And she has taken to calling that "ear pollution." Ear pollution. And her point was that she thought it was not the best for music when it becomes such a passive experience that it's everywhere you go, you hear it all the time, you're not connected to it.

That was her take on it. You offered your assessment about the music being so accessible and being such a passive experience, but is that a good thing or a bad thing, as you see it?

Taylor: It's just sort of inevitable. The end of the thought for me is that it makes it so special to be at a concert because then it actually is happening in real time. People are really focused on the music and you're focused - the musician is focused on making it. And it is a different thing from having it sort of casually happening at random in the background.

Often, you'll - a song like "Fire and Rain," for that to happen at a celebratory moment or for Kool and the Gang's "Celebrate" to come on when you're just opening a letter with a pink slip in it or something, (laughter) it can be a very disjointed kind of a thing.

Tavis: Yeah, I understand. I get your point. I want to go back on your bus for the moment, figuratively, although I've been on your bus so I'd like to go back on literally one day and hang out with you again. But let me go back to that bus figuratively for a moment.

So you're on the bus traveling around the country as you do all the time on tour, and you turn on the radio and every now and then you hear a JT song. Are there songs - is there a particular song that comes to mind on the spur of the moment that you think sounds just as good now, maybe even better, than it did when you first put it out?

All your stuff's good, but is there something that you hear every now and then, have heard recently, and you said, "Man, that really sounds good?"

Taylor: Yeah, well, recording a song - when you write a song and you sort of hear it in your head and you've got an idea of how the thing should sound when you record it, that sort of idealized version of the song, you never really quite get there. So nine times out of 10 I would say songs fall short of the mark of what the expectations you have of them when you're thinking of them abstractly.

But then sometimes there are songs that are, like, a surprise, that actually the playing of it, the recording of it, it turns out far better than you ever could have imagined.

There's a song on this album, it almost was a throwaway track that we did - "Hound Dog," Big Mama Thornton's version of "Hound Dog" is what informed our version of it. But the session itself - that's the thing about this album, the sessions were unique. And that particular one, it just fell together. It's a 12-bar blues, so it's a form that everybody knows, but everybody just listened and it just fell into the shape that it's in perfectly. It was like that one, crystallized moment.

Tavis: You pushed yourself on this. You tried some genres - when I got the CD I was so - I couldn't wait to hear it, and I opened it up and looked at it and I saw some of the song titles, and I'm, like, wow. If that's the song that I think it is, he's pushing himself into some genres that he has not recorded, at least, heretofore. I'm sure you played around the house with it. You got a Dixie Chicks song on here. You pushed yourself.

Taylor: Yeah, we learned that song, the Dixie Chicks song we learned when we were on the road. Last election cycle we did a lot of work for John Kerry and MoveOn and Vote for Change - those organizations sort of put together a tour that we did of sort of swing states. And the Dixie Chicks played a couple of songs of mine and I did a couple of songs of theirs in the set that we did together, so they - that's what I took away from that tour, was that song, and it's just a good time song, and it turned out well.

Tavis: Well obviously you got to get down to 12, and knowing you, there were a lot more than 12. How did you make the choice to synchronize this thing?

Taylor: It was terrible.

Tavis: Or I should say sequence this thing.

Taylor: That's right. It was awful, Tavis. (Laughter) We just struggled with it. Everybody weighed in, we voted, we flipped coins, we did random samplings, we -

Tavis: Pulled straws and everything, huh?

Taylor: Everything we could. We cut 20 things in 10 days, and they were - we finished them all and they were all great, so I think what's going to happen is that we will make those available sometime down the line. We'll either get them out as a volume 1.5 or we'll make a digital release of them.

We've got to get those out there somehow, because they turned out great. And more and more I think of this as being these sessions. This 10 days of sessions that we did in mid-January.

Tavis: In your barn.

Taylor: In the barn, in waist-deep snow with the wind howling outside. And it was just - it was such an unusual circumstance, to have 12 people playing the music live and improvisational, too. There weren't arrangements, we just - they're head arrangements.

So it really was an amazingly inspiring kind of a creative process for 10 days, and I'd like to put the whole thing out there sooner or later.

Tavis: Let me probe that, because I wanted to get to that anyway so now is a good time as any, I guess. So I'm trying to figure out how you know a project - your talent not withstanding, what gives you the chutzpah to think that you can put out a project that's worth people buying, worth me wanting to hear, when you do it in 10 days and they're head arrangements. Do you have to pressure yourself like that?

Taylor: Well, I should say that we started by going in with the idea of recording songs that we had had live versions of for years, and that we had played on the road for years and that I always wanted to put down. And that's what brought us into the studio. But we cut those really quick because we knew them so well, and then we started just cast about and see what else we could do.

To re-cut a song you have to make it worthwhile. If the original's so great, why do you need a new version of it? So when I do a cover tune, and I've done a lot of them - "Up on the Roof," "Handy Man," "How Sweet It Is," "You've Got a Friend." All of these songs are known parts of my repertoire. You have to bring something new to it. It's never going to be better than the original, but it has to be a different take on it.

Tavis: When you were last, I recall our having a conversation about your own songwriting - these are covers, of course, but your own songwriting process and how there are certain songs that you wrote years ago, and one day you're performing it for the umpteenth time, or the zillionth time on stage, and the meaning of the song finally hits you, or hits you in a different way than it did when you first wrote it.

You said that to me in our last conversation, which leads me to this question where this "Covers" project is concerned. How did you personally connect, how do you find meaning in the songs of others when at times you ain't figured out your own stuff until a few years after you wrote it.

Taylor: It's all mysterious. You just move into the music and play it. This is mostly sort of good time stuff - like comfort food, essentially. It could have been like a party record, it could have been all soul tunes, all from that genre. It could have been all country.

We cut enough songs to put out a number of different types of album, but really, what happens when you sing someone else's song is you find an emotional connection in it.

Most of the time - sometimes you don't, and then you shouldn't be doing it. But it just does. A song like "Suzanne" that I first heard in the mid-'60s, a beautiful version by Judy Collins on a famous album that she did, that beautiful Leonard Cohen song, that's been something that's meant a huge amount to me for years. To hear her version of it, to hear Leonard's.

I played it in sound check. I never performed it, but I would play it in sound check when the house mixer says, "Give us something with just guitar and voice," I would often play that song. So I knew it and I wanted I to go on the record.

Tavis: You've got a couple of young kids of your own now, and having, of course, other kinds of experiences in your life, is your songwriting inspiration coming from the same kinds of places, or do you find that your whole process has changed over the years, the songwriting process?

Taylor: Well, that's really - it's a good question. I find that I do write from the same places. Like, I go back and visit the same emotional territory over and over again. It's as if having written 160 or 170 songs, I've really written 16 songs 10 times.

Tavis: (Laughs) We've all been fooled. I want my money back. (Laughter)

Taylor: I don't want a refund -

Tavis: We've been bamboozled, hoodwinked, run amok, led astray. It's the same 16 songs.

Taylor: I don't want a refund, I want my money back.

Tavis: Exactly. (Laughs) So 16 songs, 10 different ways. Is that what we have here?

Taylor: It really is - it seems like that sometimes, that I go back to the same emotional territory time and time again. There probably are only, like, 25 types of songs. It depends on how you parse these things out and why people bother, I don't know, because music is music. Talking about music seems to be sort of an empty practice, except it's compelling somehow.

But anyway, there are love songs, there are blues, there are celebratory songs, there are angry songs. There are songs that take something that's in you that needs to get out, and get it out of you. And there are songs that are sympathetic songs that feel somebody else's pain. But there aren't that many songs. There are spiritual songs and songs that - all music is spiritual because it takes you out of the human - to listen to music is to actually - most of what we do is - I know I keep getting back to this topic over and over again when we talk, but most of -

Tavis: There are only 16 topics, too. (Laughter) So you can keep coming, yeah.

Taylor: You would know. You would know.

Tavis: I do this every night, same 16 subject matters 352 days a year, but go ahead, yeah.

Taylor: Most of what we do is arbitrary. We're not sure if we're right or wrong about it, because we create the world in our minds and it's sort of an abstract process that we do. But music is real because it follows the laws of the real universe. An octave is twice the vibrations of the octave below it. A fifth is a known thing.

And I'm convinced that when people - there is a cultural bias, there is a cultural sort of - there's a cultural tendency, for instance what we think of when we hear a minor chord may not be what people in India think of when they hear a minor chord. But generally speaking, the difference between a major chord and a minor chord, how that feels, the tension you feel when you're playing a seventh chord and it wants to go to the fourth above it.

All of these things are truths, because music follows the laws of the physical universe. So when we feel it and when we listen to music, we're doing something that's undeniably direct. It doesn't have the human filter on it, really. And yet it is an entirely human process - maybe uniquely human process. What animals think of music, people will argue that back and forth, or plants, as Stevie Wonder would be able to talk about.

But music is - it bypasses the decision-making process and goes straight to your heart, so - and when you pack into that, when you combine that with a lyrical message that either plays - that either is supported by the music or contrasts with the music and therefore makes it even more so, I don't know, it's a powerful thing.

Tavis: That it is. I couldn't have put it the way you put it, but I agree on the conclusion that it is a powerful thing. You're at the point in your career now when you've got so many hits behind you that people are now doing covers of your stuff, increasingly.

In my car right now I - it's in CD holder number four, it's been there for, like, a year, I can't get it out. I am still grooving on Babyface's cover of a couple of your songs.

Taylor: He did "Fire and Rain" and "Shower the People."

Tavis: "Shower the People." His "Shower the People" is cold. I don't know about you, I love it. It's amazing.

Taylor: Yeah, it is, it really - it's a thrill to hear it and there's nothing better than getting a great cover by someone who you deeply admire. That's as good as it gets.

Tavis: Yeah, and people are starting to cover your stuff. Next to you, you have a - I insisted, I begged somebody please, please get JT to bring his guitar with him.

Taylor: I have. I can tell you about this guitar.

Tavis: Yeah, tell me, tell me.

Taylor: This guitar, the very one, in fact, was in a hotel room in Minneapolis in 1985 when I checked in, and the builder, James Olsen, who lives in St. Paul, he had somehow gotten the guitar - I'll have to ask him how he got it into the room, but it was there. I picked it up and played it, and I haven't gone back. It has a slightly wider neck than most steel string flat-top guitars have.

It's not a large body. I've often thought that I'd like to make a cobweb, like a plastic cobweb, and put it up here, because I never get up here. (Laughter) I don't use that, no. That thing there, that's not necessary, no. But it just sounds good in spite of it, so a little plastic cobweb sometime.

But anyway, he had left this in the - and I just loved the way it sounded, and I haven't - with the exception of a Line 6 guitar that I play now because I'm developing a special kind of electronic guitar that plays bass at the same time as it plays guitar - it's difficult to describe.

But with the exception of that Line 6, this is - and a Fender Telecaster that I play on two or three songs a night, this is the guitar I mostly play.

[Music]

Taylor: I was brought up in the context of, like, the Episcopal hymnal I think is probably what is at the center of my, along with the rest of the Western world, is at the center of my musical experience. And I learned those songs.

[Music]

Taylor: Those songs like that's "Jerusalem," and "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," and all of those tunes I worked out when I was in school on the guitar, and the endless bored, empty moments that there were. There's time today for young people, it seems to be just filled with distractions constantly. But when I was a kid, I was bored. There was empty time, and a lot of it - time to kill, time to have long, circular thoughts.

So I sat - once the guitar started giving me sounds back that I liked, I was off and running, and I worked up hymns and Christmas carols and then started learning things that other people taught me, and songs that I liked. So that's it, that's what you hope for in this life anyway, is to find what it is that you love the most and then just follow it. Follow it as far as you can.

Tavis: I'm glad he figured that out. So for all the JT fans, which is just about everybody right now watching this program, whatever you're doing, just stop and thank God for all the boredom in James' life when he was a kid. (Laughter) We're going to thank God for all that boredom when he was just a kid.

The new CD from JT, James Taylor, "Covers." Some good stuff on this, I don't need to encourage you to add it to your collection. If you're a fan of James, as I am, you got to have it. And James, as always, good to see you, man, and thanks for bringing that guitar with you.

Taylor: You bet.

Tavis: I appreciate it.

Taylor: Thanks to James Olsen for building it.

Tavis: Yeah, thank you - we love all the Jameses in the world right about now. (Laughter)