For all his acoustic-guitar-by-the-campfire romanticism, most of James Taylor's music over the years has had a tinge of sadness to it. Consider that his single most famous song -- "Fire And Rain" -- is about mourning for a friend who's died too young. Even his sweeter love songs have always been burdened with undercurrents of self-doubt.
You wonder why that might be… and then you consider the timing of this album -- the one disc on which Taylor really lets his romantic optimism fly, on which he essays not one or two but three of his most heartfelt "I'm in love and life is great" songs -- just before his first marriage to fellow singer-songwriter Carly Simon fell apart. Sometimes -- as Taylor has many times eloquently reminded us -- life is like that.
Context aside, this is a decidely upbeat album. JT opens up with two of the most optimistic, buoyant love songs of the '70s. "Your Smiling Face" is about as sunny as they come, with its playful guitar and piano lines, hummable chorus, terrific Motown breakdown-and-reprise middle section and overcome-with-joy scat-singing on the fadeout. Its sequel "There We Are" goes even farther, taking the piano-based love ballad to new heights of idealistic lyricism: "There we are / Walking hand in hand / Somewhere on the sand / At the end of the land / And the edge of the shining sea…. You are my universe / You are my love."
Yep, that fall looks like it's gonna hurt.
Never mind that now, though, because there's more terrific music
to come. Longtime Taylor guitarist and future star producer Danny
Kortchmar (Don Henley, Billy Joel) contributes "Honey Don't Leave
LA," featuring a fat r&b riff and multi-tracked sax from David
Sanborn. Equally playful is Taylor's ode to the evils of fossil
fuel, the jazz-scat romp "Traffic Jam."
On the serious side, JT does offer a couple of his trademark downbeat tunes, "Another Grey Morning" (just what it sounds like) and "Bartender's Blues" (warmed up by a terrific harmony vocal from Linda Ronstadt). But they actually stick out on an album where even uncertain, cautious tales like "Looking For Love on Broadway" and "If I Keep My Heart Out of Sight" seem to weigh in on the side of hopefulness.
Perversely, one of my favorite songs on this very romantic album is its most anti-romantic track, a tongue-in-cheek portrait of the artist as a truck-stop sleazeball titled "I Was Only Telling a Lie." Taylor's crack studio band of Kortchmar (electric guitars), Lee Sklar (bass), Clarence McDonald (keys) and Russ Kunkel (drums) has a blast with this one as JT sketches a fairly brilliant vignette about a conscience-less loser ditching the victim of his latest quickie. (And, really, what's not to love about rhymes as witty/greasy as "You got them mackerel eyes / Brought the side of fries / You got me hypnotized"?)
More typical, though, are a pair of Taylor standards. "Secret O' Life" may be the ultimate ode to optimism and romantic possibility, and remains a concert favorite 25 years later. Ironically, the bigger hit off this album was the Otis Blackwell cover "Handyman," which is the slightest of the 12 tracks here, notable mostly for Taylor's brilliant phrasing of the second verse's anchor line, in which he turns the word "me" into a four-syllable falsetto aria.
For me, though, the emotional high point of this album has to be "Terra Nova," a truly exceptional ballad. In the main part of the song, JT pines for the ocean, wallowing in a memory of sailing with Carly while in reality sitting alone in a hotel room, far from home. Simon herself supplies a beautiful harmony vocal, their two voices intertwining sinuously. The chorus finds Taylor reminding himself again and again that he "ought to be on my way right now," but he seems transfixed by the memory. Delving deeper into it, he contemplates what each of his loved ones means to him, until the song finally bleeds right into its coda, a two-stanza sonnet about sailing and then coming home "to stop yearning" that is written and sung by Simon in perfect, passionate pitch, her vocals double-tracked into a swirling call-and-answer effect by producer Peter Asher. Uh, wow. It's flat-out gorgeous.
If you wanted to play tabloid reporter, there are plenty of hints on JT that things were not entirely copacetic in the Taylor-Simon camp, that their relationship was in fact already in trouble (ex.: "I found out something about you / Baby without you / I'm a lonely man"). But I'd rather remember this album the way it seems intended -- as a heartfelt entreaty from a flawed romantic to the woman he loved.