North Carolina People; James Taylor, Singer/Songwriter

James Taylor is one of the great performing artists of our time. He's an North Carolinian, and he's also from Chapel Hill, and you'll be in just a minute. Production of North Carolina People is made possible by a grant from Wacovia Bank, a symbol of strength, stability, and service for over a century. James, it's good to have you back home again. You were here to help us launch the University's Big Bicentennial effort, and you got a glorious concert in the Dean dome last night to grant to see you. It's great to be here, Phil. Chapel Hill, I know you have had much of a chance to ride around, but having grown up here, I'm sure your roots are deep in this town. It's true, you know, I can't seem to really identify my place, any other place as home, aside from Chapel Hill.

I just, I really think of this as being where I'm from, you know. There's something about the region that, maybe it's that my father's family's from down here, or that period of time that I spent here was so formative, but it means a lot to me for sure. Last evening you had 14,000, 15,000 people in the Dean dome, and I couldn't help but remember that when you were a boy here, you used to wander through the woods and come over that very sight coming into town. Your brothers and sister, you just had a lot of fun wandering out that around out there, didn't you? That's right, that was, there were sort of territories, you know, that you're aware of, but one of the things that I remember so in such a sort of immediate and physical tactile sort of way about growing up here is the landscape of it, and there's, you know, the clay,

the soil, you know, and the trees and the landscape of it, just the topography and the way it feels. That's, I remember having been away from North Carolina for about 10 years. It was a period of time in the 70s when I didn't come down at all, and then a tour took me through North Carolina at some point, and I was staying in a motel room. I remember walking outside in the evening. We had a night off and smelling a honeysuckle and looking across a field at sort of dusk, it was, and seeing the pine trees, the loblolly pines on the far side of the field, and it's sort of a hint of red dirt there in the ditch. It just hit me, you know, that as some sort of a profound resonant kind of a memory, and I feel like that's really sort of in my blood, you know.

Your mother was one of the really creative spirits around this town those years ago, and she and your dad went out there and built the first modern home in Chapel Hill, and from then until now, I'm sure she's been that kind of influence in your life. Yes, she really is true. My appreciation of her sort of unique individual talent has continued to increase, as I get some distance on what it was like for her in those days, and really what a creative and energetic thing she did here in Chapel Hill. She was raised in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and this was a very adventurous thing to do to move down here with four young children and a fifth on the way to start a life down here in Chapel Hill, and it was, she really, you know, out there beyond the 15 501 bypass there,

on the edge of Morgan Creek, she really made a statement there with that sort of Frank Lloyd Wright inspired house and the gardens and around it, and her greenhouse and the furniture that she chose to put in it and the artwork and stuff, and I think also that, you know, she would take us up to New York City and sort of little parties of us would go up there to take in some theater or a museum, she was always sending us on some, you know, excursion to learn something, and she just, she was very, like I say, very energetic. But she really introduced you to nature and animals and plants and birds, and so much that people see and hear in your music now. I think it really is true. I owe an awful lot to her. Well, in my mind, I'm going to Carolina, has lines in it about the dogs that bite.

Can't you see the moonshine moonlight? Yeah. Those are all reflections of Morgan Creek as I hear you. It's true, you know, when I was talking earlier about that sort of visceral kind of memory, the time I wrote that song I wrote it in two different episodes of writing it. One was in London, I was working with the Beatles. I'd been signed by Apple Records, which was their label. It was 1968. It was an amazingly exciting time to be, they were recording their white album at Abbey Road. I'll know at Trident Studios at the time, and I was working also sort of in the interstices, in between when they were in the studio, I'd go in and cut a couple of tracks, and McCartney played on one song, and Harrison sang on another one. It was amazing, an amazing sort of acceleration for me. I just couldn't believe it because I was so into their music.

But I was away from home and from the United States, and I had this, when the song refers to a holy host of others standing around me, that sort of referring to sort of being embraced by that. So I started to write the song there, and then while I was in London working on this album, I took a trip down to Spain with a friend of mine, and the rest of the song sort of came to me there. But it was as if some direct and very strong tug, and an identifiable sort of physical presence was calling me back to quite a parent, but I think James, about six million North Carolinians, make that the new album out of the state, almost a year it played so often around everybody loves it.

So writing music, how difficult is that when you start composing? You get the idea of the lyric first or the rhythm, do they come together some way as you work? Yeah, I think they come together. I think that I usually answer that by saying that it's not a controlled process, I don't know the role. I don't really have much direction over it. It always happened as a kind of subliminal kind of a thing, that just occurs. And the main thing with me about writing music is to give myself enough time to let that thing happen, because now with a much fuller life than I used to have, a lot of things can happen to crowd it out to preempt that time that's needed to write. But I think that lyrics and music are sort of cadence to language. You know, when you hear little children when they're pre-verbal,

they sound like they're talking, but they're basically, they're just expressing the rhythms of language. Before there's anything, I mean, it may mean something to them. Without a question, it does, and it's probably much more valid than what we spout all the time. But anyway, you can hear that sort of cadence in it. And I think that somewhere in the back of my brain, I have a musical language connection that sort of comes up with both of these things at once. So typically what happens is that there will be an initial sort of iteration of a song that will get some distance into writing it. And that's sort of a gift. It just sort of occurs as if it's delivered on your doorstep. And then I have to go back and work at it to get the rest of it to finish up. You know, some music and lyrics and composition have a romantic theme, other tell stories, but you've lived through an age when many of the songs were expressions of anger and protest and vigor and dissent. What do you see happening in the minds of young people today as you move around the world?

Well, I personally feel as though the world is on the edge of a transformation from one type of human activity to another, or one way of organizing human activity to another. And I think it's approaching a sort of global synthesis. I think that it has to do with the numbers of people who are on the planet. I think that and also with global communication and just kind of a saturation of the planet. And I think that what looks like a very confused period, that's what this feels like to me, will turn out to be in retrospect to be a period of transition into a more, if not a more stable phase, just a more sort of realigned phase.

If that makes any sense at all. I think people are looking for a lot of people are looking for representation in the sort of global consciousness. When you speak of environments, you don't mean just what's happening in Morgan Creek area. You're talking globally and I use the environment, hunger, suffering. These things are now humankind problems. That's what you really sing about and write about, isn't it? I think so. You know, partially. Mostly I wrote right from a very personal point of view, and my songs are personal expressions. Even when they have more political or global themes, they're still a personal take on those things. But because that's just, that's my style. But, you know, I'm very, you know, I find that there's a fascinating time to live. You know, on the other hand, if you would live between, if you would live in Germany, for instance,

and between the two World Wars, I think things would have looked particularly apocalyptic then too. Or in Japan, just after the Second World War. You know, I think that this is just, you know, it might be a narrow sort of personal view of things that this great change is happening now. I know, I think you're right. You and Reynolds Price have gotten together here recently. Reynolds is a distinguished professor and novelist at Duke. What went on there? My wife, Catherine, was doing a piece for public television that was filming in Columbia, South Carolina. This is maybe six years ago now, maybe more, maybe seven or eight, I'll call private contentment that Reynolds had written. And at that time, she communicated with the Reynolds, and we went back and forth some. They wrote letters to one another.

And then I booked a concert in the Dean Dome, and she got in touch with Reynolds and said, listen, you know, you've got to come out. Reynolds said, well, I've recently had surgery and confined to a wheelchair. And I just don't think, you know, I could make that. But thank you very much. And maybe we can get together and visit. But Catherine called back and said, well, you know, we'll just figure it out. We'll make it work out. And James has a lot of people who can sort of help us out and stuff. So he came out to the show. And, you know, we just, we hit it off immediately. He, Reynolds really feels like family to Catherine and I. And we visit back and forth a lot. He's a great talent. He really is. He's a very creative mind. And you two get together. A lot of energy must fly there. What did you write together? Well, we wrote a song called Copper Line together, which is, again, a song about this sort of landscape around, you know,

sort of in a 10-mile vicinity of where we're sitting right now. I mean, 10-mile radius of where we are right now. Some of it is fictional and some of it is sort of true. But it basically just talks about this idea of remembering a landscape that you live in and sort of connecting your thoughts and your memories with a physical space. I'm sure earlier years in your careers of great performing artists, one night stands traveling a good year left. Well, it's still there. I go to ask, as the years have gone by, as it's still that much pressure to get around. I know you're in great demand all over the world. Well, you know, it comes and goes, but yeah, sure. It's a cyclical thing.

I typically will start by a period of trying to write some songs and assemble them into a sort of unit of work and my line of endeavor is an album. Record album, it's about 12 songs. When I get that together, we go into the studio and make an album and then that'll be followed by about a year and a half or two years of touring, you know, and that'll happen and there'll be one big six-month stretch that'll eat up a summer, you know, from a spring to a summer to a fall and then a little isolated bits of work in between and some benefits here and there, or maybe some, you know, new things you've got to make a video if you can. If you can get the weight of the money up for that or we'll film a concert or try to figure some way to promote it without humiliating ourselves too terribly and, you know, so that's the way. There are slow periods and then intense periods of work. Here we are on November 12th that you're going from here to Appalachian and then into the Northeast and after Thanksgiving you'd be up at Brown

and will that end the fall tour for you this season? Somewhere along there. Yes, that'll do it. We're recording this tour to try to make a live album and that's then I'll go into the studio and try to assemble that with my co-producers. And then when that's finished then I'm pretty, I've got a couple of benefits coming up in the spring but those are isolated and generally speaking I won't do anything until I get back in the recording studio and I've got to accept and won't do anything but right. James being a creative person. There's an awful lot of discipline in this. I know you rehearse, good as you are, you rehearse with all great artists too, but how do you organize your time when you're taking the next, you're going to compose the next series of music. You finish the tour, you take six months,

you do your creative development. Is that it's not from eight to five and you move by? That's the best way to do it if you get a discipline yourself that way. If you don't really defend the time and sort of schedule it in, it'll get eaten by something else. And that's one of the things that I remember from North Carolina and I'm most thankful for is that there was empty time. It was real space. I mean, there was time to kill. Time at the time felt just, you know, like unreleased boredom. We'd go out and wander around in the woods, you know, just, you know, look at trees or just a lot of empty time. When I see my kids growing up now in Manhattan and Massachusetts, it seems like there's just not a, there's not a dull, never a dull moment. I think, I actually, I think dull moments are really valuable. Very valuable.

You'll have to pack them up and bring them down here for an extended two weeks and let them wander out there where you want it. Well, we have to take them pretty far away from a civilization that, you know, that's true. We've done that sometimes. What do you have in mind as your next series of compositions? Are you thinking that far ahead? I've got some things. I've got some things started. I have, you know, I have some starts. Yes. And I keep notes on them and I'll start trying to assemble them and pin them down a little bit when my time frees up. When young people gather around you after a concert, as I'm sure they do it every college town you ever go to and they come to ask you, you know, what about music as a career? What about what you've done and what is there out there for us? What do you say to young people today, Jane? Well, I think it's difficult to think of, for me to think of music as a career, I would advise people to have a Plan B if they were career-minded.

If they were committed to, you know, to making music and that's all they loved and all they wanted to do, well, that's fine. It's got its own motivation. It doesn't, you know, just be careful not to, you know, make sure that you're lonely and free for a while and you can travel light if you want to allow the thing to develop. Don't weigh it down with an awful lot of other things. But, you know, when people ask me, how do I get an entrance into the business? How do I make this into a career? How do I make my living at it? I really never know what to answer except to say, you know, if you love it, it has its own energy and its own reason for being done, no matter what, no matter what your circumstances are and basically you just have to play all the time, play whenever you can, you know, if you're a painter paint when you can, can you talk about it, you know, live it, be in the company of other people who are doing it and interested in it, and, you know, sooner or later it will find a way

into, it'll make a life for you. Do people respond to music the world over in pretty much the same way do you find the, that touches people in ways that the singularly music's way of intervening in our lives, which is wonderful? It is true, I mean, the cliche is that the music is the universal language everybody always says that, especially when you're sort of traveling abroad, everybody always says, you know, music is the universal language. In fact, it is sort of the thing about music is that it's a harmonic structure, you know, it has the cadence of language, it has sort of expresses human consciousness through lyrics and stuff, but the other thing is that it has this sort of link with the physical world with physical sort of science, you know, the overtone series or what we consider to be harmonic or not harmonic relates very much to sort of physical law, you know,

and so it really connects us with the cosmos, you know, you know, in a, you know, the same things that make, the same laws that affect whether or not something is harmonic to us affect the orbit of a comet, you know, or the spectrum of light as it manifests as color to us, and there is something that's profound, you know, and it's pre-verbal and it's pre-conscious, I mean, animals, animals love music, you know, so will you be going overseas again soon? We were, we were in Europe in May, we're overdue to play South America and Asia again, so my guess is that that'll be in the next round of, the next campaign will be. We'll take us there.

How about records now? You say this, you're doing this live consciousness, we'll make this live consciousness. That'll take a lot of editing. The thing about it is that you want to stay current, whether you want to listen to it every night, the sort of reference tapes that we make from the board every night so that you don't get swamped by it, because it's a lot to wade through all that stuff, and yes, it'll take a lot of editing to it. You actually do that yourself. You set the standard and measure the quality that has to please James Taylor. Yeah, well, you know, that's, that, I don't trust anybody else's. Where were you in Europe this last tour? We started in Portugal, we played Spain, we played in a lot of jobs in Italy. We're popular in Italy, played Hamburg and Paris and London. You always popular in London. We did do well there. England is good for us. Our daughter Mary lives over there and she tells us about your appearances, and she's a lawyer over there.

Oh yeah. Speaks of Chapel Hill spirit, the way you do, and those she's far far from home. You know, there's something about North Carolina as a region. Maybe other people feel this about Indiana or Kansas. I don't know. But it just feels as though it's an identifiable region. That it is a real place. That it hasn't, maybe it's that it hasn't been swept by the same drastic economic changes or changes in population and stuff. But it just, it really feels like an identifiable zone. Well James, we've used up all of our time. But before you get on the bus and head to Appalachian, I hope you can go out, place a farm road and breathe deeply and renew your spirit for another generation of travel. But thank you for joining me on North Carolina people. It's grand to see you. Thank you Bill. I'm glad you're here.

I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. Production of North Carolina people is made possible by a grant from Wacovia Bank, a symbol of strength, stability and service for over a century. Consider this a century.