JT SORT BREAK SHOT SES MEMOIRES AUDIO CHEZ AUDIBLE

Les Mémoires audio de James Taylor intitulée Break Shot sont sorti le 31 janvier chez Audible.

Dans celle-ci, Taylor raconte l'histoire des 21 années qui ont précédé sa signature sur le label des Beatles en 1969, en commençant par son éducation à Chapel Hill, en Caroline du Nord, au cours de laquelle lui et ses quatre frères et sœurs ont été plongés dans la musique à un âge précoce.

Break Shot emmène les auditeurs à travers l’adolescence traumatisante de Taylor, quand il s’est fait admettre dans un hôpital psychiatrique du Massachusetts en 1965. Il se souvient également d’avoir sorti son premier album éponyme sur Apple Records (il a été le premier artiste américain à signer sur le label des Beatles) et sa montée en puissance avec Sweet Baby James des années 1970.

Break Shot a été enregistré dans The Barn, le studio de Taylor dans l’ouest du Massachusetts. Les interviews ont été menées par le journaliste de musique de longue date et ancien cadre de MTV, Bill Flanagan.

“Je connais Bill Flanagan et j’admire son écriture depuis toujours”, a déclaré Taylor dans un communiqué. “J’étais donc heureux et soulagé qu’il ait accepté de m’aider à rassembler mes pensées et à réviser cette autobiographie de mes débuts, la rampe d’accès à la route que j’ai parcourue depuis.”

“Un lanceur a besoin d’un receveur et un collaborateur drôle et intelligent peut vous canaliser”, poursuit Taylor. «Pour autant que je m’en souvienne, je n’ai jamais eu beaucoup de mémoire; mais voici comment je m’en souviens … Je l’ai déjà dit? “

Break Shot est une expérience unique de récit et de musique, puisque ces mémoires comprennent des interludes musicaux enregistrés par Taylor.

Malheureusement Break Shot n'est pas pour le moment disponibles en France!!

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member James Taylor has a new album, “American Standard,” and a new tour with Jackson Browne. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)


James Taylor is everywhere with “Break Shot,” his new audio memoir for Audible; a new album, “American Standard,” and a spring tour with Jackson Browne. At home in the Berkshires, he talks about his ‘noise-making’ moment.

By AMY KAUFMANSTAFF WRITER - LOS ANGELES TIME - JAN. 31, 2020

LENOX, Mass. — Even here, in the stillness of the Berkshires forest, James Taylor grows anxious. He has to be conscious of how he enters his days, since he most often experiences stress during the first six hours of being awake.

“I was glad to get a chance to see my shrink. I haven’t seen her since before the break,” he says. “I think any attempt at mental health is an excellent idea. It’s a little bit self-centered and navel-gazing, to a certain extent, to focus on yourself to that degree. But some of us need to become conscious of what we’re doing that we need to stop doing.”

It’s early January, and the 71-year-old, who has just driven the mile of his maple-lined entry after visiting with his therapist, walks into TheBarn — his recording studio, a building just a few paces from where he sleeps — and takes off his coat. He keeps on his trademark newsboy cap while tending to the fire in the wood-burning stove.

It’s difficult to imagine a more tranquil environment. But in recent years, Taylor says, he has found his anxiety becoming “a bear.” From the inception of his career, the musician has been open about his mental health struggles. In his senior year of high school, he spent 10 months at Boston’s McLean Hospital during his first depressive episode. A couple of years later, he checked into another residential treatment center in an attempt to kick his heroin addiction. It was there that he composed the majority of his first hit record, 1970’s “Sweet Baby James” — a story he shared whenever he spoke about his songwriting.

Which is why, when Taylor has been asked by publishers over the years to write his memoirs, he has declined. Because he finds it redundant to talk about his music — “it should be listened to, and it either connects or it doesn’t” — he’s been more forthcoming about his personal struggles since he became famous 50 years ago.

“I didn’t necessarily feel worthy of anyone’s attention, so when I was interviewed, I’d just say, ‘Well, whatever you think is worthy of writing about. Here’s the whole thing,’” he says, settling into a chair at the kitchen table. “I think that’s part of being a public person. You have to accept that people can have any of it that they want, and they will interpret it as they will. Self-doubt is a trait I really like in people — I trust people who are right-sized. But I don’t think it’s a very helpful trait if you’re going to be a celebrity. I think you have to be very entitled to pull it off.”


Taylor, seen here at the Bel-Air Hotel, reflects on his life with a new audio memoir and album.(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Then, last summer, Audible approached Taylor about collaborating on a project. Because he was preparing to release an album of classic covers — “American Standard,” out Feb. 28 — his manager thought that teaming up with the audio company might help to promote the new music.

“My wife and I like ‘Blue Bloods,’ and when you watch one of those, they set out three plot lines at the beginning. You follow them and they all resolve,” Taylor says, referring to the CBS family and police procedural drama. “We can’t just have one plot line anymore. I feel as though multi-tasking in that way is sort of the new norm, and I think my manager looks at it from the same point of view: ‘Let’s do something that allows us to make even more noise in the popular culture for a second.’”

Initially, Taylor envisioned creating something for Audible that would focus on his songwriting. He planned on selecting six of his tunes and talking about the process of writing them, their meaning and reception.

But when he began talking to the project’s producer, Bill Flanagan — an author and television executive who oversaw VH1’s “Storytellers” and CMT’s “Crossroads” — a different idea emerged.

“We talked on the phone about the parameters — about 90 minutes of James talking about something — and the best idea that came up was his detailing the first 21 years of his life,” says Flanagan, who has known Taylor for 35 years. “In the years I was at VH1 and MTV, he never wanted to do a ‘Behind the Music’ special — he could never be talked into it. So it was interesting to me how fully committed and into this he was once we started going. He told me a lot of stuff I never knew. And he’s one of the only rock stars you’ll ever meet who speaks in full paragraphs.”

Taylor decided to call the audio memoir “Break Shot: My First 21 Years.” The title is a reference to the first shot of a billiards game, when the cue ball slams into the other balls, sending them off into various directions. For Taylor, that moment occurred when he left his Massachusetts boarding school, Milton Academy, and went to McLean. But “it had been building,” he says, “to a real discontinuity:” His father’s alcoholism had reached a critical point. His parents’ marriage was coming to an end. The Vietnam War was underway. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. The U.S. was living under the threat of nuclear annihilation amid the Cuban Missile Crisis.

He was on the precipice of adulthood, but he didn’t have any direction. Growing up, Taylor often felt crushed by the weight of his family’s unspoken expectations. His father was, as he puts it, “the ultimate academician” — a star student who went from Harvard Medical School to head resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. When Taylor and his four siblings were still kids, their father uprooted them from the Northeast to North Carolina, where he would later become dean of the University of North Carolina Medical School.

But as he remembers in “Break Shot,” Taylor wasn’t getting any clear instruction from his parents on how to achieve such success — about how to apply to college or pursue a career. He grapples with his relationship to his parents throughout the audio memoir, which he says he largely felt comfortable making at all because his parents are no longer around.

“I wanted to be careful not to drag other people’s business into the street — people who are my contemporaries and my siblings — anyone who’s still alive,” he explains.


James Taylor, left, and Joni Mitchell in a recording studio, circa 1970. (Jim McCrary / Redferns/Getty Images)

Less than a month before the Jan. 31 release of the Audible project, Taylor is still uneasy about the prospect of sharing it with the world. Because the final touches had yet to be put on the audio version of the story, his representatives would allow The Times to review only the manuscript of “Break Shot” — and to read it on Taylor’s property.

The singer-songwriter says his hesitation came from a fear that someone might “furiously read it and mine it for its prurient or sensational aspects” before release. The abbreviated memoir does delve into his infamous drug use — he didn’t get sober until his mid-30s — and in one scene, he recalls how he accidentally gave John Lennon a dose of methadone “too big to be taken by a civilian.... I am sure glad I didn’t kill John Lennon that day,” he says.

But, as promised, he never reveals much about his intimate relationships with other living public figures. He briefly mentions taking up with Joni Mitchell, saying only: “Our romance did not last that long, but our friendship has sustained for 50 years.” And the only reference to his first wife, Carly Simon, occurs as he is recalling his childhood summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where he says he first met the Simon sisters who, at 14, were out of his league. He married Simon in 1972, a few years after “Break Shot” cuts off.

“Maybe that’s why Bill suggested we do that early part [of my life], so as not to have to make decisions like that,” Taylor says of excluding his romance with Simon from the story. “It’s hard to talk about, to tell half of a story like that. To own the whole thing — I’m glad I didn’t have to talk about those intimate relationships with people who are still alive.”

Simon — with whom Taylor has two adult children, Sally, 46, and Ben, 43 — made a very different choice when she wrote her own memoir in 2015, “Boys in the Trees.” In the book, she wrote extensively about her 10-year marriage to Taylor, detailing how she watched him shoot up in a room at the Chateau Marmont and her intense physical attraction to him.

“The connecting of our skin went more than inches,” she wrote of the first night they spent together in 1971. “He was four inches taller and his torso was much longer than mine, but it felt as though a manufacturer of bodies had copied our limbs and made them a perfect double.”


James Taylor, left, and Carly Simon in 1974. (Peter Simon)

But if Taylor was upset about the revelations in Simon’s book, he doesn’t show it.

“I think she’s been pretty kind to me, and that’s certainly her story to tell,” he says of his ex-wife, who told The Times in 2015 that her kids weren’t allowed to give her Taylor’s phone number. “Maybe she got better offers. Or maybe they were more compelling, somehow. One should be free to be one’s self and not the prosecuting attorney and the defense. It would be hard for me.”

Flanagan didn’t push for such detail, anyway, he says: “By 21, he’d spent time in a mental institution, got into a motorcycle accident, got addicted to heroin, started playing music with the Beatles. I just felt there was so much good stuff that I was very, very happy with ending it there.”

The idea of someday sharing more about his life isn’t particularly appealing to Taylor, who still has trouble viewing himself as in any way exceptional. In TheBarn, memorabilia from his celebrated career — magazine covers, photos with politicians, commemorative record sale plaques — was put on the walls of the stairwell only after his assistant asked if she could take the keepsakes out of storage. (His five Grammy awards rest on shelves above her desk on the second floor of the office.)

“I certainly don’t have anything enlightening to say,” he says of the prospect of a future written memoir. “I don’t have anything to say that other people aren’t saying as well, and probably saying better. This Audible thing is fine, you know? It takes the part before I was known, and basically sort of lays it down, and I think it is an interesting story with a couple of lessons to be learned from it about parenting, about how we help young people become adults.”

Taylor has two other children, 18-year-old twins Rufus and Henry, with his third wife, Kim, whom he married in 2001. Like their father, the boys attend Milton Academy and are both interested in music. Rufus is a fan of musical theater, while Henry is the head of the school’s male a cappella group and plays jazz guitar.

“Looking at Sally and Ben’s experience with two parents who were successful in music, it may open a few doors, but you pay much more for it,” Taylor says of his elder children, who are also singer-songwriters. “Celebrity is good for the celebrity, but it’s really not that great for everyone around the celebrity. It’s something you have to cope with. It’s not really an advantage. It’s not the ideal situation for a kid coming up to have a parent who’s in the spotlight somehow.”

39th annual Kennedy Center Honors
At the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in 2016, from left, Henry Taylor, Caroline Taylor, James Taylor and Rufus Taylor.(Getty Images)
Raising his younger boys, Taylor says, he was especially cognizant of making sure his sons realized that “their parents’ emotional needs are not their responsibility.” As he recites in “Break Shot,” he often felt he had to parent his parents — particularly during ages 7 to 9, when his father left the family for two years to serve as a medical officer for the U.S. Navy in Antarctica. The eventual divorce of Taylor’s parents was hard on him, and as an adult, he invited his father to one of his therapy sessions in New York to discuss it.

During the meeting, he says in “Break Shot,” the psychologist confronted Taylor’s father, asking why he’d had five children with a woman he didn’t love. He replied that his own mother had died in childbirth, so he surmised his ex-wife might come to the same fate.

“He was just trying to maintain a little bit of his pride,” Taylor says of the brusque remark. “My dad was a little defensive coming down to New York to talk to a sort of a feminist family police. She was almost indicting him for my issues. He wanted to show me that he loved me and would do anything for me. If I wanted him to come down and come talk to a family therapist, he’s there for me. But if she starts poking at him with a stick, he’s going to bite her back, and he did.”

Taylor has found himself reflecting more on his youth as he ages. “It seems to be a time of summing up,” he says, “when there’s a finite amount of time that remains.” When he listens to music — which is, in fact, a rarity, because he prefers silence so he can “put something together” in his head — he finds himself returning to favorites from his childhood. “American Standard,” which he began work on in 2018, includes 14 guitar-centric arrangements of songs he treasured as a boy: “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” from “Oklahoma,” Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.”

“Not only do these songs inform my music, but very early on, they were what I was playing,” he says. “Those songs were so smart and so capable and so well done that as songs, they need to have a presence in the life of music. I think it’s good to reiterate them. Bill Evans played these songs so beautifully. He threw them into a whole new light on the piano that it inspired an entire generation of jazz players. I’m not saying that I’m as capable as he, but the thing is, it’s worth doing if you bring something new to it or see it in a new light.”

In May, Taylor will embark on a 26-date U.S. tour with Jackson Browne to promote the new music. (He’ll stop in Anaheim on May 28.) He is rarely at home for more than a month, but tries to balance his touring schedule just enough so that he doesn’t tire of it.

“In its season, there’s nothing like it,” he says of being on the road. “I don’t know if I’ve got another studio album in me of my own material. It’s hard to know what will happen in the next 10 years. I’m still writing. I feel as though I’ve done this all my life, and I just want to take it as far as I can go.”

In a candid interview at his home in the Berkshires, James Taylor reflects on his rocky start, two new releases, and his big break. "The Beatles opened the door and invited me through," he says. "It was the dividing line in my life."

WASHINGTON — A half-century after his breakthrough as a singer-songwriter, James Taylor is coming to grips with the rocky road that led him to a hard-won stardom. On Feb. 1, 1970, his album "Sweet Baby James" was released, including his first top-10 hit, "Fire and Rain."

This is a busy year for JT, whose groundbreaking audio memoir "Break Shot: My First 21 Years" — it's a musical autobiography — just came out on Audible.com. His 19th studio album, "American Standard," is set for release Feb. 28 on Fantasy Records. Spring and summer North American tours are ahead, including the annual Independence Day celebration on July 4 at Tanglewood.

The album of Broadway and pop standards is intertwined with the audio memoir, a project brought to him by his management team.

The deeply introspective look at his formative years forced Taylor to confront the personal demons that haunted him from his privileged but ultimately fractured family life, suicidal thoughts while in high school and eventual heroin addiction.

"Three of us kids ended up in psychiatric hospitals, and the fourth should have," he says in "Break Shot."

"Drug and alcohol addiction tore us up. You could make a case that most of the songs I've written have been a way of trying to work out just what happened to us. Like that movie `Groundhog Day,' I keep going through it over and over until I figure it out, until I get it right."

In the memoir, he acknowledges that "heading out into the world to play music was not a career path, it was an abandonment of conventional ambitions. It was like becoming a hobo and riding the rails. No one was offering the music business as a college degree. Any hope my family might have had that I would pull myself together, go to college, study law or medicine, was now abandoned. I was heading into territory for which there was no map. I was free."

But barely out of his teens, he managed to break into the music business, winding up in London, singing for Paul McCartney and George Harrison and being the first outside act signed to Apple, the Beatles' new label, to cut his first album.

"I felt like I was in the big leagues," Taylor remembers. "Fifty years later, I can't get over what the Beatles did for me. Their approval validated my music and introduced me to the world I've lived in ever since. The Beatles opened the door and invited me through. It was the dividing line in my life."

Taylor speaks briefly of his brief romance with Joni Mitchell, followed by a lifelong friendship with her and with Carole King. He credits his 19-year marriage to Kim Taylor for overcoming multiple personal struggles.

"Falling in love with Kim put my life back on the path I might have wandered off forever," he says. "Kim also gave me a second chance to have a family, now that I was old enough and clearheaded enough to take it on. With Kim, I was able to break the patterns I inherited from my father; I was able to become my own man."

During a revealing fireside chat at his home base in the town of Washington, Taylor mused about the long and winding trail, including bouts of depression that led him to spend time at the McLean psychiatric hospital outside Boston, and then at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge to kick heroin.

"Austen Riggs is very close to where I live now," Taylor said. "Life circles around."

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: What inspired you to revisit your first 20 years through an audio memoir and a related album?

A: One of my managers, Sam Feldman, thought it would be a good idea to have both things support each other.

I've never done anything like the Audible project before, so, I worked with music journalist Bill Flanagan. We did a few days of interviews, came up with a script, accompanied by some music that illustrates it. It's a short autobiography of my beginnings, and I'm reading it as if I had written a book.

It focuses on the story of my mom [Trudy] and dad [Dr. Isaac "Ike" Taylor] after he moved all of us down to North Carolina in 1951 for his position at the University of North Carolina's Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. Then he went on a Navy expedition to the South Pole as a medic in 1956-57.

I was 8 and 9, and it was a tough time for my mom. Moving to North Carolina was a very abrupt and complete change from what she was used to in Boston, a real stretch, and then for him to leave for two years, [she became depressed].

Q: In delving deeply into the first 20 years of your life, were there any fresh insights that struck you?

A: In focusing in depth on my childhood and that formative period, I see it as a whole now, being very much what happened to me and my entire family in the cultural context of the '60s, Vietnam, nuclear proliferation, the civil rights movement, assassinations, Nixon and Watergate. A lot of things changed, the music and the way we communicate. It was remarkable.

The typical form was go to high school, college and become a professional. Those forms that people always relied on, like my father did, were called into question. And the music was a key part of it.

Q: How did the music bring you to a closer understanding of your past, and your family's traumas?

A: We assemble our own personal mythology from elements of the popular culture, and we use that popular art to support ourselves. The music is a big, big part of that.
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There was a family story informed by my father's tragic childhood. He was raised by his aunt from Springfield because his mother died giving birth to him. After my father moved us south to get in touch with his North Carolina roots, there was his alcoholism, though he was an extremely functional, brilliant man as well, and a loving father. Then he left my mother for two years to go to the South Pole, where we had no contact with him at all except for a big packet of letters from time to time and gifts for each kid's birthday.

Q: What's the significance of the audio memoir's title, "Break Shot"?

A: It's the opening in a game of pool, when you slam the cue ball into the 15 other balls in the middle of the table, giving them a good smack and they go flying off in all directions, all at once. That's how I felt in 1967-68, when my dad's drinking overwhelmed him, my mom and dad separated, my brother Alex dropped out of school [he died in 1993, at age 46, of alcoholism].

I went to McLean Hospital and was followed there by two of my siblings. It seemed like everything had cruised along relatively normally and then suddenly the whole thing just fell apart. For five children of a committed academic, for not one of them to go to college was unusual.

I have been somewhat mystified by why we jumped the rails like that. I think I understand it more now; I understand my mother and my father. The tragedy of his birth very much informed his life, and all of ours; there wasn't enough joy in his motivation, it was all duty and proving himself.

Q: Do you foresee sequels to "Break Shot," covering your later life?

A: I'm such an autobiographical artist anyway, my stuff is so self-referred and self-centered that it would seem redundant to do that. It has been interesting to take a look at this haphazard way I fell into this life, or wandered into it. But, I think I put all that out there, one way or another.

Q: What inspired you to delve into pop standards and Broadway classics for your new album?

A: The Gershwins, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Rodgers and Hammerstein, all this was basically our parents' music from the '30s into the '60s. That music was called the American Songbook, performed by Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Evans.

This really is the pinnacle of American popular music. Lennon and McCartney grew up listening to it, and it was a harmonic source. It's important that people keep that stuff alive as a source so that we don't dumb down too much in our music as we go forward.

My own sources were those songs and their harmonic sense, the typical sort of Protestant American hymnal had a huge effect on all of our music, and then equal parts Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, and rhythm and blues, along with Celtic music, some harmonically accessible classical pieces by Aaron Copland ("Appalachian Spring"), Ralph Vaughan-Williams ("Greensleeves"), Dvorak.

I was introduced to those various musical forms before I was 20, and my parents' record collection was the first thing. There was always country music on the radio. As time goes by, it's clearer to me what my sources were.

Q:There are so many standards; how did you narrow down to 14?

A: Over the years, I've done many covers, and you want to do something new with the material instead of just substituting your voice for Nat King Cole. These chosen songs are those I learned on my guitar growing up; it's the way I've always done covers and the way we did these standards. So, I have my own versions going into the project, and that's the foundation.

And I worked with John Pizzarelli, a great guitarist, a delight. We had a musical conversation back and forth; that's what generated these arrangements. I wanted to keep my guitar version supported by John Pizzarelli's seven-string guitar, to keep that simplicity and transparency, and then we worked like crazy on the vocals and some choral parts here and there.

The process is very similar to writing a song. I have a lens, an approach, which is in no way complicated or formalized. It's like speaking in a certain vernacular. I have a musical vocabulary and I just apply it to these songs.

Q: What are the challenges of promoting a new album like this?

A: The music doesn't need to be sold; one of the great things about music is that it either strikes you or it doesn't, it either engages you or it sails right by you. With my type of music, the beauty of it is, it connects with us or it doesn't.

If I can get people to listen to it, I've done my job. And if they like it, they want it to be in their ears and in their lives, or not. It's just getting it out there and getting it noticed in this changed world. We'll go out again on the road this summer, and we'll find room for a couple of these tunes.

Q: Are there any downsides to fame?

A: I think there's such a thing as too much exposure, being too popular. I see people whose lives are restricted by how well-known they are. I can move relatively calmly and comfortably in pretty much any circumstance.

People in the Berkshires may recognize me more than they do elsewhere, but basically, it's a very comfortable level of fame, it's really the best of both worlds, and it's been extremely gratifying.

Q: How did you come up with the album title "American Standard."

A: The last time you saw it was on a plumbing fixture. I don't think many people will realize that. I remembered the name between the two taps on a kitchen sink in North Carolina, cast into the porcelain in cool blue letters. I have that association with it from those days. So, the album's got everything but the kitchen sink in it.

Clarence Fanto can be reached at cfanto@yahoo.com, on Twitter @BE_cfanto or at 413-637-2551.