JT in My Mind
James Taylor is a hardworking man. In droll Instagram videos, he splits seemingly endless piles of logs into kindling for the woodstove in his studio in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. Already this year, he has celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his second album, (which means it’s been almost that long since I first fell hopelessly in love with that face, that voice surging forth from my beat-up eight-track and breaking my young heart), and by the time this column appears, he’ll have brought out a new one, , his twenty-ninth. In January, Amazon released the Audible book , which describes the first twenty-one years of his existence, including his oft-harrowing family life and struggles with addiction, in moving and extraordinarily articulate detail. (Says the project’s producer, Bill Flanagan: “He’s one of the only rock stars you’ll ever meet who speaks in full paragraphs.”) In it, he describes how his mother, Trudy, never got over the trauma of being uprooted from the New England seaside where she grew up and plopped down in civil rights–era North Carolina. She was deathly afraid her five children would grow up to be “hillbillies” and took solace in the fact that they did not speak with obvious Southern accents. And
