The one songwriter Paul Simon called the complete “package”
Most songwriters don’t focus on being the best musician in the world. It’s about the kind of music that can be created on one instrument, and even if not everything is perfect, it’s a reflection of who you are. But Paul Simon knew when he was dealing with a pure craftsman when listening to a record.
Because listening to Simon’s track record, he knew that there were ways to work as a songwriter that weren’t exactly normal. No one listening to ‘The Sound of Silence’ back in the day would have necessarily seen a song like ‘Graceland’ coming or anything, but it was always about forward motion. Then again, Simon could still melt hearts even if he had a guitar in his hand and a microphone in front of him.
After all, some of the best Simon and Garfunkel songs had very little adornment, and it only took Simon a few more years to start developing his own voice as a writer. Every one of his songs were enormously well done from a production standpoint, but Simon had perfected what it meant to listen to someone’s story for three minutes at a time, whether it was the goofy lyrics of ‘You Can Call Me Al’ or the wistful ode to his own staying power on ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’.
When Simon was first starting out, though, everyone needed to be doing something a little bit more than being a guitar player with a song in their heart. Bob Dylan had already shifted the game on that, but if Dylan had started to wake people up to the horrors that were going on in the world, James Taylor was the flipside of that coin that showed everyone what beauty can come from one man and his guitar.
And given the music he was working with in his earliest days, it wasn’t hard for The Beatles to see what they had on their hands when they signed him to Apple Records. Songs like ‘Carolina In My Mind’ were pure works of art that somehow blended the tenderness of Carole King’s best ballads with the musical sophistication of Joni Mitchell, and compared to what Simon was doing, Taylor took everything great and blended it into his own sound.
Simon definitely stood out compared to everyone else, but he felt that Taylor was the archetype for what the standard folk singer was supposed to sound like, saying, “James Taylor, who has a pretty pleasant voice and sings pretty good sometimes, I’m not saying he’s a great singer, but I’m saying he sings pretty good. I think of him as the package.” And it’s not that far off from reality, either.
Taylor does have his share of fun moments throughout his catalogue, but he was far more interested in trying to make music that put everyone at ease. Even when he was talking about serious subjects like on ‘Fire and Rain’, his way with words and fantastic use of imagery in his tunes was like taking Simon’s more esoteric songwriting style and blending it with the pop sensibilities of the old American Songbook.
Not everything that Taylor played had to be exactly right, and compared to every other singer-songwriter, doing so would have been boring. He only played what he thought was right for the song, and for all of Simon’s wit and lyricism when writing his classics, no one was ever going to replace the sound of hearing Taylor’s soft croon over every single second of Sweet Baby James.
