Quote of the Day (Tori Amos, on Why ‘Being a Librarian is a Fantasy of Mine’)

 

“Being a librarian is a fantasy of mine. In my album Tales of a Librarian, I'm dressed in different imagined librarian costumes, and in the liner notes the tracks are organized by the Dewey Decimal System. My own little libraries don’t have a system, but I have dreams of one!”— Grammy-nominated American singer-songwriter Tori Amos, interviewed by Scott Heller for “By the Book: Tori Amos,” The New York Times Book Review, Mar. 16, 2025

The image accompanying this post, of Tori Amos performing in Helsinki, Finland, was taken June 9, 2015, by NeoMeesje.

Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, on a Village Bohemian of the Early Sixties)

“Chloe had red gold hair, hazel eyes, an illegible smile, face like a doll and an even better figure, fingernails painted black. She worked as a hat-check girl at the Egyptian Gardens, a belly-dancing dinner place on 8th Avenue; also posed as a model for Cavalier magazine. ‘I’ve always worked,’ she said….Chloe had her own primitive way of looking at things, always would say mad stuff that clicked in a cryptic way, told me once that I should wear eyeshadow because it keeps away the evil eye. I asked her whose evil eye and she said ‘Joe Blow’s or Joe Schmoe’s.’ According to her, Dracula ruled the world and he’s the son of Gutenberg, the guy who invented the printing press. Being an heir of the ’40s and ’50s cultures, this kind of talk was fine with me. Gutenberg could have been some guy who stepped out of a folk song, too.”—American singer-songwriter and Nobel Literature laureate Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (2004)

Quote of the Day (Ray Davies, on Why ‘It’s Critical To Be in the Now')

“You’ll never be able to be what you were. You’ll never achieve what you achieved before. It’s critical to be in the now. This is what I am, this is how I speak, this is what I write – take it or leave it. Thankfully, people have continued to take it rather than leave it.” —English rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Sir Ray Davies, on creating new material, interviewed by Andy Greene, in “The Last Word: Ray Davies,” Rolling Stone, Apr. 6, 2017

Happy birthday to Ray Davies, born 80 years ago today in London. Unlike many other British Invasion musicians, Davies—whether fronting The Kinks or soloing—never really became relegated to a novelty act.

Part of the reason why comes from the venturesome spirit indicated by the above quote, but the rest comes from a character that, to use one word, is “complicated”—and, to use more, might be “shy,” “insecure,” “troubled,” and “turbulent.”

All those terms apply equally to how he has been viewed by his romantic partners (including fellow singer-songwriter Chrissy Hynde) and younger brother and Kinks bandmate Dave Davies.

But an equally useful word for him might be “engaged”: engaged with “the now,” and with the past—including the working-class environment in which he grew up, and its discomfort with and alienation from a rapidly changing culture.

Davies fans have their own favorites among the tunes from the musician’s long career. Mine might belong to, for want of a better term, the middle phase of The Kinks’ career—“Celluloid Heroes,” “Misfits,” and “Better Things." 

They spring from a sensitivity and sense of hope that, despite a personality that he described, in a 2011 Guardian interview, as “easy to love…but impossible to live with,” remains rooted in an abiding interest in other characters.

(Unlike Colin Gawel’s August 2014 post on the “Pencil Storm” blog, I would not go so far as to say, “Ray Davies Is the Best Songwriter.” But I thank him for bringing to my attention the 1986 song “Working at the Factory,” in which Davies yokes his youthful angst with his later rage against “the corporations and big combines” who “turned musicians into factory workers on assembly lines.”)

Song Lyric of the Day (Gordon Lightfoot, on the Necessity of “Rainy Day People’)

“Rainy day people always seem to know when you're feeling blue
High-stepping strutters who land in the gutters sometimes need one, too.”—Canadian folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023), “Rainy Day People,” from his Cold on the Shoulder LP (1975)
 
I came to Gordon Lightfoot secondhand, through relatives who couldn’t stop playing him. The repetition of all those songs on the turntable got a bit too much for me in my teenage years.
 
Nearly five decades later, I see these tunes differently—shining with craft and, as seen in the lyrics above, understated melancholy, sympathy, and compassion. (In a different vein, I am deeply fond of his epic “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.”) So I join now with the many music fans worldwide who mourn “Gord’s” passing.

(For a concise but extremely thoughtful consideration of how Lightfoot maintained his religious belief—despite multiple problems with his health and relationships over the years—I urge you to read Paul Asay’s post, “What Gordon Lightfoot Taught Me About Faith,” on the blog “Plugged In.”)

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on ‘These Dark Café Days’)

“All good dreamers pass this way some day
Hidin' behind bottles in dark cafes, dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days.” — Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard," from her LP Blue (1971)
 
Like so many other baby boomers, I was astonished to discover that the legendary Joni Mitchell had made a surprise appearance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival last Sunday. It was even more glorious to think that she had performed nine songs, including one on her guitar—the first time she had done so before a paying audience since her 55^th birthday.
 
On her live 1974 double-LP set, Miles of Aisles, Mitchell expressed her ambivalence about fulfilling fan expectations, telling an audience, “That's one thing that's always the major difference between the performing arts to me, and being a painter. A painter does a painting, and he does a painting — and that's it, you know. He’s had the joy of creating it, and he hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it, and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint A Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it, and that was it.”
 
This past weekend, however, the 78-year-old musician and artist seemed genuinely delighted in revisiting old fan favorites like “Carey,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “A Case of You,” “Help Me,” “The Circle Game,” and “Both Sides Now.” Collectively, they could be her “songs of experience,” to borrow a phrase from William Blake.
 
The lyrics I chose for today’s quote represent perhaps the more dominant strain of her youth: songs of flight (“my gorgeous wings”), of the bohemian yearning for musical, artistic and personal freedom.
 
She would be the first to tell you of the personal price she paid for that quest (discussed in this prior post of mine about “Urge for Going”). But they form as indelible a part of her legacy as her “songs of experience.”
 
The Newport audience was honoring her stunning contribution to music with their full-throated response. But there were other reasons for their warm welcome back to her.
 
Chief among those reasons is this: everybody loves a comeback story, and Mitchell had to overcome greater odds than most to make it back onstage. Vanessa Romo’s blog post for Georgia Public Broadcasting relates how, following the singer’s 2015 brain aneurysm, even relearning how to speak and walk was a struggle.
 
But Mitchell took matters a step further: “Playing an instrument and vocal cord coordination, those sorts of things, are really, super complex fine movements that would take a long time to relearn," Dr. Anthony Wang, a neurosurgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Hospital, told Ms. Rono.
 
Mitchell relearned how to play the guitar by watching past videos of herself to see where she put her fingers. But the rest came through the stubbornness that sometimes drove hit-bent record execs to distraction in her youth, or what her attending surgeon correctly termed her “will and grit."
 
Over the past several years, baby boomers have grown used to the icons of their youth leaving the stage through physical decline and death.
 
But for one glorious moment this past weekend, they were able to witness a return of a genius who created words and chords that form part of the collective soundtrack of our lives. It was indeed something to cheer—even sing—about.

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)

Quote of the Day (Joe Jackson, on Cynicism as a ‘Disease of the Young’)

“Some of my early stuff was infected by the deadly disease of cynicism, which is a disease of the young, I think. When you’re young, it seems very clever to be cynical. But as you get older, hopefully, if you’re not completely stupid, you realize that you have to be a bit more positive, as a simple matter of survival. You know what I mean?”—English singer-songwriter Joe Jackson quoted in Sarah Larson, “Joe Jackson, Past, Present, and Fast Forward,” The New Yorker, Oct. 15, 2015

Yesterday marked the 67^th birthday of Joe Jackson, a musician who has grandly resisted genre pigeonholing. Sarah Larson’s combined concert review-interview from a few years ago captures his “sideways, sly” lyrics, as well as his impatience with the late Seventies stereotyping of him as an angry young man in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. (“I was really poking fun. A lot of people were doing that back then.”)

I myself have been partial to the two LPs he created in the early Eighties after coming to New York, Night and Day and Body and Soul, which incorporated pop, jazz and salsa textures.

It was a long way from his upbringing in Portsmouth, England, a dingy place that fueled his desire to escape. Admission to the Royal Academy of Music set him on a lifelong path, described memorably in his 1999 quasi-memoir, A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage:

"I saw music as White Magic. Pure energy, pure emotion, pure spirit. I thought that musicians, regardless of what kind of music they played, were beyond reproach, like firefighters or nuns.”

I have never had the opportunity to hear Jackson in concert, but YouTube clips suggest an idiosyncratic, interesting performer not content with note-for-note playing of oldies, as does this quote from a February 2019 interview with Jim McGuinn on the Minnesota Public Radio musical website/station “The Current”:

“Obviously it's me that's changed rather than the songs. But in some cases the songs embarrass me and I don't play them anymore. In other cases I still like them and do play them. A lot of times I've tried to do new arrangements of them — change them around and keep them interesting. And every now and again, some of the songs on this tour, we've gone right back to playing them exactly as they were recorded, which kind of goes against the grain a bit for me, to be honest. But sometimes it's fun to do that as well.

Flashback, June 1971: Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ Sets New Artistic Standard

With her fourth studio album, Blue, released 50 years ago this month, Joni Mitchell pushed against the conventional boundaries of the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement.

She would explore new musical textures through the end of the decade in LPs such as Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Mingus. But I don’t think Mitchell was more daring than she was when she poured out her anxiety, depression and fears about the costs of her total artistic commitment.

Commercial success was not her goal with this release, and in any case it would not come until Court and Spark three years later. (The major single, “Carey,” rose no higher than #93 on the Billboard charts.) But the astonished awe of her contemporaries arose rapidly.  Over the years, they—and the following two generations of musicians—have covered virtually all the songs in this collection.

Fragile, even depressed, over the increased expectations placed on her by fans, critics and her music company, in addition to ennui over balancing relationships against creative freedom, Mitchell sought an acoustic safe place—A&M Studio in Hollywood, where she was accompanied by only a handful of trusted musicians, including Russ Kunkel (drums and percussion), Stephen Stills, and James Taylor, with whom she had had a passionate affair in the summer of 1970.

From these often spare aural textures from piano, guitar and Appalachian dulcimer, lyrics emerged unsparing in their emotional honesty. One admirer, singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson—himself no stranger to hard self-examination in tunes like “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night”—cautioned her about too much public exposure, urging her to “save something for yourself.”

Among the few things she may have saved for herself—at least at the time—were the identities of males who figured romantically in her life to that point, including Taylor, ex-husband Chuck Mitchell, Graham Nash, and Leonard Cohen.

But the most daring subject—one she had been unable to address on prior albums, because of the ferocious pain involved—was her decision to give up for adoption the baby girl she had out of wedlock before her relationship with Chuck Mitchell. “Little Green” dealt with her hopes for the girl’s future—and the lingering ambivalence that Mitchell (so young at the time she thought of herself as a “child with a child pretending”) felt about her decision:

Like the color when the spring is born
There'll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little green
Like the nights when the northern lights perform
There'll be icicles and birthday clothes
And sometimes there'll be sorrow. 

Inevitably, the songs are less affirmative anthems than arrivals at a tentative musical equilibrium. In “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” she depicts the creative death-in-life of the male who had warned her that “all romantics meet the same fate someday” (Richard “drinks at home now most nights with the TV on/And all the house lights left up bright”), but her own resolve to push on against the odds is darkened by uncertainty (“Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings/And I fly away/Only a phase, these dark cafe days”).

In recent years, the song that may have received the most airplay, particularly during the Christmas season, has been “River.” The initial invocation of a festive season (a few bars of “Jingle Bells” on the piano, the mention of cut trees and reindeer) before long gives way to Mitchell’s deep melancholy over rejecting a marriage proposal by a lover (“Oh, I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad”). It has become the holiday theme song for everyone unable to summon a sense of joy in the season, for whatever reason. 

With time, I have come to regard “A Case of You” as my own favorite song from the album, in no small part from Diana Krall’s stunning rendition of it in her Live in Paris LP. (Hear it for yourself on this YouTube clip.) But many other singers have covered it, too, including Aoife O'Donovan, Tori Amos, Betty Buckley, Phoebe Snow, Nancy Wilson, Jane Monheit, k.d. lang, and most unusually, Prince, just before his Purple Rain tour.

Decades after its release, according to Sheila Weller’s collective biography of Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King, Girls Like Us, a pair of female fans told Mitchell, “You were our Prozac.” That kind of comment had the kind of outsized fan reaction that had made Mitchell anxious so many years before.

More recently, however, with the 50^th anniversary of Blue, Mitchell has come to value the fact that so many ordinary people have found comfort in her masterpiece. “When it was first released, it fell heir to a lot of criticism,” she noted in a recent video. “So, 50 years later, people finally get it, and that pleases me. Thank you.”

One of the many musicians influenced by the album was Jewel, who, in a tribute to Mitchell for Rolling Stone’s 2011 ranking of “The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time,” commented on the artistic process behind her idol’s confessions:

“I could tell that Joni was a painter by the way she wrote lyrics. She describes smells and sounds and uses fewer words to transmit more feeling. Her melodies are about shapes. The singing lines are slow, steep plateaus. One of the things I learned from Joni: If you can tell the story and keep things moving, you don't need to return to the chorus on time.”

(Even the image accompanying this post—obviously, the cover of the classic album—marked something of a departure for Mitchell. Her three previous LPs—Song to a Seagull, Clouds and Ladies of The Canyon—featured Mitchell’s own paintings. In contrast, Blue contained a photograph of the singer by Tim Considine—by this time in the early 1970s, making his mark as a photographer, but better known to baby boomers as oldest son Mike Douglas on the Sixties sitcom My Three Sons.)

This Day in Rock History (Stewart Becomes Solo Superstar with ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’)

May 28, 1971—The LP Every Picture Tells a Story primarily featured song covers, but it was a tune co-written by Rod Stewart—one that he considered leaving off the finished product—that propelled the 26-year-old to solo superstardom, after stints with the Hoochie Coochie Men, Steampacket, the Jeff Beck Group and The Faces.

As he had done with his solo studio album from the prior year, Gasoline Alley, Stewart included a composition by Bob Dylan, “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” on this new 10-song Mercury collection.

But the influence of Dylan may have been more strongly, if unconsciously, absorbed when the working-class son of a North London plumber let his creativity flow on what became the album’s monster hit, “Maggie May.” 

Recalling why he had reservations about including this song that he had recorded rapidly in the studio, Stewart remembered in his 2012 autobiography, Rod:

“It didn’t have a chorus. It just had these rambling verses. It didn’t really have a hook. How could you hope to have a hit single with a song that was all verse and no chorus and no hook? And it went on a bit: it was more than five minutes long, for God's sake, which was pretty much operatic by the standards of the pop single."

Perhaps he “should have known from listening to Bob Dylan,” Stewart reasoned, that “the lack of a catchy phrase in the middle,” not to mention a song exceeding the average length of a single, was not necessarily an impediment to significant radio time. (Indeed, see "Positively 4th Street" and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”)

Nor was Stewart’s raspy voice an obstacle to success: Dylan’s vocals, likened to “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire” by an unnamed Missouri folk singer cited by critic Nat Hentoff, had already proven that unconventional sounds could be tolerated if they were also expressive and evocative. Similarly, in the counterculture’s periodical bible, Rolling Stone, John Mendelsohn, reviewing the album, wrote that Stewart possessed “the most unique male voice in rock, a voice anyone could recognize instantly at five hundred paces through a Dixie cup….He’s got soul to spare.”

To Stewart’s surprise and delight, then, an American DJ (“allegedly in Cleveland, Ohio”) went with playing “Maggie May” rather than the designated single, a cover of Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe.” It peaked at #1 on the Billboard U.S. singles chart in early October 1971.

I wonder, though, if there might have been another reason for Stewart’s initial hesitancy about releasing “Maggie May?” I was surprised to learn from Rod that, when recording the vocals on his own compositions, he has sometimes felt so vulnerable over revealing his feelings that he has the studio emptied out “of everyone except the engineer—the producer at a push.”

There could hardly be a more personal song than “Maggie May,” his semi-autobiographical memory of losing virginity at age 15 in the summer of 1961 at the Bealieu Jazz Festival to “an older (and larger) woman” who propositioned him in the beer tent.

It’s hard to believe that the randy rooster who has undoubtedly scored with the ladies in virtually every stop on his world tours could feel this way. But who are we to argue?

The album also conveyed Stewart’s bone-deep appreciation for blues, soul and folk. Produced by Stewart himself, it exhibited a raw, go-for-it quality that crackles with energy, especially on the title track, the singer’s episodic tale of careening across Europe as a teenager and what he learned from the opposite sex—a kind of Tom Jones for the age of rock ‘n’ roll.

“That whole album was done in 10 days, two weeks, about as long as it takes to get a drum sound right nowadays," Stewart recalled in an interview for Mojo Magazine in 1995. He trusted his backup musicians—guitarist Ron Wood, pianist Pete Sears, and fiddler Dick Powell—and they delivered to a man, perhaps none more so than acoustic guitarist Martin Quittenton, who not only co-wrote “Maggie May” with Stewart but contributed its memorable, and ultimately exhilarating, mandolin sound.

In the years since, Stewart has sometimes been maddeningly unmindful of his gifts, whether through roosterish posturing on “Hot Legs” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” or his early-millennium ill-advised turn towards “The Great American Songbook.”

But Every Picture Tells a Story demonstrates why fans on both sides of the Atlantic embraced him so ardently near the beginning of his journey. Or, as he put it in his ruminating 2012 song, “Can’t Stop Me Now”:

I stood up straight and sang for the record-company man, my enthusiasm filled the room
I was young and I was keen with that devil in my stream as I hollered out an old blues tune.

Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, Looking Ahead to 80 and the Need to ‘Do the Impossible’)

“If I’m here at eighty, I’ll be doing the same thing I’m doing now. This is all I want to do – it’s all I can do . . . I think I’ve always aimed my songs at people who I imagined – maybe falsely so – had the same experiences that I’ve had, who have kind of been through what I’d been through. But I guess a lot of people just haven’t.

“See, I’ve always been just about being an individual, with an individual point of view. If I’ve been about anything, it’s probably that, and to let some people know that it’s possible to do the impossible.

“And that’s really all. If I’ve ever had anything to tell anybody, it’s that you can do the impossible. Anything is possible. And that’s it. No more.”—American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan quoted in Mikal Gilmore, “Bob Dylan at Fifty,” Rolling Stone, May 30, 1991

Bob Dylan may have spoken of being 80 in this interview with Mikal Gilmore, but there surely must have been times when he wondered if he would make it, especially with the brush with mortality that produced his 1997 CD, Time Out of Mind.

Many of us who have listened to the composer of “Forever Young” find it hard to imagine him at such a stage in his life. A poet of the counterculture for nearly as long as baby boomers can remember, he has seen that fringe movement transform into part of the cultural mainstream.

Too bad that Dylan couldn't have paused more often in the “Never-Ending Tour” of live appearances that has ruined his voice to such an extent that it has often hopelessly garbled the delivery of his own lyrics.

But then again, Dylan’s always been about overturning expectations. No sooner had he been labeled “the voice of his generation” than he began to experiment with one genre after another, often trying fans’ patience and loyalty.

For all of these sometimes whiplash-inducing changes in tone, Dylan has remained, Gilmore wrote in Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock ‘n’ Roll (1998), “a man who isn’t aiming to change the world so much as he’s simply trying to find a way to abide all the heartbreaks and disillusion that result from living in a morally centerless time.”

Quote of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on Explaining Her Songs to Audiences)

“I’ve had my moments where I’ve maybe blurted out more than I intended to, but most of the time if I don’t talk to the audience then it becomes a very uncomfortable show. My songs are kinda dense, and a lot of the time people wouldn’t know what I was talking about. So I learned that it’s better to tell them a bit about it. Not all the songs are my own particular stories, so it’s not like I’m having some sort of cathartic experience when I sing them.”—Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega quoted in Henry Yates, “Welcome Back… Suzanne Vega,” Classic Rock Magazine, February 2006

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on the ‘Little Left of Wild Eden Earth’)

 “And everyone's a victim!
Nobody's hands are clean.
There's so very little left of wild Eden Earth
So near the jaws of our machines.” — Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, printed as the poem “Bad Dreams Are Good” in The New Yorker, Sept. 17, 2007, and as the song “Bad Dreams” from her CD Shine (2007)

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Tom Petty, on Being ‘Far Away From Your Trouble and Worries’)

“Far away from your trouble and worries
You belong somewhere you feel free.”—American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Tom Petty (1950-2017), title cut of his CD Wildflowers (1994)

Flashback, February 1970: James Taylor Breaks Through With Cathartic ‘Fire and Rain’

Fifty years ago this month, as Vietnam-weary Americans searched for serenity within the national chaos, a 22-year-old singer-songwriter, James Taylor, sought his own separate peace: a place in the musical mainstream based on his own tenuous quest for mental health. 

The 11-song Sweet Baby James might have taken its name from the “country lullaby” that became its first single, but it became a commercial smash through the unlikely success of “Fire and Rain,” whose understated chords contrasted with three verses of shattering emotional power.

There really isn’t a bad cut on Sweet Baby James, and devotees of “deep cuts” from the album (heard on what was known, in those days, as “free-form radio”) will still have echoing in their heads the likes of “Sunny Skies,” “Country Road” and “Anywhere Like Heaven.” 

(I also confess that, on my occasional trips to Western Massachusetts over the years, even during sweltering summer days, I can’t get out of my mind these lyrics from the title cut: “Now the first of December was covered with snow/So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston/The Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting.” Indeed, Taylor said, in a recent interview with Parade Magazine’s Jim Farber, that it was his favorite song: “‘Sweet Baby James’ has a rhyming scheme that’s positively Byzantine. For every line, there are three internal rhymes. Every verse is like a Chinese puzzle.")

But above all, “Fire and Rain” continues to weave its mournful magic all this time later, with an oblique recitation of a private tragedy that resonated with a wide public. 

As David Shumway noted in Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen, Taylor—and, shortly, his good friend Joni Mitchell—brought to popular music the “confessional” mode popularized by the midcentury American poets Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: “While the modernists [led by T.S. Eliot] were read as tackling the largest philosophical, religious, or formal issues, the confessional poets reported on their private psychological struggles.”  

It took me a number of years—and some intensive research into Taylor’s background—to understand what lies between the lines of the musician’s unique form of poetry, what Robert Frost, in his apt description of the form, called “a stay against confusion”:

* “Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone/Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you.” Suzanne Schnerr was a friend Taylor had gotten to know in New York in 1966 and 1967. While he was recording his first LP, James Taylor, for Apple Records in London, she had committed suicide. A group of friends, knowing his emotional fragility, had kept the news from him for several months. But in a booze-filled night out, they finally revealed the news. The “they” in “the plans” were not her parents, he later told Timothy White for the 2002 biography Long Ago and Far Away, but instead “the fates.”

* “My body’s aching and my time is at hand”: As if a teenage depression so severe that it landed him in McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., wasn’t bad enough, Taylor became addicted to heroin while trying to build his musical career in London. (He admitted, in an interview with The Guardian’s Jenny Stevens, to having given opiates to John Lennon during this time.)

* “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground”: In the United States, a band Taylor had put together, The Flying Machine, disintegrated after a series of disastrous, ill-paying  concerts. Its failure was a bitter blow to his ambitions.

Matters might have taken an utterly dismal turn if Taylor had not managed to churn out enough highly creative material to make people like producer Peter Asher bear with his difficulties; if his new American record label, Warner Brothers, had given up on him after the first single from his American LP, “Sweet Baby James,” had lost momentum; and if early studio work on “Fire and Rain” hadn’t convinced Asher to scale back the instrumentation so that its quiet power would emerge more firmly.

What “Fire and Rain,” the second, far more successful single from Sweet Baby James, meant to Taylor can’t be measured simply by units sold (nearly 100 million streams on Spotify), nor in how it finally enabled him to establish a foothold in the music industry, nor even in the vogue for singer-songwriters that would see the likes of Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Carole King, and Jackson Browne (all associated—a couple intimately—with Taylor) follow him into superstardom. Commercial success is, after all, when it is not downright elusive, likely to be transitory because of passing musical fads, ego, ill health, or the sapping of creative energy that befalls artists in all fields. 

But creating the song—not producing a hit record—functioned as a kind of personal purgative for Taylor. “There's a cumulative emotional quality to it, a message that's useful to hear,” he told WSJ.com earlier this month. “Why do people sing the blues? It's because it helps to share it with other people and to expiate it—to have it out in front of you.”

A troubadour of inner turmoil, Taylor may have also taken solace in the comfort countless people wanted to extend to him. One, Carole King, saddened by the line, “lonely times when I could not find a friend,” was inspired by his plight to write “You’ve Got a Friend”—a song that JT then turned into another hit.

Quote of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on the Creation of ‘Tom’s Diner’)

“I had just been in Tom's, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a song called 'Tom's Diner' about alienation, where you're not connected to anything you see. Lately on the Internet I've been reading people saying this song is really random and it's about nothing. It’s not about nothing! It’s about something! Every single scene has been set up to show that this person is alienated from life in general.”—Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega quoted in David Honigman, “The Life of a Song: ‘Tom’s Diner,’” The Financial Times, Feb. 1-2, 2020

Vega and I were on Morningside Heights—she at Barnard, me across Broadway at Columbia—in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and were both even English majors (or to be exact, in my case, English-History double-major). 

But we never bumped into each other, in no small part because I was a commuter. Only seldom did I venture down to the corner of 112^th Street and Broadway where Tom’s was located.

Since then, of course, this eatery has become a worldwide landmark, in no small part due to its exterior being featured in numerous episodes of Seinfeld. Maybe for that reason, it occurs to me, some listeners might feel that, as the sitcom is “a show about nothing,” everything associated with its locales might be, too. 

I’m glad to see that Vega is trying to put that notion to rest.