Where some popular singers use the songbook canon to increase record and ticket sales, Taylor has no need to change himself or increase his audience. He’s as comfortable as any man can be, having sold many millions of records the world over for almost 50 years.
He wasn’t always so comfortable. Taylor’s breakthrough success of the early ’70s, including the albums Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, came while Taylor was deep in the throes of a heroin addiction that would destroy his marriage to singer-songwriter Carly Simon. But his hits kept coming: “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)”; “Mexico”; “Handy Man”; “Your Smiling Face”; “Her Town Too.” His first compilation album, James Taylor’s Greatest Hits, quickly became his best-selling record and one of the best-selling compilations of all time.1
Taylor continued making music and scoring occasional hits until 1997’s Hourglass and 2002’s platinum-selling October Road established him as a music hero with a new generation of listeners. He has barely left the road since, winning awards and accolades along the way, including American Standard debuting at #4 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, making “Taylor the first act to earn a top 10 album in each of the last six decades,” according to Wikipedia.
This story is from the August 2020 edition of Stereophile.
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This story is from the August 2020 edition of Stereophile.
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