I've hardly ever been anywhere that wasn't an island," says Ben Taylor, who grew up in Manhattan and on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. "I'm sort of a lonely-type person -- I mean, at my best."

Since Taylor, the only son of James Taylor and Carly Simon, decided against organic farming and chose music as a career, he has worked in a group setting. "I learned a huge amount," he says of recording Famous Among the Barns, the first-rate debut of his five-man Ben Taylor Band. Songs such as "Island" and the groovy "I Am the Sun" skew mellow. Yet even some noise has crept into Taylor's poised melodies, which makes sense for a lifelong hip-hop fan for whom lyrics are paramount. "I've really never heard a song with good lyrics that I didn't like," he says.

But for Taylor, who has performed with each of his parents in concert, making hip-hop himself isn't a goal. "I write a lot of rap lyrics," he says. "But I don't get onstage with them." He used to shy away from writing songs himself. "It was easy to do my father's," Taylor says, "because I sounded like him." But when he turned twenty, Taylor spent time in the Caribbean, determined to craft his first batch. His mother wrote him a fifteen-page "rule book," as Taylor remembers it. Her first instruction: "Get a good opening line."

"My mom is a phenomenal, methodical songwriter, and my father is the type who gets a good idea started, like a snowball rolling down a hill, and then just tries to hold on," he says. Operating as a musician whose songs negotiate these two creative poles -- Simon's precise literacy and J.T.'s expressive romanticism -- is what Ben aims for: "That's all I really want."

Listen to "Islands"

JAMES HUNTER
(February 24, 2003)