James Taylor's Country Soul

In the shiny-new barn, a few yards from his surprisingly modest two-story house, Taylor and his band of ultra-elite session vets (including drummer Steve Gadd and original Saturday Night Live sax player Lou Marini) are in the midst of a 10-day session that will yield 21 songs, from Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" to the Dixie Chicks' "Some Days You Gotta Dance." Twelve of them will end up on Covers, due September 30th. "Most of them are things that we played in concert for years," says Taylor, who has had many hits with other people's songs, beginning with Carole King's "You've Got a Friend" in 1971. "We had these arrangements that we'd worked up over the years. The way I feel about the songs I write is that they deserve to be recorded, and I feel the same way about these covers — we've got 'em, we know 'em, we ought to make a record of them."

Taylor planned and funded this project on his own: Like an increasing number of musicians of his generation, he has stepped away from the traditional record industry. For the first time since he signed his first deal with the Beatles' Apple Records, back in 1968, he has no record contract — and no plans to get one, instead striking album-by-album distribution agreements. (Covers will be released by Starbucks' Hear Music.) "It's a changing sort of landscape," Taylor says. "From the time I started off in this enterprise, it was all about trying to get a long-term contract with the record houses. And that's just not the case anymore."

Taylor has sketched out the next 10 or so years of his career — and other than the occasional tour, it doesn't seem like there will be much cause to leave his woodsy compound, which he, Kim and their seven-year-old twins, Rufus and Henry, share with wandering bears, coyotes, turkeys and hawks. "I grew up in the woods in North Carolina, so this feels good to me," says Taylor. The barn — built from scratch to Taylor's specifications, with modular soundproofing walls — allows him to record on his own time, at his own pace. There may be more covers records — he's discussed bringing his band together each winter for these sessions. He wants to make an orchestral album, too, combining standards and rearranged versions of his own songs — the barn is big enough to record a full symphony orchestra.

And then there's an album of original songs, which will be his first since 2002's platinum October Road. Taylor carries around a small digital recorder to "trap ideas" when they come, and he has a sense of his next batch of songs. "There's one that's sort of like heroic, minor-key, almost martial music," he says. "I don't know where the hell it came from. And there's a traveling song — there's always a traveling song in there."