James Taylor's Country Soul

As various members of the group keep reminding me, no one records like this in the age of Pro Tools: Taylor has his entire band, even horns and backup singers (whose harmonies are so perfect that they sound like a studio special effect), performing live in their isolation booths, all at once. Taylor is a demanding bandleader — at one point, he gets deep into a discussion of two notes in the bass line — but the players are clearly enjoying the old-school sessions. "It's a luxury," says longtime backup singer Kate Markowitz. "All of us, no matter how jaded, it was impossible not to be excited. There were long hours and we were tired, but it's gonna go down as one of my favorite times recording ever."

With its forays into country and soul, the album is the latest proof that Taylor is a more versatile singer than his best-known hits might suggest. Thanks to a regimen of vocal exercises, his voice is perfectly preserved too — strong and clear, that distinctive nasal honk intact. His crystalline vocal tone and precise sense of pitch lend themselves oddly well to R&B — it's as if he's so white that he goes all the way around the other side. "He's just a soulful white guy," says Markowitz. "Most black singers love his take on things like that." Taylor is equally comfortable with country — he sings an authentic version of George Jones' "Why Baby Why" on Covers, as well as Jimmy Webb's "Wichita Lineman." "He sings the living shit out of it," says Webb.

The Covers sessions stretched to include "Oh What a Beautiful Morning," from the musical Oklahoma — a song that goes back to Taylor's early childhood. "The first music I grew up with was show tunes and folk music," says Taylor. "My folks played Lead Belly, the Weavers, and a lot of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter." When Taylor was seven years old, his grandmother caught him singing "Morning" over and over at the top of his lungs. "I thought I was by myself and no one could hear me, and I was really digging myself," he says, laughing. "That was the first time I let it run away with me."

Taylor admires unconventional singers like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Lead Belly and Kurt Cobain, but he always knew his own strengths were elsewhere. "I am a musical singer — that's my paradigm," he says. "I want to be in tune. I want to sing pretty. I want to sing sweet. It's only a relatively recent development that it was appealing to sound bad, you know." And his folk-music background pushed him in a certain direction: "When a solo person sits down and plays and sings, the chances are it's gonna have that kind of mellow feel," he says. "It's not gonna come out like Tenacious D each time. Or like Huddie Ledbetter — although he was probably trying to sound as sweet as he could."

Wrapping their latest "Road Runner," Taylor summons the band members — or all of them who can fit — into the control room to check out a playback. "Let's take a listen and see if it's alive on arrival," he says. The track blasts over the speakers, and Taylor closes his eyes, fingering chords on an imaginary guitar. His now-bald head suits his patrician features — in profile, it's a face that should be on U.S. currency. As the song ends with Gadd's big cymbal crashes, Taylor opens his eyes and nods. "It sounds good," he says. "Which is important in our line of work."

[From Issue 1062 — October 2, 2008]

• More from Issue 1062
• Review: Covers
• James Taylor and Carole King Return in High Style to the Troubadour