“I’d Have to Be Some Kind of Natural Born Fool to Wanna Pass That Way Again”

Way back somewhere deep in my journals, I declared James Taylor to be my non-romantic soulmate.  I wouldn’t mention the non-romantic part now if I didn’t specifically remember writing it that way.   I guess it was surprising to find a then fifty-something who spoke so directly to my then seventeen-year-old soul.¹

It was the Summer before my senior year of high school when my mom came home with James Taylor’s Greatest Hits.  As we do in my family, she began to listen to it on repeat.  We were all just relieved that she finally retired her copy of our church’s Christmas album, which she’d been listening to incessantly for years. ²  It was something we could all agree on, so we began listening to James Taylor whenever we were all hanging out in the kitchen.  Later that year, we saw him in concert.  I will never forget the date of that concert, because it was September 16, 2001, and we walked past a silent 9/11 vigil at the Seattle Center on our way into Key Arena.

I think I’d only been to NSYNC concert before that,³ so this was a different concert experience for me.  James said that they’d thought about canceling the concert, but he decided that there was probably nothing we needed more at that time than to all be together.  It was nice to just sit and listen to music instead of standing up and screaming.  I left feeling like I’d just received a big hug from the universe.

And James Taylor has owned my soul ever since.  I started listening to his music on my own.  That Winter when my mom and I traveled to California to visit colleges, I was in some kind of terrible and anxious mood, but I was listening to his album JT and it calmed me.  “Another Grey Morning” is still one of my favorite depressing songs to listen to when I’m in a funk.

I hardly think I would have made it through my freshman year of college without the live album.  I listened to it constantly and whenever I came across “Country Road” I’d have skip back and listen to it again on my portable CD player.  That specific recording of that song means more to me than most things in this world.  When it came up today in shuffle, I had to listen to it at least 10 times before sitting down to write this post.  Nothing turns my feelings about the uncertain future from dread to adventure faster than “Country Road.”   The title of this post is only one of my favorite lines.   There’s this part of the live version that I just live for.  I could write out the lyrics, but it wouldn’t do it justice.

I’m sure that it was “Shower the People” that made me write those words about James Taylor being my non-romantic soul mate, though.  The lyrics are still something I need to hear regularly:  “You can play the game and you can act out the part/ Though you know it wasn’t written for you/ Tell me, how do you stand there with your broken heart/ Ashamed of playing the fool/ One thing can lead to another; it doesn’t take any sacrifice . . . You can run but you cannot hide/ This is widely known/ And what you plan to do with your foolish pride/ When you’re all by yourself alone/ Once you tell somebody the way that you feel/ You can feel it beginning to ease/ I think it’s true what they say about the squeaky wheel/ Always getting the grease.”

It’s amazing how much music can mean to a life.  I can listen to songs that once meant so much to me and suddenly old feelings becomes new ones again.

1. Of course, he wrote a lot of his music when he was much younger. [↩]
2. It really was a good album. [↩]
3. That means I was a JT (Justin Timberlake) fan before I was a JT (James Taylor) fan. [↩]

Related posts:

1. “It’s a Fool Who Plays It Cool”
2. Music and Lyrics
3. For Every Season
4. Brendan James
5. Depressing Music Makes Me Feel Alive