I Like James Taylor....

Driving home very late, listening to his Sweet Baby James album and fuck you I don't care what you think! Yeah maybe I'm singing right along or maybe I'm not. Not really any of your business. But there are certain songs on there that make me wish we were all stuck in the seventies forever! And this is a weird kind of nostalgia because I never heard him much when I was young during that actual decade. My parents never had any of his albums, whatever I heard must have been playing on my hometown radio station, between "The Open Line" and "Dial-A-Deal". Regardless, when I listen to those songs I am touched by the voice of that time, a recent time, one that seemed to be moving towards recognizing what it meant to simply "be in the world". A time when perhaps there was still hope and you could just look out the window of your car on a road trip and see the world in all its mysterious glory and feel confident in assuming there would always be a tomorrow.

Now the first of December was covered with snow
And so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Lord, the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting
With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

Who the hell can write and sing that today without having it ring false somehow? There seems to be something so unpretentious about it all, something that puts faith in the common experience and lets it speak for itself.

Convinced? Whatever. Maybe tomorrow I'll see a map to world peace hidden in a Scorpions ballad. Sue me.

[And by the way, for a real treat, check out Two-Lane Blacktop, the film by Monte Hellman starring baby James himself as a practically mute drag racer alongside his mechanic friend played by the late Beach Boy Dennis Wilson (who died diving off his boat while drunk and wearing jeans, or so I've heard). A purer film has not been made, ever.]