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Photo credit - Trinette L Faint
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"All the great stories are out hunting their tellers. And some come to me and ask me to be brave enough to dance with the other feathers"
- Amazing by Sally Taylor
For anyone less determined, Sally Taylor's career path might seem daunting if not impossible. She's 27, self-managed, and an independent artist by choice. She's built her entire record company, "Blue Elbow Music" from the ground up. She writes all of her own songs. She plays between 150-175 shows a year traveling in a van full of guys, instruments and greasy bags full of fast food, and somehow she still manages to answer fan's e-mails, write daily accounts of life on the road (up on her web site at SallyTaylor.com,) and send out mail order CD's to fans and colleagues. One might think that's enough for any one person but this year Sally's decided to self-produce her latest and third CD, Shotgun.
If you ask her about Shotgun Sally will say: "It's just a demo really." Before telling you she's more proud of it than anything else she's done in her life. The reason why Shotgun is "Just a demo" is because Sally's intends to get her fans involved in the production side of her music. On both her web site and on an insert inside each Shotgun CD is a letter to fans urging them to vote on her latest batch of songs for reproduction on her next CD, it reads:
Friends!!! I invite you to become part of my music. Please cast your vote on each song of this demo recording (and if you feel so inclined, you may also offer production suggestions which, if original and authentic, and ones that we end up using on the next record we'll thank you in the liner notes.) The top 3-6 voted for songs will be reproduced (by a new producer), re-recorded and placed on the next album along with a slew of other new tunes. Let your voice be heard! Become part of the process! Vote!
Key: 1. Love it !!! 2. Take it or leave it 3. Bag it !!!
Sally has always valued her friend's opinions and musical advice. Starting in the spring of '98 she made a rough mix tape of all of her latest songs, lit some candles, de-corked some red wine and invited all of her closest friends in Boulder to her house for a listening party. She made up ballots and asked everyone to vote. It has been through such listening parties that Sally has chosen the songs that have made it onto her first two albums Tomboy Bride & Apt #6S. This time around, everyone's invited to the party.
Sally's gearing up for another rigorous summer/fall tour with her three-piece band comprised of drums, bass, and guitar and a sound engineer/driver/road manager. This will be the third summer season the band has toured together. But Sally's no new comer to the music scene. Besides being the daughter of two legendary musicians, Carly Simon & James Taylor (with whom she plans to tour this summer 2001), she's been playing in bands since her sophomore year in high school when she and some class mates formed a band called "The Slip," and started playing rock & roll cover tunes at opposing school's proms and parties. Since then, she's been in over 15 bands, had songs in movies (Anywhere but Here and Me Myself & Irene) and played with such bands as: Evan & Jaron, John Wilcox and Art Garfunkel. She's sung The National Anthem and done concerts at both LA Lakers (basketball), and Colorado Avalanche (hockey) games and had Donald Fagan & Walter Becker of Steely Dan as well as Maceo Parker, work on her first two albums. Sally taught herself how to play guitar at 21 while she was attending Brown University for her BA in Medical Anthropology but she'd already been writing songs since she was 15, about which she describes:
"These songs just started coming to me in my sleep when I was 15. I didn't know how to play an instrument yet and so I'd just keep this mini-recorder next to my bed. I'd wake at any odd hour of the night, [with] some song harassing me, to hum some horse crackley lyrics into a little mic before falling back into dreaming, forgetting I'd ever woken up in the first place and always curious in the morning what ghosts had possessed me to paint such songs, sometimes almost finished before I'd opened my eyes. It was as if these stories were coming to me, asking me to be brave enough to open my heart to them and speak their truth through my eyes. I've always been clear that it's the stories that hunt me, shoot me down like birds in the sky and make me their tellers, not the other way around. Sometimes it can be painful. Sometimes very disorienting. Sometimes I yearn for it though, the way floating longs to fly. Sometimes it grows me stronger and stronger until I feel my life all at once, all over me. And then….. It's amazing."
About the touring experience Sally says:
"I'm so lucky to be blessed with these guys (the band) and with these audiences that keep on showing up and staying and pushing us to go farther and farther. They remind me again and again that this stuff, this music stuff, it isn't about candy coating art with glitter to feed to ones ego. It's about sharing time and space and giving it up to the audience, those friends you've never met but have always known because you see yourself in them. It's about letting go of the ownership of your art and your fear and your heart because giving love is the only thing that makes complete sense."
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