Sally
Taylor: True to Her Heart
Shying away from what she refers to as the "high-powered music-biz," Taylor made her debut album, Tomboy Bride (Blue Elbow), on her own in her co-producer's living room with dogs and crickets chiming in. With a beautiful silvery alto and strong originals such as the opener, "The Complaint," the upbeat "Happy Now" and the sweet title cut, Taylor's made an impressive introduction.
While home in Colorado preparing for an upcoming tour, she and I talked about the album, the difficulties of maintaining your integrity in this industry, and her desire to remain an independent artist.
You started writing songs when you were 15, even though you didn't play
an instrument.
I'd wake up with melodies in my head and some words. I had this little tape recorder next to my bed and I'd record them and I'd write more lyrics to them. I still have the tape. It's a 90-minute tape of just me singing a cappella stuff. It's really funny.
Then you sang with a Tabor, Massachusetts band called The Slip. What
kind of stuff did you do with them?
Just covers, pretty much '70s rock 'n' roll tunes, everything from the Stones to Janis. It was a school band that we just created, but it was independent of the school. We'd book our own shows and we'd go to different grade schools and play. Then, every year, somebody would graduate and we'd pick up a freshman so the band kept on going. A couple of years after I graduated, the band got really good and decided to just take it on the road. they're still around.
You decided to pick up guitar while you were in college because you got
sick of having guitarists that weren't good enough for you, right?
It wasn't that they weren't good enough. It's just that they kept on graduating. I was frustrated that I was having to teach people new stuff. Plus, I really wanted to be able to write. That was what was really frustrating, not being able to write music to the lyrics. So, I picked up guitar, and I just learned the bass notes. Actually, a few songs on the album are songs I wrote on the E string. That's how I started playing, and then teaching myself how to play.
I can't picture you with this disco cover band, The Boogies.
All these bands that I've started and initiated have kept on. the disco band still exists on Martha's Vineyard. I did it for three years. I had seven-and-a-half, inch platforms and wigs and vinyl suits and glitter and huge rings. It was the best time ever. I sang with them last Summer. We did a few gigs on Nantucket.
Originally, you were going to do Tomboy Bride very bare bones on a four-track.
Then you hooked up with Wendy Woo, who talked you into a fuller sound, right?
I was finishing my degree actually. I graduated from Brown, but I took a semester here in Colorado. And I ran into my friend Wendy and told her I was going to put down some songs. The reason I made the album is because I just wanted to organize the songs. Some of them were on tape, some were written down in books. I thought, "I want to have this as a record for something I've accomplished."
So, I met with Wendy and she said, 'Come and look at this equipment I've got in my friend's living room.' It was out in the mountains. I thought, 'Man, I'd be so inspired if I was out here. I'm willing to pay $20 a day to use it.' As I'm sitting there playing guitar in this living room, Wendy would say, 'I hear mandolin on this' or 'I hear cello on this.' I'd say, 'Well, I just want it to be me and the guitar. That's sort of the prime rib of it.' She said, 'Well, just try it out.' Then her friend would come up and put some tracks down, and I'd take him out to dinner as payment.
That's how it ended up happening. Halfway through it, Wendy was like, 'I want to be co-producer of this.' I was like, 'Cool, I'm not going to do anything with it.' So, she and I developed this album. She'd made an album before. She said, 'Why don't you get some artwork done and make up 100 copies of it?' I told her I didn't want to shop it around, that's totally not who I am. I thought I'd just make up 100 copies and give it to friends. So, I made up 100 copies and they were gone.
Were you selling them at gigs?
I wasn't even playing out. I was trying to graduate from college. People just bought them. So, I made up 1,000. And I started getting solo gigs out around here, playing coffee houses, and selling them there, also on the internet. Before you know it, I was looking for a band. I was doing everything at first, then I started hiring people to help me.
Did you get an assistant yet?
Yes, she's a really good friend of mine. That's the best thing about this. We've sold 7,000 CDs, which is amazing. I feel like I'm working with people who support me and want me to be doing exactly what I'm doing. What I'm doing is completely within my integrity. That's the most important thing to me-that I'm happy with what I'm doing, and that I'm staying true to my heart and not selling out because I could be making more money or because I could be on the cover of some magazine that I don't care about.
I admire your desire to remain an independent artist. I'm sure you're
getting all sorts of offers from labels.
I promised myself that I'm not going to do anything that's just going to be for the betterment of my career. I'm only going to do things that make me happy and successful. Success, to me, is happiness.
Did anybody close to you tell you that you should sign with a label?
Some people say, 'Sign with a label, it's time.' What I do is, I sit them down and I explain why I'm doing this. Then, they realize that I'm not in this for fame, that I'm actually in it for making music and take a stand for the fact that you can do music independently. You can't have 'fame' independently, you need to be made in order to be famous.
But then you become a product.
Right, which is why I'm staying independent. I think the only way to actually be involved with a record company-with integrity-in my opinion, is that you need to have the record company working for you instead of working for the record company. In order to do that you have to have been independent and strong, until you have the respect of your audience and the respect of the people who are supporting you.
You seem so much wiser than your chronological years. Do you feel that?
I feel very independent. I also feel very empowered. I feel like I know
what I want out of life. There's one thing my parents taught me, and they
taught me a quadrillion things. But if I could take with me one thing it would
be one thing: They said, 'Whatever you do, follow your heart.' If that's the
only thing that I've done in my life, then I've accomplished everything.
Aquarian Weekly, 9/1/99
One look at this gorgeous golden-haired, leggy singer and you'll be struck by a sense of familiarity. Sally Taylor's the daughter of Carly Simon and James Taylor, but while she bears strong resemblance to her famous mom, her music is light-years away from the pop sounds of either parent. While her style has folk and rock influences, some of the tunes on her debut could be described better as jazz.
-Lydia Carole Defretos
Luminescent
Sally Taylor comes to sing at Painted Bride & Media's Walden School
In the best singer-songwriter tradition, it blends solid elements of folk with occasional bursts of soft rock, and surprises with some tasteful flights of bossa nova and torchy jazz.
Although I knew virtually nothing about her, I had decided to do an interview with her prior to two upcoming local appearances (more on that later). And then the last song began. Called "Unsung Dance," it was the turning point. It was how I "discovered" Sally Taylor. Recorded three years before the rest of the album at her father's home on Martha's Vineyard, it is driven by melodic lines and lyrics worthy of the best singer-songwriter.
"You came / softer than laughter / into my eyes...You say / my passion's
your pleasure / so please stay here tonight / wine words / written in satin
/ sit watch my undress / take me into your sadness / with lace linen threads."
So rich. So poetic. So sensual.
And that fabulous finger-picking. That guitar style. So dramatic. So assured.
So...familiar. I had to check the liner notes. Was it Sally...? No it was
James Taylor? The James Taylor? My wife and I wondered how she
had managed to lure the greatest singer-songwriter of his era to accompany
her on her first album. Taylor? Taylor?
Then I checked my press kit. There it was, buried deep enough not to distract from the singer herself. Sally Taylor is the daughter of Carly Simon and James Taylor.
Now I understood. Coming from such a proud musical lineage and surrounded all her life by some of the best music of our time, it's no wonder that this bright and engaging young woman has emerged from the sunshine into a new light of her own making.
Now on her second national tour in two years, Sally Taylor is reveling in the accolades she's receiving for her own music. Available only through her website (www.sallytaylor.com) with virtually no fanfare "Tomboy Bride" has already sold 7,000 copies, and fans who have seen the young singer on her first tour are bringing friends with them for the second round while requesting their own personal favorites.
These range from the sweetly rueful ballads, "Song 4 Jeremy" and "Sign of Rain," to lively romantic interludes like the salsa-flavored "When We're Together" (produced, by the way, by Steely Dan's Donald Fagan) and the catchy, upbeat rhythms of "Happy Now" to the complex dissections of relationships gone awry in "The Complaint" and "The Good Bye."
And they might not even be the best of the lot! Sally Taylor proves to be as effective a storyteller as her illustrious dad with her live recording of the title cut. Inspired by a book she found in Telluride, Colorado, where she lived for a time last year and accompanying herself on guitar, Taylor tells the tale of "a young 19th century woman striding wide open into a new life." She says that the story, which "resonated deeply with me, and helped me identify myself in a new world," allowed the song to just "come tumbling out."
Taylor's "tomboy bride" is "strong and tough as rawhide." She has broad shoulders, a slim waist and "waterfall hair" and smokes a pipe, challenging the town's macho men, who can't help falling in love with this strong and compelling woman.
No wonder Taylor so identifies with her heroine. No lover of urban environments, Sally Taylor was born on the shores of Martha's Vineyard (her father's home), now lives in the mountains of Boulder, Colorado, and has chosen to chart her own unique course. Although she is still very close to both her parents, whom she says are still friends despite being divorced since 1982, she has never used that connection to further her career.
In fact, she has turned down lucrative contacts with several major record labels in order to maintain her independence. "I didn't want people to listen to me only for my parents. I wanted to learn the business for myself and learn how to represent myself to the public."
And she's doing just fine, thank you. In fact, she has just earned a bachelor's degree in medical anthropology. She told me, in our recent phone interview, "I just got it in the mail, and it's one of the proudest achievements of my life." Further, it was while doing field research o the medicinal properties of the coca leaf in Peru a couple of years ago that a plane crash changed Taylor's life.
She survived the crash without swearing off flying in her future. But she said, "The airstrips around Telluride are pretty gnarly. So, I began regretting not having had any children or putting my music on anything that would stay or last."
Taylor has been playing in various bands for 10 years and has a trunk load of songs she has yet to record. So, she and her friend Wendy Woo, a Boulder musician, set to work on "Tomboy Bride." Co-produced by the two women in a makeshift studio on a dirt road in the hills of Lyons, Colorado. it was mixed by Michael White with a thoroughly professional touch.
Suddenly music became a serious option in Taylor's life, if not the only one. And this week she will make two area appearances -- at the Painted Bride on Sunday, September 12, and at the Walden School in Media on Monday, Sept. 13.
Her response to my question "why the Walden School?" was most illuminating. "This is actually my second visit to the school. And I'm really looking forward to it this time. When my booking agent first suggested it, since the school really seemed to want me to perform there, I said I'd have to think about it. I was never more nervous about an appearance in my life! What was I going to sing or say to these children?
"But then I began thinking of my idea of success," she continued, "which is to be happy, to keep your integrity and be honest within your own truth and not sacrifice your own dreams, but also to inspire others to find and live their own dreams. So it turned out to be wonderful!"
Taylor said she would play a song like "Sign of Rain" and ask the children what they thought it meant. "They all had different ideas," she said, "and I told them they were right. What I learned from teaching kids is that the song is what you think it's about. After all, art society, and all human activity is all interpretation, and they helped me figure out what my songs were all about. I don't always know when I write them. What comes out, comes out.
Anyway, I thought it would be a great opportunity to give the children a chance to believe in themselves and maybe to find their own dream." Pretty heady stuff for a 25-year-old artist, and most admirable.
And as autobiographical as Taylor's songs may seem, she says they're often a combination of personal experiences and those of her parents, family and friends -- the collective experience, the love, joy, loss and regret of the human race.
As to her personal musical tastes ad influences, Taylor says, "There's never been a conscious attempt to imitate my mom or dad. But some say 'The Complaint' does have a Carly Simon feel to it. In college I was totally into Brazilian jazz -- Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto, Antoni Carlos Jobim. And today I listen to everything from New Orleans funk to Duke Ellington to the Sex Pistols."
Whatever the influences may be, Sally Taylor has begun the first serious
leg of what promises to be a long and fruitful career, extending the illustrious
contributions of the Simon-Taylor musical family well into the new millennium.
Times Chronicle, 9/1/99
How did this woman get into my head and heart so quickly? Two weeks ago I had never heard of Sally Taylor. But after my wife and I listened to her first CD, the independently produced "Tomboy Bride" (Blue Elbow), we were struck by her sweet and delicate alto voice, the amazing passion and sophistication of her lyrics (she's all of 25!) and the straight-ahead honesty of her music.
-Frank D. Quattrone
Taylor
asserts her independence and her captivating voice To wit: Get down on your knees and start begging. Come on, I said!
But when heard on her album "Tomboy Bride," her demand is likely to evoke smiles, not anxiety, since this gifted singer-songwriter was a little girl when she recorded her impromptu command.
"I cannot remember who I was talking to, or what that was even in reference
to," said Taylor, 25, after a hearty burst of laughter.
"When I was a kid, I would tape-record things all the time over my parents' stuff. My mom sent me the tape a year ago, and said: 'Check this out.' It was right in the middle of a song. I think it's the funniest thing. Neither of us can remember that having happened."
What makes this tale especially intriguing is Taylor's reference to recording
over her "parents' stuff." She is, after all, the daughter of James Taylor
and Carly Simon, and the "stuff" she recorded over was songs in-progress by
her famous musical parents.
Taylor, who performs with her trio tonight at Java Joe's, is understandably
proud of her heritage. She speaks with unmistakable warmth about her mother
and father. Their trademark vocal styles are evoked to varying degrees in
her own music, which she's been honing since she began writing songs in high
school.
But she is well aware of the vital need to stand on her own, musically and personally, which is why she earned a degree in medical anthropology before turning to music full time. And her habit of recording over her parents' songs as a child may have been an early, if subconscious, declaration of artistic independence.
That independence is at the heart of her arresting album. She released the self-financed disc on her own label, Blue Elbow, and initially pressed up just 100 copies. When those were all bought in two weeks, she had an additional larger batch made. And then another.
The dozen-song CD has sold more than 6,000 copies, despite being available only from her website (http://www.sallytaylor.com) and at her live shows. Drawing from folk, pop, jazz and more, it is a promising maiden voyage that showcases her gently captivating voice and lilting songs.
"My goals for this album are to just let it get out there, to breathe life into art and maybe let it represent who I am as a soul," Taylor said, speaking from the Colorado mountain town of Lyons, near her home in Boulder.
"What I always loved when I was a kid listening to music is the way a song made me feel, particularly the melody, the chord changes and the movement of the song. The way I felt about these songs after I'd written them was that they had very specific moods. It was almost like they were rooms, and you entered a song, or a room, and got a vibe. So, I wanted to construct them like a house I'd want to live in."
She also wants her album, and her career, to be a house where unwanted guests are politely, but firmly, kept out.
Witness her decisions to decline interview and photo requests from People
and Vogue, two high-profile magazines that were more interested in her bloodlines
and striking appearance than her music. And witness her decision to turn down
several major record labels that wanted to capitalize on her name.
"I told People they couldn't do an article early on, because I knew what they wanted to focus on, and that wasn't the (kind of) press we wanted," Taylor said.
"For the most part, we're just a baby band and we need to create some buzz.
And it's only to be expected that the early interviews would be about my parents.
What else was there to write about? So we were cautious. And I couldn't find
anything that wasn't a compromise in the signing of a (major label) deal,
so I decided not to."
Independent and proud of it, Taylor is also happy to embrace the musical opportunities that are afforded to her.
The svelte, bossa-nova flavored "When We're Together," a standout song from her album, was mixed by Steely Dan's Walter Becker, a family friend and includes instrumental contributions by his Dan-mate Donald Fagan. The album's unlisted bonus track, "Unsung Dance," features nimble guitar work by Taylor's father, with whom she made her San Diego concert debut last year in a cameo performance at Coors Amphitheater.
Asked if being the daughter of two enduring pop stars is both a blessing and a curse, she replied:
"First, I'm amazingly blessed for who they are as people, and to have been raised by them. Second, people come to my shows because they are obviously curious. If I were self-conscious, then, yeah, it might be a curse. But I feel really positive about what I'm doing. So I'm only grateful that people are curious enough to come out."
Moreover, Taylor noted, her proud parents are now asking her for advice.
"At this point, I've created a business for myself, (whereas) they signed (major label) deals very early on in their careers," she said. "So there wasn't a lot of booking shows for themselves, or hiring a publicist. That kind of stuff is not in their vocabulary, to this day. So they ask me when they want to know: 'What does it take to do this?' or 'How much does it cost to do this?'
"And they give me advice, in a very loving way, so it works both ways."
San Diego Union Tribune, 6/30/99
Sally Taylor is not a heavy-metal singer or a bondage queen, no matter how intimidating a spoken interlude from her debut album reads on paper.
-George Varga
SALLY
FORTH: Another musical Taylor embarks on a career, turning down deals from
major labels in order to call her own tunes
One would suspect that Sally Taylor's remarkable genetic endowment, as the daughter of folk-pop luminaries James Taylor and Carly Simon, has supplied her with the equivalent of first class passage into the inner sanctum of the music industry. Just look at the recent crop of artists' offspring who have made splashy recording debuts- from Sean Lennon and Rufus Wainwright to Jakob Dylan and Tal Bachman. But Taylor has benefited from not only a rich musical heritage, she has reaped the rewards of a caring and conscientious upbringing.
" My parents were like, 'Set yourself up so that your living your life exactly the way you want to live it, and don't compromise,'" she recalls. Taylor and Simon married in 1972 and divorced 10 years later, when Sally was 6. Following her parent's split, Sally spent most weeks with her mother and most weekends with her father, shuttling back and forth between their homes in Manhattan and Martha's Vineyard. The generational legacy is rich both with musical inspiration and the knowledge that it would never be easy to follow in her famous parents' footsteps. "They were a huge influence, in many ways. There have been many times when they said, 'Do not go into the music business. Run away.' But what they really did was teach us to follow our hearts."
Taylor's heart (and a boyfriend, long gone now) led her two years ago to the idyllic Rocky Mountain town of Boulder, Colo.- literally and figuratively as distant from the coastal epicenters of the music business as possible. There she recorded a handful of songs, co-produced by Taylor and her friend Wendy Woo, in a makeshift studio 3 miles down a dirt road. Listen closely, and you can hear crickets chirping on the quieter tracks. Twelve tunes that were originally intended to be demos, a way of organizing her growing collection of compositions so that they wouldn't wind up on a million different cassettes in the glove compartment, wound up becoming "Tomboy Bride," Sally Taylor's debut CD. She released it last fall on her own Blue Elbow label.
"I love it," Taylor says, her face lighting up in a huge smile. " It's just the raw deal, you know, it's not decked out in production." Indeed, it's the raw deal- as opposed to the major-label deal- that holds meaning for Taylor, who has turned down a handful of lucrative offers from record companies eager to snap up the next generation of folk-rock-and royalty. She sells the CD from a folding table after her gigs. and through her website , at http://www.sallytaylor.com. So far she's sold 5,500 copies, and she's happy as a clam. Luckily, there's little need for a day job. "Sometimes I look at these opportunities," Taylor muses of the numerous offers from labels, "and they really do look like opportunities. But then I realize that they're actually compromises, compromising who I want to be, and who I'm becoming."
Writing songs at 15
This sort of earnest self-reflection fills Taylor's conversation. She looks back at a file filled with music- but no formal training- and is hard pressed to put her finger on the genesis if her own creative inclinations. " I was just up on Martha's Vineyard yesterday, and my mom pulls out these tapes. She made tons of tapes of us growing up." Us is Taylor and her 21- year old brother Ben, whose first CD- described by Sally as a wild convergence of hip hop and folk- is being released by Sony later this year. "Every single one is of me going 'nanananana," singing, and then I suddenly stop singing and go, 'Let's listen.' I remember asking her back then, I guess I was around 8, if she could teach me to write a song. And she said, ' You know, if your meant to be a singer, if your meant to be a songwriter, it will just come to you.' I'm so grateful that she said that. I feel like she gave me my independence."
Taylor started writing songs when she was 15. She sang melodies into a tape recorder, not even picking up a guitar until she was nearly out of college. " I didn't want people to get the wrong idea," she says, her voice quieting, "of me being out there trying to prove something." She delved into her studies in medical anthropology- a pursuit, she confirms with a sudden laugh, that was the polar opposite of music. " Oh, yeah. Where do you think that came from? But I think it was less a rebellion and more insecurity. Because I thought, ' I'll never be good enough.' What I was actually doing was somehow comparing myself to my parents, and when I realized that, it was like, 'Stop being a victim of your life. Do what you believe in doing.' But I went through everything. I went through going, 'This is so wrong,' and being so scared. But being scared and doing it anyway. Of course people are going to make comparisons. Music," says Taylor, "just seemed like what was in my soul."
A Voice all her Own
"Tomboy Bride" bears the classic marks of an emerging artist. The songs are sweet, simply arranged, and filled with heartfelt, pensive lyrics. While she moves through familiar folk-rock territory, scattered with occasional jazzy inflections, neither Taylor's songs nor her singing much resemble that of her mother or father. (Ben, on the other hand, is a ringer for his dad in both voice and visage.) The one exception is the album's title song, a lilting, measure ballad that recalls James's graceful interpretations of traditional folk forms.
Taylor is eager to analyze song-writing styles. "My mom's and my brother's are very similar, just by accident," Taylor begins. "She writes all the words first, then writes all the music over it. I could never do it. My dad gets an idea, an image or a scenario, and then he writes to that. I can't do that either." Coincidentally, Taylor's uncle Livingston appears at our table during this discussion of the family trade. Hugs and happy fretting abound, but the elder Taylor graciously declines our invitation to contribute his own recipe for cooking up a song. Sally continues: "Me, I sit down and start strumming, and usually those chords put me in a certain mood. I play it a few more times, and I get in touch with a feeling, and then from that emotion springs the words."
Curious Audiences
On stage, Taylor is radiant. Her wild blond curls are corralled in a knot at the back of her neck, and her sleek black top, full skirt, and funky leather boots are reminiscent of an earlier time, circa "Anticipation." Taylor's most captivating natural gift is her singing voice, a rich alto that sounds more like Natalie Merchant than any blood relation; it flows warm and easy, like her banter between songs, during the band's 40 minute set. In clusters at tables, in line for the restroom, people are talking about this new young singer. Sally Taylor knows what they are talking about; indeed, she knows why they are here at her show at all.
"That knowledge, knowing who my parents are, is going to be the first thing
on their minds. That's totally fair," Taylor asserts. For a young person trying
to establish an identity in the same field as her prominent, beloved parents,
the obstacles-as Taylor is acutely aware- are at least equal to the advantages.
It takes a hardy soul to turn away from an open door, but Taylor believes
it's her best shot at success. "That's the hardest thing, to keep my ideas
of success-being happy-as the main focus," she says. "People come to me and
they have a different perception of success. They put it on the table and
say, 'If you want to be successful, sign on the dotted line.' And I say, 'Well
I actually am successful.' When I think about signing a record deal and plastering
myself up on something, then I worry, like a mother, about myself. Like these
people are going to create me, and I haven't even created myself yet," says
Taylor, who manages her own career. Meanwhile, Taylor has already written
material - between snowshoeing trips and epic knitting sessions, her other
passions- for a second CD. She's on tour through the fall, and may include
a Boston stop in August or September. Come winter, she'll go back to the studio
with her band, in Boulder. That town, it would seem, is the perfect hide-out.
"It's not that I'm staying out there to avoid confrontation with the music
industry. It's not that. I'm just really enjoying owning my own space, owning
my own time. And I feel like, well, Boulder's a perfect place to ..." Taylor
breaks off her thought, and looks down at her hands. For the first time all
evening, she speaks without making eye contact. "What I'm saying is that I'm
still insecure. And scared of what I could be persuaded to become." Then she
looks up, blue eyes clear and calm. "In Boulder, I don't have the self-doubt.
I'm free to create. And become exactly what I want."
Boston Globe, 6/15/99
Sally Taylor is one of those rare 20-something who meet the gaze of a stranger, and hold it. We are face to face on futon couches upstairs at the Iron Horse in Northhampton-killing time in between her sound check and her 7pm set- talking about music and family, boyfriends and philosophy, and the relative merits of the ocean versus the mountains. Taylor's a tanned, strapping beauty who rowed crew in high school at the Tabor Academy on Buzzards Bay and rambled through Third World countries as an anthropology student at Brown. At 24, Taylor is on her first concert tour. Every inch of her 5ft-10inch frame is poised and alert, yet supremely relaxed, as she arranges her long limbs on the sofa- and prepares to move into the public eye.
-Joan Anderman
Taylor-made:
While threads of her famous parents can be heard, Sally Taylor maintains her
independence
That's the onus facing Sally Taylor. Her dad is James Taylor. Her mom is Carly Simon. Yet, according to the 25-year-old fledgling troubadour, there is no burden being Taylor-made.
``I've never felt I needed to be as good as they are,'' said Taylor, who released her first CD last fall, ``Tomboy Bride,'' on her own Blue Elbow label. Taylor and band open for Marshall Crenshaw at Northampton's Iron Horse tonight.
At this point, Taylor knows that the main reason she is getting gigs and attracting interviews is her famous folks.
``If I was insecure about what I was presenting, then it would be hard, but I'm not,'' she said. ``The band and I are lucky that people are curious about what we'll sound like. Only when I'm having a tough day and lots of people ask me questions about my parents do I snarl. But I mostly feel blessed. They're both so unbelievably brilliant and unbelievably supportive.''
James Taylor plays guitar on the album's hidden track, ``Unsung Dance,'' recorded in his Vineyard living room. Though the CD is nicely airy and casual, there are two star producers on one cut: family friends Donald Fagan and Walter Becker.
Taylor grew up in Manhattan and Martha's Vineyard, living ``weeks with my mom, weekends with my dad'' after her parents divorced in 1982. A recent graduate of Brown University, she now lives in Boulder, Colo.
The album displays a still budding talent, with vocals that are pleasing and tuneful, though not especially distinctive. Her songs are stronger in melody than lyrics. There's a jazz tinge at times. She slightly recalls James or Carly just on occasion.
Taylor has been singing ``in about 15 bands for 15 years,'' including the Boogies, a disco band that played the Cape and the Islands in the summers. ``It was a 10-piece cover band. We wore huge glitter outfits,'' she said. Unlike her famously stage-shy mom, Taylor loves hitting the boards.
Taylor has chosen to go an independent route: low-key recording, self-release. She says that large record companies have wooed her, but she turned them down. ``I've seen the bad side of what they can do,'' she said. ``I want to decide who I am before I jump into the public eye and ask someone else to put a personality on me.'' (Taylor's CD is only available at gigs and on line at www.sallytaylor.com.)
Does she see Ani DiFranco as a role model for the indie route?
``She's still looking to be famous, to be a star. I'm not. I just want to make music and have some people show up at gigs.
``Is that unrealistic of me?'' she added, as if realizing how odd her desire to avoid fame sounds. After all, she doesn't have to get into Rolling Stone. She was already on the cover at age 5.
Taylor's younger brother, Ben, is going at it from a totally different path: He's signed a big contract with Work/SONY, and is currently recording in Europe. But Sally doesn't even want a small label behind her.
Is her rejection of the mainstream record business her way of dealing with her parents' shadow? And has she considered going totally anonymous and changing her name?
``I'm not looking for anonymity or looking to use my parents as my way in.
I'm totally happy with exactly where I'm at,'' she said.
The Boston Herald, 6/10/99
Imagine trying to begin a singer-songwriter career with one of the genre's true giants as your parent. Now multiply by two.
-Daniel Gewertz
Sally
Taylor
Tomboy Bride (Blue Elbow)
Maximum Ink, 5/99
Starting with the idea of cutting a home demo, singer songwriter Sally Taylor
overshot the mark considerably in fashioning a delicious debut with Tomboy Bride.
Its simple modesty suits Sally's style. With a voice, light and feathery, the
fairy princess melodies of Ms. Taylor tip toe with natural grace; tumbling out
stories that read like late night coffee shop talk between understanding friends.
Whether waltzing across sawdust floors or braving the dark waters of the questioning
heart the choir girl charm of the simple, acoustic arrangements glow with innocence
and integrity. Home spun homilies of restlessness and heartbreak, romance and
regret. Reveling in a brand of folk pop balladry whose roots owe something to
her father James' influence, Sally dabbles successfully in the bossa nova and
mountain music as well, creating a warm, friendly disc that is both fresh and
mature. Despite her big name parents (her mother is Carly Simon) Sally is taking
a low-key approach to her musical career. Catch her at Madison's Mango Grill
on May 14th and Milwaukee's Tai Joes on the 15th. Sally is also available twenty-four
hours a day at her web site www.sallytaylor.com.
-John Noyd
Taylor
Made: The big time's calling for Boulder's Sally Taylor -- but she's taking
her sweet time answering
The pretext behind the intense interest in Taylor isn't tough to suss out:
As the 25-year-old daughter of James Taylor and Carly Simon -- about whom
those of you who've been in the vicinity of a radio during the past
quarter-century have no doubt heard -- she's seen as a lucrative commodity.
But even people who'd rather undergo several days of uninterrupted dental
work than listen to "You've Got a Friend" or "Haven't Got Time for the
Pain" are apt to be charmed by James and Carly's eldest, and not just
because her independently produced CD, Tomboy Bride, is a cut above the
usual singer-songwriter fare. On a personal level, she's wide-eyed,
guileless, honest to a fault and thoroughly indifferent to fame for fame's
sake. She doesn't need to dream about appearing on the cover of Rolling
Stone -- she already did, when she was five.
Unlike plenty of celebrity offspring, Taylor doesn't whine that her
parents' star status made her life more difficult. She knows that she drew
a lucky number in the gene-pool lotto and is appreciative of the privileges
that came along with it. At the same time, she's toiling earnestly at
developing her own creative voice, and if the language she uses to describe
this process sometimes suggests a twenty-something Oprah, it doesn't
diminish her efforts or make her determination not to rush into a bad
situation any less admirable.
"I'm still really learning," she admits. "But the main reason that I don't
want to sign with a major label right now is that I really don't feel that
it's within my integrity to do it. I've been trying to stay really clear
about what my heart's telling me to do versus what my ego wants me to do.
So I've said no to a lot of really cool opportunities -- or what people
might feel were really cool opportunities -- because I was afraid I might
be putting my heart at stake."
The story of Taylor's formative years wouldn't have appealed to Horatio
Alger: There's definitely no pulling up of bootstraps in it. When she came
along during the late Seventies, father James was riding high on the
strength of smash singles such as "Handy Man" and "Your Smiling Face," and
mother Carly was doing equally well thanks to "Nobody Does It Better," the
hugely popular theme to the James Bond opus The Spy Who Loved Me. As a
result, Sally was never less than exceedingly comfortable. From an early
age, she and her brother, Ben, who's three years her junior, were toted
back and forth between a posh pad in New York City, where she was born, to
a lovely spread on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts -- and they got to
know other stops along the highway as well. "We went on tour a lot," she
says. "It was mostly when we were younger, and then in the summers. But Mom
really took time off to raise us and keep us feeling a sense of home and a
sense of community. That's really important to her -- that we had a place
where stability happens."
To note that Taylor was inundated with music as a kid might seem tantamount
to revealing that McDonald's makes lots of hamburgers. But even by the
standards of other well-known musical clans, hers was extraordinary in this
regard. Her aunt, Kate Taylor, and two of her uncles, Livingston and Alex,
had record deals, and other relatives harbored similar ambitions. According
to Sally, "There's only one person on my mom's and my dad's side who's not
a musician, and that's my Uncle Peter, my mom's brother; he's a
photographer who mainly takes pictures of musicians." She adds, "Family
reunions and family gatherings were basically music festivals. It was
great."
Although her parents' marriage broke up in 1983, when she was six, Taylor
insists that she and Ben didn't feel caught in the middle. They spent most
weeks with Carly, most weekends with James, and everything was civil and
pleasant. The only tensions she recalls were imposed by outside forces.
"The question people always wanted to know from my brother and I was,
'Which one do you like more?' -- meaning whose music did we like best," she
says. "Isn't that awful? We'd always go, 'We like them both the same.' We
were just trained really well."
As for Taylor's own musical tastes, they were as eclectic as her folks'
record collections. "We'd hear tons of Stones, a lot of Ray Charles and a
lot of blues; my dad was really into the blues. And I remember jumping on
the couches and dancing to that 'lime in the coconut' song till all hours
of the night." She never went through a period of rebelling against her
parents' favorites, she goes on, because of their damnable open-mindedness.
"When I was a teenager and wanted to piss them off, I'd be like, 'I'm going
to play some loud music,' and they'd be like, 'That's cool. I like that
sound.' It was annoying."
When she was thirteen, Taylor was shipped off to Tabor Academy, a tony
Massachusetts boarding school, and a couple of years later she began
writing songs -- even though, at that point, she didn't know how to play an
instrument. "They were about emotions, first kisses and stuff like that.
Most of them came to me at night: I had a tape recorder, and I'd wake up,
reach out and hit the record and play buttons, sing into the recorder and
then go back to sleep." She also crooned with a Tabor act called the Slip
that remains in existence. Still, Taylor didn't see herself as a musician
back then. "I wanted to be an actress. I did high-school plays and got a
lot of reinforcement, which my parents gave me for everything. They'd be
like, 'You're great at that.'"
At Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, Taylor persisted in such
thespian pursuits while majoring in, of all things, medical anthropology.
But things took a turn when a classmate who assumed that she was a musician
-- "Everybody always assumed I was a musician," she says -- convinced her
to try writing tunes with him. Two months later he coaxed her to the stage
to sing her own material. The pair subsequently warbled at the Telluride
Bluegrass Festival at the invitation of James, but neither this musical
marriage nor a similar one that followed was built to last. "I got sick of
having guitar players who I didn't think were good enough to play my
stuff," she says. "So I started learning how to play myself."
That was four years ago, and in the intervening years, Taylor did some
skipping around. She sang for a while with a disco cover band from Martha's
Vineyard called the Boogies ("We had seven-and-a-half-inch platforms and
huge wigs," she says). She lived the life of a ski bum in Telluride before
breaking her leg. And she survived a private-plane crash in Peru, where
she'd traveled to study the medicinal applications of the coca leaf, best
known as the source material for cocaine. "That's all you think about when
you think about coca," she says. "But there are seven other medicinal
properties in the leaf that aren't really being put to use because of the
stigma. So I was down there with this really amazing doctor studying coca
and flying around and being all groovy and stuff."
Upon her return to Martha's Vineyard, Taylor decided to cohabitate with her
boyfriend, who lived in Morrison, but on the drive to Colorado, she
realized that the relationship was doomed: "We broke up pretty much as soon
as we got there," she says. But instead of immediately returning to the
East Coast, she headed to Boulder, for reasons she understands better now
than she did then. "There were a lot of things in my life that were making
me feel sorry for myself, and I just wanted to completely clear that
ground. And I wanted a clean slate. I didn't know anybody in Boulder, and I
actually slept in my car for the first three nights. I was kind of sitting
there not knowing who I was, but that was sort of a relief. All my life,
somebody's been telling me who I am or who I should be -- mostly because
they know who my parents are. So it was really, really nice to not know
anybody for a short period of time -- and then it was really, really great
to meet all the amazing people I met. I think I had a really spiritual
awakening right when I got to Boulder. I came to feel that I was defining
myself on my own terms, so that when I met people, I met them as myself.
And that was totally empowering to me."
Approximately 72 hours after her arrival, Taylor was part of a band of (her
words) "rocker guys" who, upon making her a member, changed their handle
from Sister Mary Reload to Doppler Circus. But several months later, and
with the encouragement of Boulder scenesters such as her current beau,
onetime Zuba manager Kipp Stroden, she realized that she was ready to
commit her own compositions to disc. On the recommendation of the bass
player from the Boogies, she sought out Wendy Woo, a singer-songwriter with
her own studio, and the pair hit it off. Before long, they were deep into
Tomboy Bride.
"She's a great producer," Taylor says of Woo. "For my style, she was
perfect. She wanted to put more on the songs than I wanted to at first:
She'd be like, 'How about we put cello on this?' And I'd go, 'No, it's got
to be just vocal and guitar.' But then she'd convince me to try some other
things, and it turned out much better than it probably would have been. I
just love her and all the musicians who played on the album."
Woo didn't oversee every track on the CD. The last number, "Unsung Dance,"
featuring Taylor's father on guitar, was laid down in Sweet Baby James's
Massachusetts living room, and "When We're Together," an irresistible
samba, was overseen by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan (Fagen's longtime
partner, Walter Becker, contributed as well). But these efforts fit snugly
within the recording's overall scheme: spare, simple and ultra-respectful
of the Seventies-era singer-songwriter tradition. The safeness of this
approach, as well as Taylor's Carly-like voice, prevents her from truly
stepping out of her parents' considerable shadows, and the unremarkable
nature of "The Good Bye," "Happy Now" and "Alone" doesn't help unmix this
particular bag, either. However, "The Complaint" is lovely, "Song 4 Jeremy"
sashays with aplomb, and the title song has a lyric that invites comparison
to John Prine -- and that's fine company to keep. So while Tomboy Bride
will certainly cheer listeners hoping to hear nothing more than a chip off
the old block, it also suggests that Taylor has the potential to eventually
stand on her own.
A&R weasels aren't waiting for this day: They started pounding on Taylor's
door when she and Woo were in the early stages of recording (Taylor claims
not to know how they found out about the sessions), and the arrival of
Tomboy Bride has done nothing to quell their ardor. But Taylor isn't ready
to consummate any deals. Unlike little brother Ben, who just inked a pact
with the Work Group (a Sony imprint) and recently got the glamour treatment
in an issue of Vanity Fair, she wants to wait until she's got more of a
sense of her artistic footing. "I'm fortunate to be able to do that -- and
the reason I can is because I have some financial support," she
acknowledges. "I don't need immediate money. I'm probably one of the few
musicians who can say that. I don't feel the pressure of financial
difficulties."
With time on her side, Taylor has been able to dabble in numerous areas of
the music business with which she was unfamiliar. "I've never really known
my parents' careers as solo gigs. From the time I was born, they've always
had their success, and their careers were all lined up. So as an
independent artist, I didn't know how to book a tour, I didn't know how to
start a mailing list, and I didn't know how to set up a Web site [her
Internet address is www.sallytaylor.com]. And by doing all these things,
I've found out how much I'd pay not to do them. I was calling up radio
stations and saying, 'Hey, I'd like to play,' and then I realized I
couldn't do all this by myself, and I hired a publicist. And my boyfriend
and I booked our last tour, and it was just too much work, so I hired
someone to do that. And I'm getting ready to hire a kind of secretary or
assistant who will pick up phone calls and do my mail orders while I'm on
the road."
Taylor is currently branching out beyond Colorado; later this month, she
and her band (guitarist Chris Soucy, bassist Kenny Castro and longtime
Sherri Jackson drummer Brian McRae) kick off a series of West Coast shows,
including a stop at Los Angeles's Troubador, where her mother was, to use a
time-honored show-biz expression, "discovered." But while she's looking
forward to visiting the City of Angels, where she performed once before,
she expects that she'll soon be eager to return to Colorado. "If you're
looking for money and recognition, you've got to be in L.A. But if you're
looking to have music be something that's just about beauty and love and
spirituality, then I think that it's probably easier to do it in Boulder
and harder to do that there. At least I haven't found a way yet.
"It's not that I see Colorado as a buffer zone from all that," she
continues. "But I do love how much support musicians give to each other
here. It's so great that musician friends are always coming out to gigs and
helping each other."
Boulderites shouldn't expect Taylor to hang around town forever. She is a
big booster of the city -- "I'm very inspired by the mountains," she declares
-- and she's enjoying the chance to make fans one by one rather than in batches
of thousands or hundreds of thousands. But when she believes that she's reached
a point musically where she knows what she wants to do and is strong enough
to fend off hangers-on with other ideas, she'll probably step into the corporate
breach. She's just not ready yet. "I feel very clear about who I am as a person,"
she says. "But when it comes to me as a musician, I'm still trying to figure
that out. And until I figure out who I am as a musician -- and I'm not sure
that everybody does; who's to say that's ever going to happen? -- I'm not
going to do anything that would hurt my integrity. I just have to be sure
what 'making it' is for me."
Denver Westword, 3/11/99
How is Sally Taylor unlike most local musicians? Counting the ways would require
a mainframe computer the size of the Astrodome -- but here's a couple of examples.
Whereas the average area performer would sell his or her family into slavery
to get a contract with a major-record label, Taylor, who lives in Boulder, has
graciously declined a whole passel of them during the past year or so. She also
turned thumbs down when a representative of People magazine asked to do a story
about her, prompting the startled staffer to admit that he'd never before been
rejected. Taylor laughs at the memory -- and at the notion that she might someday
regret her decision. "I feel great about not doing it," she says from Telluride,
where she's just spent three days fasting and doing yoga. "I feel like it reminds
me of who I want to be."
-Michael Roberts
Sally
Taylor and Zuba
And now, Sally Taylor has something her
parents, James Taylor and Carly Simon, have
had lots of: A new album out.
Tonight and Saturday, Taylor performs at back-to-back CD-release parties
in celebration of her debut effort, the beguiling "Tomboy Bride.''
Joining her will be Boulder's veteran soul-funk combo Zuba, which is
releasing its fourth disc, "South of Eden.'' Tonight's CD party is at the Fox
Theatre in Boulder; Saturday's is at Herman's Hideaway.
There's a warm, enveloping breeze blowing through Taylor's new album, but
at the core of many of these songs is a tightly clenched fist of emotion.
"I don't exactly know how it happened,'' she says, "but I didn't intend to do
a CD.''
As a child, surrounded by recording equipment, Taylor says she "has always
been touching things I wasn't supposed to be touching,'' and recording over
her parents' tapes. Snippets of her childhood home tapes appear here and
there on her new CD.
In high school, she sang in a covers band called the Flip, and has performed
with a variety of groups over the years, but for a long time she didn't want to
pursue music.
When she relocated to Colorado last winter, making an album was the last
thing on her mind.
"I moved out here from Massachusetts . . . to be with my now
ex-boyfriend.'' She laughs, then adds, "That seems to be the pattern, as I
hear from people.''
After they broke up, "I slept in my car for a while, and then I went down to
Robb's Music and picked up a bunch of those tags that say "Female lead
vocalist (wanted) who likes Fiona Apple and Cowboy Mouth."
She linked up with a band, doing little more than singing at practice twice a
week and dabbling at writing lyrics. "It was their vibe,'' she says. "I was a
little tentative about doing my own stuff.''
Then one day, Taylor took a plane ride. "I'm really scared of flying, and
there was a lot of turbulence, and I was thinking, I'm not gonna make it
through this. I was positive I was going down.
"And the two things I was really regretting were not giving my mom
grandchildren, and not having put some music down.''
Soon, Taylor got to know Wendy Woo, one of Boulder's most talented
singers and a popular attraction at Front Range clubs. "She said, "Oh, I've
got all this (recording) equipment up at a friend's house (in Lyons). He's out
of town for a few months; why don't you go up and use that?'''
Woo wound up producing Taylor's album, which was recorded in May and
June with several local musicians.
The Lyons house was at the end of a 3-mile-long dirt road. "We'd play until
2 or 3 in the morning,'' Taylor says. "We'd have to (record) by candlelight
because the lights buzzed, and the crickets made too much noise. But we
ended up having a lot of fun.
"And it wasn't about making a product at all, until we got to the 15th track,
and we were thinking, man, there's a lot of material here and there's so much
work put into it. Why don't we actually get some photos taken and get
something pressed up?''
The resulting sound is intimate and uncluttered, as if Taylor and her musician
friends were playing for you from a couch in your den.
The title "Tomboy Bride'' is a reference to a book she found in Telluride, the
saga of a free-thinking 19th century frontier woman. The concept informed
both the title song, about a wild, pipe-smoking saloon gal, and the album art,
which shows Taylor in a slip and cowboy hat.
"After the whole album was done, I was at home and Donald Fagen (of Steely
Dan) called me and said, "I'd love to produce a track.' What was I going to
say? He's this idol of mine. I said, "Thank you, God, I'm going to New York
on the next plane.''
After two days in the studio, "he said, "Do you mind if I call in my partner to
help me mix this down?' And in comes Walter (Becker). And I was
completely blown away, sitting in the corner trying to breathe.''
The session with the Steely Dan twins resulted in "When We're Together,'' a
bossa nova tune with a "Girl From Ipanema'' lilt.
Taylor's album closes with the "hidden'' track "Unsung Dance,'' recorded in
her father's living room on Martha's Vineyard. He plays guitar on the tune.
Taylor insists she has few expectations for her new CD. For now she's
making a name for herself, singing with her band at clubs along the Front
Range and in California and Massachusetts. She also appeared this summer
at the One World Music Festival in Crested Butte.
On July 24, during his concert at Fiddler's Green, James Taylor introduced
Sally, who played her song "Sigh of Rain'' during a drenching downpour.
The pair later sang a duet on Papa Taylor's sweet lullaby "You Can Close
Your Eyes.''
"Every once in a while he pulls my brother and I up to do a couple of tunes,''
Taylor says of her dad. She appeared with him at promotional dates in
Europe last summer.
But she adds that neither of her parents, who were married from 1972 to
1983, pushed her to follow in their footsteps.
"I'm sure that, as a performer, subliminally I've taken in so much from them.
But nothing was ever said like, "OK, when you perform you should do this,
when you write a song you should do that.'
"Once, when I was a kid, I asked my mom how to write a song. And she said,
"If you're meant to write songs, it'll just come to you."
The Denver Post, 11/13/98
She came to Boulder for love, and found her voice instead.
-Mark Harden
Sally
Taylor does it her way
Singer/songwriter Taylor, a transplanted
Boulderite, has been writing music for about nine
years, since she was 15. But until she hooked up
with another Boulder singer/songwriter, Wendy
Woo, she hadn't considered recording. "If anybody
can take the blame for making this album, it's
Wendy," she says. Taylor had taken her writing
pretty lightly, doing it more as an exercise in
expression than as a career. (She was, however,
the lead singer of a 10-piece disco outfit for a
while.)
But after spending time with — and playing her
songs for — Woo, Taylor realized an album was in
her future. "I hooked up with Wendy, and before I
knew it, I had an album. I really never thought it
would happen," she says. The end result is
Tomboy Bride — a fantastic debut effort. The first
thing you'll notice is how much she sounds like her
mother. Also undeniable (and no surprise) is the
folk influence. Though a couple tracks have a
loungy jazz feel, the CD is a straightforward
exercise in folk-rock. And with Taylor's slightly
husky, endearing, relaxed alto and her penchant
for storytelling, she could be onto something.
Plan: For now, Taylor just wants to play her music
for people. She has no immediate plans for
regional or national distribution, and the CD isn't
even in stores yet. But it will be available when she
plays at the opening of the Virgin Megastore in the
Denver Pavilions.
Influences (besides the obvious): "I love the blues,
from Lightening Hopkins to newer, alternative
stuff."
Last CD she bought? Alvin Youngblood Taylor's
latest, Territory.
Inspirations: "Beauty."
Real job: She works full time on her music career.
Favorite local band: "I love Zuba!"
Sidewalk, 11/98
The Scoop: OK, let's get this over with: Sally Taylor is the daughter of James
Taylor and Carly Simon, and, unlike some musicians who have famous musician
parents, she doesn't mind talking about them. "I think my parents are amazing,
and being associated with them is incredible." Enough said. Now more about Sally.
-Tim Mullins
© 1999 Ariel Publicity and Sally Taylor