Livingston Taylor

LIV AND LET LIV-E

Singer-Songwriter Livingston Taylor on the True Essence of Live Performance

BY LEE VALENTINE SMITH

an energetic fellow and quite the character.

IN CELEBRATION OF HIS 54TH YEAR of performing, Livingston Taylor is back on the road. Touring behind five decades of insightful material, the singersongwriter recently released a retrospective box set appropriately titled LIVe - 50 Years of Livingston Taylor Live. The collection contains 87 live recordings, culled from gigs in 1969 through 2016, and packaged with the 2018 documentary film “Life Is Good” and a commemorative picture book. 2021 also marks the 50th anniversary of his second album, Liv, originally issued by Capricorn Records of Macon. In addition to travelling the world singing songs and telling stories, Taylor has been a professor at Berklee College of Music for the past 30 years, teaching thousands of students the fine art of stage performance. His former students include Gavin DeGraw, Clay Cook of The Zac Brown Band, Charlie Puth, and Susan Tedeschi. As a member of the talented Taylor family of rock and folk-based musicians, including sister Kate and brothers James, Alex and Hugh, Livingston was born in Boston and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The erudite artist is best-known for his Billboard charting hits “I Will Be In Love With You,” “First Time Love,” “Good Friends” and “I’ll Come Running.” INsite recently spoke with Taylor by phone from Massachusetts. As the pandemic kept you busy with the online Livingston Taylor Show, was the recent downtime the longest you’ve been away from the road? Since the age of 16, I’d never been away longer and I just felt terrible. I like being with people. When you do things, you want to play them for people. I like to interact and reconnect with people. And if you can’t do it, then why bother? The infrastructure of the live experience is quite evident on The Best of Liv(e) set, including a track or two recorded at Eddie’s Attic. That’s right. Eddie’s is one of those great places that, for whatever reason, just works for me. It’s the perfect size, concentration of people, room density and general enthusiasm. Some places just have that magic. Atlanta has always been a great market for you. But the south in general has been a good place for you in many ways. Oh, I love the south. I was raised in North Carolina and my father was a Carolinian. My mother was a Yankee, causing much consternation with my father’s family. ‘Ike is marrying a Yankee!’ I am just very at home there. Atlanta’s a great city and Georgia’s a great state, what can I tell you?

Like you, Phil was always surrounded by a number of cool session players. What was it like in the Capricorn world in those days? There were always lots of musicians around. We would record during the day and the Allman Brothers would record at night in the same studio. So they’d be wandering out around 10 in the morning and I’d just be wandering in. It was a busy place and I remember it was pretty rudimentary, but you’re right, Phil Walden assembled some really wonderful players. Pete Carr and Johnny Sandlin. Robert Popwell on bass. Oh my goodness, it was such a good time to be recording. Everything was changing in the world. With each new decade the culture shifts a little, but the early ‘70s in particular brought a massive culture shift. Without a doubt. I wrote few songs of the times, but mainly mine were LIVINGSTON mostly self-examining, selfexplaining, self-justifying.

TAYLOR As is the case when you are young, you’re obsessed with Sunday, Nov. 14 • 6PM yourself. Life was compelling

Eddie’s Attic eddiesattic.com and explosive and I think the songs reflected it. I’m not sure if I’m a better songwriter now, but my technique is vastly better. I know how to build a bridge. When I’m getting into trouble, I know how to get out of it. So with that kind of freedom, I can go in lots of different directions. Now that you’ve expanded the horizons of technique, have current events seeped in at all? Or do you still center things around your own introspection? Well, sometimes a song can cover both aspects. For instance, I just wrote a song called “It’s Still a Hell of a Ride.” I wrote it as a reflection on coming out of the fallout shelter and looking around at the world again. Do you think it will find its way onto a new album at some point? Oh yeah. I imagine that’ll happen in the next year. Making records is like giving birth to a baby. You don’t until you can’t not. It’s funny, I won’t even think about it for a while and then all of a sudden, it’s the only thing I can think about. When it’s time to produce, it occupies all my thoughts. Your early records still hold up to modern standards and you consistently pull tracks from the catalog for the live shows. “Good Friends” has certainly served you well. I sort of view that as a signature song, not unlike Jimmy Buffet with “Margaritaville” or my brother James with “Sweet Baby James” or The Beatles with “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Those early songs really define who we are and continue to stay with us throughout our lives. I like the notion that song is the definition of who I am and how I’ve always seen myself.

You made your first three albums for Maconbased Capricorn Records. How did you meet those folks? I had become friends with a fellow named Jon Landau who of course, later went on to produce and manage Bruce Springsteen. But Jon was going to Macon, Georgia to do an article on Otis Redding. He also wanted to produce a record for me. So I went with him. Phil Walden at Capricorn signed us to a record deal. He was Did you ever envision yourself as a pilot in the early days? It actually took a moment of self-reflection for it to happen. The year was 1989 and it was my 39th birthday. I had been drinking a lot of alcohol. I looked in the mirror on my birthday and I said, ‘I’m going to stop drinking when I’m 40.’ That thought lasted about 10 seconds. Then I said to myself, ‘No, I’m not. That just means I’m not going to stop drinking.’ So I stopped that instant. Then I went to the airport and started flying. Now I’ve flown for over 30 years. I’m up here in New England and I was flying today, actually. I’m an instrument pilot, so I was flying through the clouds and the rain today.

That would seem to be very daunting. It not for the faint of heart and it’s not for the unskilled. You want to know what the heck you’re doing if you’re going up in the sky, in the clouds.

Have you had any close calls? I’ve never injured myself in an airplane. But I’ve flown in some very adverse situations. I’ve iced up badly a couple of times. One time I lost an engine and I only had one engine. So that required gliding into an airport, landing and then writing a massive check to get a new motor. The real issue is not damaging myself or anybody with me. Wrecking an airplane isn’t a problem, you can get another one of those.

At this point, which is more challenging, stage performance or flying? Absolutely nothing is more pleasant to me than being on stage, in the presence of my audience, to approach that microphone at the beginning of a show. I love to fly too, don’t get me wrong, but performing is heaven.

You’ve taught performance for three decades now. Do your students need to have at least a bit of natural talent? Or can you make even the most untalented person ready for the stage? I can make even the most untalented person ready for the stage. What you do is, above all else, you teach that it’s not about you. You go on stage not to be seen, but to see. You sing a song not to be heard, but to hear where people are in the presence of your creativity. If you can find those mutual places of comfort, it’s very pleasant. But the problem is that people ask their music or their creativity, to do too much. So you’ve got a nice little song. You go on stage and you might say to this nice little song, ‘I want you to make me popular, rich, beautiful, the center of attention.’ But the little song just goes, ‘I can’t do all of that, I’m just a little song.’ The problem is never with the creativity. The problem is with the expectation that accompanies it. You just need to show up on stage and speak your vision clearly. And if the audience doesn’t accept it, you forgive them and you forgive yourself.