Quote

But it's only after you've played it on the road 20 or 30 times that it becomes really finished and polished...and you realize what it means, and you get the phrasing right.

James Taylor

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James Taylor
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 12
Guitarist
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
James Vernon Taylor
Means
Polished
Right
Finished
Mean
Played
Writing
Road
Really
Realize
Becomes
Realizing
Times
Phrasing

More quotes by James Taylor

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I don't find the songs they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.
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I've written a number of songs over the years and it's a big part of my life, this sort of tension between a longing for home and the call for the open road. It's sort of like a tug between two families. I even love to miss my home.
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There's been plenty of adversity, starting the moment he was born. He had a respiratory crisis, and it was touch and go for a week whether he would survive. I think ever since, you can feel this pulse in the guy, an almost physical enthusiasm.
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Bruce Springsteen's a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I'm a folk musician. Honestly, I think that's true.
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If you feel like singing along, don't.
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I don't play the kind of music that works in a football stadium.
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Don't be sad cause your sun is down, the night doesn't need your sorrow. Don't be sad cause the light is gone, just keep your mind on tomorrow.
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Quart of whiskey a day for months working hard on a long poem. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Murderous and suicidal. Many hospitalizations, many alibis.
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It's probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years, it's a failure.
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In my mind I'm going to Carolina. Can't you see the sunshine, can't you just feel the moonshine? Ain't it just like a friend of mine, to hit me from behind, and I'm goin' to Carolina in my mind.
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Music reminds us that the universe loves us
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Never give up, never slow down, never grow old and never ever die young.
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Sobering up was responsible for breaking up my marriage. That's what it couldn't stand.
James Taylor
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I'm grateful to my audience, that there are people who will buy a ticket and come and see us play and who essentially support me and this life of music.
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It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical.
James Taylor
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I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.
James Taylor
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In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.
James Taylor
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Though the body sleeps, the heart will never rest.
James Taylor
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I know there are people who don't like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated, but my audience has been very good - they don't bother me and when they do contact me it's usually on the nicest possible terms.
James Taylor
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I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.
James Taylor