About James Taylor: James Vernon Taylor is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A five-time Grammy Award winner, Taylor was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.
Bruce Springsteen's a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I'm a folk musician. Honestly, I think that's true.
I don't reinvent myself in any major way. It seems to be a slow evolution. I go back and visit certain themes that I feel strongly about and resonate with me emotionally.
I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could.
Somehow it helps just to take something that's internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you.
It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical.
I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.
I don't think anyone really says anything new.
When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.
One of my earliest memories was me singing 'Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin' at the top of my voice when I was seven. I got totally carried away. My grandmother, Sarah, was in the next room. I didn't even realise she was there. I was terribly embarrassed...
I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.
I was a functional addict.
I was in chemical jail.
If you feel like singing along, don't.
I don't get into heavy political numbers because I don't find them lyrical.
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.
I think it surprises a lot of people that I'm still around, you know, still - that I'm not pushing up daisies, as they say.
It's hard to find a way forward. When you're 18 it happens in huge chunks every day, but after 20 years, growth is much more costly.
Knowing when to quit is probably a very important thing, but I just am not ready.
When I cleaned up some 17 odd years ago, I felt terrible for about six months. The only thing that gave me any real relief was strenuous physical activity.
Photographers and reporters are mostly after me. They want to know what I read and what I'm like and I don't really know myself, so how can I tell them?
The Beatles were a phenomenon, but they were also ordinary blokes like anyone else. I was lucky enough to see that side.
