The Words and Music of James Taylor by James E. Perone

Author:James E. Perone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

NEVER DIE YOUNG (1988)

Taylor continued his leisurely pace of releasing new material throughout the rest of the 1980s, a decade, in fact, in which he issued only three albums, Dad Loves His Work (1981), That’s Why I’m Here (1985), and Never Die Young (1988). Never Die Young continued Taylor’s new sense of self-knowledge and even contentment. Whereas critical reaction to the newly self-assured and happy James Taylor on the album That’s Why I’m Here was generally positive, that was not necessarily consistently the case with Never Die Young. For example, The Christian Science Monitor’s Amy Duncan wrote that Never Die Young found Taylor on a career and life “plateau”7; however, writing for All Music Guide, William Ruhlmann was not so kind, suggesting that the bulk of the songs “floated on a sea of yuppie contentment.”8

The album opens with its title track, in which one of the primary defining features of the collections can easily be heard. More than Taylor, who produced his previous album, or Peter Asher, or any of Taylor’s previous producers, Don Grolnick adds a middle-of-the-road pop ambience. The prettiness and the slight feeling of detachment of the processed rhythm guitar parts might make for a pleasant listening experience, but it seems so slick that the wash of sound might draw some listeners’ attention away from the song’s lyrics. It also provides a sense of distance between Taylor’s voice and guitar and the listener that runs counter to the immediacy that has marked Taylor’s best work throughout his career.

In “Never Die Young,” Taylor seems to produce a fantasy based on the wonderment of childhood. His encouragement to “never die young and never grow old” celebrates both the promise of childhood, but also warns against losing the innocence of childhood. Taylor’s melody has an easy lilt to it, with phrases of narrow range with a natural feeling rise and fall. Some listeners might detect a similarity to the feeling of melodic structure and vocal phrasing of Taylor’s twenty-first-century celebration of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, “Angels of Fenway,” which appeared on the 2015 album Before This World.

Contrary to the pattern that had been established on several previous James Taylor albums, Never Die Young included no cover songs. Taylor was the sole writer of 7 of the 10 songs and cowrote the other three, each with a different collaborator. “T-Bone” was a product of Taylor and Bill Payne, the latter from the band Little Feat. A tale of the title character, a person who seems to be attached to an old automobile, it is a somewhat bittersweet song that can be taken as an observation of a man who cannot quite come completely to terms with the past, but is also happy to live in the past. The raked guitar chords, harmonic progression, bittersweet atmosphere, and vaguely island-ish rhythmic feel are reminiscent of the work of Jimmy Buffet. This is worth noting, because during the 1980s, as Taylor became more and more closely associated with Adult Contemporary music, some

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