This week I attended a small concert by Terry Scott Taylor, my favorite singer/songwriter. Terry’s been recording since the mid 1970s, with his serious band, a joke band or two, under his own name and various pseudonyms. These days he’s spending a lot of time writing music for animated cartoons. How’s that for versatility?
But it’s not all boings, wokka-wokkas, and kersplats for the creative dynamo that is Terry Taylor. He’s just completed a new CD with one of his bands, the Lost Dogs, a kind of supergroup built around a team of guitar-playing lead singers from various successful bands. The new CD, entitled The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees, will be released before the summer’s over.
The CD is going to be great, and everybody ought to go straight out and buy it. Terry Taylor is a mature songwriter whose work consists of one honest line after another, linked together in artful narratives that always orbit somewhere around Christian faith. He’s a wounded veteran of the Jesus Music scene and the Christian Music industry that followed it, but he’s outgrown any bitterness, opting instead for forgiveness, genuine affection, and a wisdom that could only have been gained by coming through all those reversals with the integrity of an artist.
One of the many mistakes that the dreadful Christian music industry has made over the past decades was to think that everyone with Jesus in their heart and a banjo on their knee ought to be put into conventional pastoral ministry, doing altar calls, providing youth ministry, taking up offerings, and setting themselves up as spiritual examples. Taylor is from the generation that tried not to go stark raving mad under those expectations, and he led the way for a handful of musicians who found their way through the confusion and defined themselves as artists first and foremost. At times he’s had to stake out some territory as someone who has the right and responsibility to pursue art for art’s sake. So it’s ironic — wonderfully, graciously, ironic — that now in his fifties his craftsmanship has matured in a way so centered on Christ, so committed to the things that matter most for a believer. In spite of it all, Terry Taylor is a man with a ministry. The stuff he’s writing right now is solid gold. Nobody else is doing work like this.
The recording sessions for Lost Cabin and Mystery Trees was only a couple months ago, so this little concert in Berkeley was the first time Terry Taylor has played any of the songs in public. Here’s the set list, with links to lyrics for the songs from earlier albums.
As for the brand new songs from the forthcoming Dogs album, take my word for it: prime work from an artist at the peak of his powers. “Broken Like Brooklyn” is a careful, probing travelog of the American soul; “This Business is Going Down” is as funny as it is twisted; “Only One Bum in Corona Del Mar” drove the audience over the edge with its light-opera buffoonery; and “That’s Where Jesus Is” is the show-stopping album-closer anthem that manages to be instantly accessible and several layers deep at the same time.
1. Startin’ Monday
2. The Lust, the Flesh, the Eyes, and the Pride of Life
3. Honeysuckle Breeze
4. Ten Gallon Hat
5. Broken Like Brookyn
6. This Business is Goin’ Down
7. Capistrano Beach
8. Moses in the Desert
9. Only One Bum in Corona Del Mar
10. Papa Danced on Olvera Street
11. Angels Must Smile Like That
12. Bad Indigestion
13. That’s Where Jesus Is
14. You Lay Down
15. Crushing Hand
16. Joel
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2 responses to “Terry Taylor, California Singer/Songwriter”
[…] Here is the latest song by Terry Scott Taylor. He played it at a small concert last week and I can’t get it out of my head. He’s written dozens of songs that show him to be a Californian with deep roots in this region which seems rootless and placeless, and I know he’s been reflecting on the Californian mythos more intensely in the past few years. His 1998 album John Wayne (named for the Orange County airport) was subtitled “Orange Grotesques,” for example, and his 2000 solo album was about the Avocado Faultline. But in this latest song, “Broken Like Brooklyn” from the soon-to-be-released Lost Dogs Album The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees, Terry has set himself the task of thinking about his native California from a long way off: from New York. Having given himself that assignment, he has fastened on the perfect way to carry it out: by pondering the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and singing from the point of view of a New Yorker who feels the dislocation deeply. California’s big with myth in this song: not only do rivers get lassoed as in tall tales, but the Rose Bowl gets filled with guacamole! And an east coast soul yearns for the golden land of California boosterism, where everything’s new and big and unsullied. Instead of deflating California hype from within, this song draws you in to the melancholy of the western dream and makes you feel the whole country’s midcentury complicity in it. It also manages to make me nostalgic for a New York baseball team I have never cared about, and links it back behind the twentieth century with the “trolley dodging” line. […]
[…] Here is the latest song by Terry Scott Taylor. He played it at a small concert last week and I can’t get it out of my head. He’s written dozens of songs that show him to be a Californian with deep roots in this region which seems rootless and placeless, and I know he’s been reflecting on the Californian mythos more intensely in the past few years. His 1998 album John Wayne (named for the Orange County airport) was subtitled “Orange Grotesques,” for example, and his 2000 solo album was about the Avocado Faultline. But in this latest song, “Broken Like Brooklyn” from the soon-to-be-released Lost Dogs Album The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees, Terry has set himself the task of thinking about his native California from a long way off: from New York. Having given himself that assignment, he has fastened on the perfect way to carry it out: by pondering the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and singing from the point of view of a New Yorker who feels the dislocation deeply. California’s big with myth in this song: not only do rivers get lassoed as in tall tales, but the Rose Bowl gets filled with guacamole! And an east coast soul yearns for the golden land of California boosterism, where everything’s new and big and unsullied. Instead of deflating California hype from within, this song draws you in to the melancholy of the western dream and makes you feel the whole country’s midcentury complicity in it. It also manages to make me nostalgic for a New York baseball team I have never cared about, and links it back behind the twentieth century with the “trolley dodging” line. […]