Sweet Baby James (1970)
11 tracks, 31 minutes
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After a debut album that proved to be a commercial flop, James Taylor went back to the drawing board and came back, two years later with Sweet Baby James and solidified what quickly became, in the immortal words of Buzz Aldrin, his ‘unique brand of bittersweet folk rock.’
It was a defining work in many ways, and at least four of its 11 tracks remain on Taylor’s setlists to this day. The songwriting on display is just on another level. On the title track’s simple, romantic but lonesome cowboy lullaby and the rumination on a friend’s suicide that is ‘Fire and Rain’, he shows his ability to write in a truly affecting way, while still managing to also include songs with a sense of humour: in taking the piss out of boring white-man blues rock in ‘Steamroller Blues,’ he still somehow managed to make an amazing rhythm’n’blues song – he got to have his cake and eat it too, the lucky bugger. And he can flip between these different moods without interrupting the vibe one jot because the whole album shares a genius arrangement that marries country music, American folk and light rock in a stripped-down and laid-back fashion.
There are also so many amazing individual moments in the tracks, tiny things that turn good songs into remarkable ones. It’s the rich sound of a bowed double bass on ‘Fire and Rain’ and the weeping pedal steel on ‘Sweet Baby James’; the slight pause on ‘Lo and Behold’ that marks its flip from simple folk to a gritty gospel-blues and the smooth jazz chords behind the country standard of ‘Oh, Susanna’.
I know I bring this sort of thing up a lot, but Taylor was only 21 when he recorded this album, and that absolutely blows my mind. The lyrics are so mature and insightful, the music so understated to the perfect degree and filled with special moments. How can a 21-year-old come out with that sort of stuff? Baffling, but all the better for the musical world that he did.
I’ve also got a personal reason for choosing this album as well as it just being Last month I talked about John Prine’s ‘Diamonds in the Rough’ as being a song that I adored as a little kid, even though I subsequently forgot what it even sounded like. Well, a similar thing happened with ‘Sweet Baby James’, except I never forgot it. I was obsessed with it when I was little. I even went as far as to proclaim it ‘my song,’ which would make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that my name isn’t actually short for James. Regardless, it sure is a beautiful song, once again proving that I have never had anything less than an impeccable taste* – and apparently a particular fondness for country music that I am only now making a proper effort to rekindle.
With Sweet Baby James, James Taylor not only struck upon the gentle country-folk formula that would stand him in good stead for the rest of his career, but also managed to capture that particular turn-of-the-decade sound that would come to epitomise a certain branch of acoustic-based post-hippiedom and from there the whole ‘singer-songwriter’ genre for generations to come.
* Let’s ignore the S Club 7 period.
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