The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.
I think when you get married, it’s not a totally free ride – it’s not without its unglamorous periods and its fights and its angry noons and silent dawns or vice-versa.
When I was a little girl, I so wanted to be sociable, but I was scared that I wasn’t going to be able to speak a sentence because I had such a bad stammer.
[Ben Taylor] He is an interesting combination of the two of us. His voice box is more like mine but the way his tongue sits in his mouth, and the way he pronounces words, is just like James Taylor.
I think I had the best of James [Taylor]. I mean, I was so in love with him. Not with blinders on – I was in love with him because he is a remarkable man, and he gave me a tremendous amount.
I’m constantly reemerging in my life.
From the first time I saw a picture of him, James Taylor was it — the ultimate Orpheus of all my fantasies.
Music brought me closer to the idea of God.
I never identified with the feminist movement in a strong way. I just kind of lived it. I didn’t politicize it. I didn’t follow any written rules to what it meant to be a feminist. I had my own sense of what was right and wrong.
Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief.
I grew up not understanding what was true and what was not true. It gave me a sense of unreality.
I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness.
There ain’t no freedom when you’ve got a worrying mind.
When I’m feeling anxious or depressed, I do find it helps to reach for a pen and paper. There is something about writing things down, that hand-eye combination, that makes me feel calmer.
I have simply found a way of loving through whatever absences or dejections have fallen like tree branches in my path.
There was a lot of charm in just living in a big family compound of a house. My two uncles, who were into jazz, lived in the basement, and one of them, Uncle Peter, taught me my first songs on the ukulele.
One of the things about creativity is you can be in denial about these things. When I found out I had cancer, there were four hours in which I was pounding my head on the marble kitchen top saying, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” But then I felt as if this little army in uniform was flooding me. They had come to help me fight it. I felt really strong about it after that. It was one of the strongest periods of my life.
There are a few things that were just sheer, unadulterated joy, like the birth of my children.
You usually can’t tell what’s inspiring until you look back on it.
You can repeat the mistakes of your parents’ marriage or you can go out of your way not to repeat them.
Actually, I think the more Ben [Taylor] sings, the less like James he sounds.
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