James Taylor’s strength was melancholy; now he must cope with contentment

Singer-songwriter behind hits such as Sweet Baby James and Carolina In My Mind is heading to Hong Kong for a concert, his dark days of drugs and alcohol distant memories

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Singer-songwriter James Taylor is heading to Hong Kong for a concert in February.

Published: 8:18am, 2 Dec 2016Updated: 8:18am, 2 Dec 2016

His brain was frosted with morphine, his heart petered, but his lungs remembered to breathe. Simple as that. He was dying – there were multiple times when he was dying – but his lungs always kept working, every time.

And that’s why he is sitting in California, many years later, sober, in a hotel bungalow that costs thousands of dollars a night. Instead of being dead at 22 or 27 or 33, like many of his artistic peers who sought solace in drugs, James Taylor, 68, fetches from the coffee table a crinkled printout of his discography: 18 studio albums and about 200 songs spanning 48 years of platinum-certified celebrity.

He knows that some songs are better than others and that some songs were better written than they were recorded. Shed a Little Light, for example. The Frozen Man. Those sessions didn’t hack it. He thinks he came close to success with Gaia and achieved it with Never Die Young and Enough to Be on Your Way. There are a few others.

“Sweet Baby James and Carolina – I’m still proud of those songs,” says Taylor, who will be appearing live in Hong Kong at the Convention and Exhibition Centre on February 23. “ Sweet Baby James maybe more, because it’s kind of a Chinese puzzle.”

Anyone younger than 50 is forgiven for not knowing this: James Taylor was a babe. A 190 cm stalk of corn and sensitivity. Flowing chestnut locks. A demure pornstache. A way of picking the strings of a guitar as if he was fingering the valves of your heart. Put some sky-blue denim on him, lean him against a wooden post, tell him to look straight into the camera and good night, you moonlight ladies.

Taylor’s second album - Sweet Baby James, the one with the words “fire” and “rain” on the cover – sold 1.6 million copies in its first year. By March 1971, he was on the cover of Time, illustrated as a Christ-like, post-Woodstock troubadour under the headline “The New Rock: Bittersweet and Low.”