In the corner stands a guitar that plays only sad songs
Give me when a friend lost his wife
And this fine leather jacket came in a package
The day after he took his own life
In a bar down in Austin, he was drinkin' and boastin'
This ring…
Jimmy, this song reminds me, what great lyrics you can slip into your songs/albums! AND I had forgotten how much I like this song/album. Thanks for reminding me about it. JQ
I was in Spain, in the Pyrenees, working on THE STONE RAFT. I was the only American, read, "English speaker." I was feeling very alone.
SOLITARY WALK Am
INTRO Am F Am F
Am (walking down) G F G
Tho I follow in the footprints of my friends…
Yesterday afternoon, I received my copy of... The Stone Raft, the English translation of a novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1998. A Spanish-language film based on the book, La Balsa de Piedra, was released in 2002 by George Sluizer; see JMT intro above. This is a great JMT song... the lyrics of this song, represent well, the true genius JMT has with words! What absolutely great lyrics!
CALIFORNIA
Capo @ 4 in C/Am
I’m (Am) going back to California
A little place in the San (E) Joaquin
(Am, stepping down A G F# F E)
Where the back pasture builds
To Sierra foothills
And Kaweah tumbles down cool and clean
I’m going back…
CALIFORNIA
Capo @ 4 in C/Am
I’m (Am) going back to California
A little place in the San (E) Joaquin
(Am, stepping down A G F# F E)
Where the back pasture builds
To Sierra foothills
And Kaweah tumbles down cool and clean
I’m going back…
The story our song that night (Songwriter night, Tuesday, at The Post, where we would divide up into groups and have a new song ready to perform in one hour) was about railroads and a girl from San Antone. When I got home I had the Tejas/Chaos…
Damn, Jimmy! I am not sure what to make of this song! I really... REALLY... like this song very much! The story makes me feel "sad" ...and yet I find this song quite... ??? ..."pleasing" ??? WELL, It doesn't matter! EVEN IF I do not understand why... the fact remains... I LIKE THIS SONG! And I agree with what Jeff wrote below in COMMENTS... AND I REALLY agree with Violet!
CALIFORNIA
Capo @ 4 in Am
I (Am) come from California
With a banjo on my (E) knee
(Am, stepping down)
I was off to college in Oklahoma
Where I (E) studied (Am) Christianity
I’m going back to California
A little place in the San Joaquin…
WITHOUT THINKING
capo @ 3 in C
C I do things without E thinking
Am (walk down) I admit it's true
But I do C nothing without G thinking about C you
Am I turn a corner
Em I pump some gas
F I fold a pillow case
C I wash a G glass
I stand…
Jimmy, I like this one. You mentioned the other day, that you might consider adding some cello to one of your new songs... ??? This version is only 2:09... seems to me... there might be plenty of room for a few bars of cello instrumental to float around between the words! But you know me... I have often mentioned to you, how good some of your instrumentals really are... and I have often thought that you, yourself, under appreciate yourself... when it comes to your own instrumentals. Good song... JohnQ
The story our song that night (Songwriter night, Tuesday, at The Post, where we would divide up into groups and have a new song ready to perform in one hour) was about railroads and a girl from San Antone. When I got home I had the Tejas/Chaos…
The story our song that night (Songwriter night, Tuesday, at The Post, where we would divide up into groups and have a new song ready to perform in one hour) was about railroads and a girl from San Antone. When I got home I had the Tejas/Chaos…
TEJAS
Capo @ 2 in C
I met a girl. Her name was Tejas
Shrimping south of Texas City
In her eyes I could see chaos
In her voice I heard confetti
In her purse I found the lip gloss
She bought in New York City
When she jumped I felt such…
I BUY GUITARS
Em
One man might buy cigarettes and waste it all in smoke
Another marijuana and share a friendly toke
Am
Another, with more money, might invest in antique cars
Em
I buy guitars
A man might buy a baseball card
Keep it…
I love that...reading and listening to it..!
Love the sounds...i can feel the amercan poet in the music...and the vocal sound is really full...
That song just makes me want to buy an old guitar....i keep lookin in the second hand stores around here...but theres no guitars...i dream that someday i’ll walk into anthony o hallorans second hand / antique shop, and there’ll be some old gem of a six string , archtop maybe, or a rusty old tele...full of mojo...waiting there for me to find...! I check every time im passing his place....i think i’ll never stop waiting....
But yes...thats a great track....you should send that out to dream guitars shop...in ashville....paul huemiller owns it....or some such shop....i bet one of those places would love that song for a website....im doin my website at the mo....id love to put that track on my instruments page...!
Then people could send pics of the old guitars they bought and i could post those pics too...wouldnt that be a bit of craic....fun...we all buy guitars....a choir of guitar pickers could sing it....we buy guitars..✌️
Also...i never saw the link between telescopes amd guitars before....but i do now...its a cold night here...and a clear sky full of stars....Matt
I BUY GUITARS
Em
One man might buy cigarettes and waste it all in smoke
Another marijuana and share a friendly toke
Am
Another, with more money, might invest in antique cars
Em
I buy guitars
A man might buy a baseball card
Keep it…
I BUY GUITARS
Em
One man might buy cigarettes and waste it all in smoke
Another marijuana and share a friendly toke
Am
Another, with more money, might invest in antique cars
Em
I buy guitars
A man might buy a baseball card
Keep it…
I BUY GUITARS
Em
One man might buy cigarettes and waste it all in smoke
Another marijuana and share a friendly toke
Am
Another, with more money, might invest in antique cars
Em
I buy guitars
A man might buy a baseball card
Keep it…
Barbara Anne Taylor sings.
Que Paso capo @ 5 in G
Am/G x3
G G bass Em Am bass G bass F#
The man on the radio said we are falling apart
Am bass G bass F# G
Falling apart…
Bali Hi, at 6th and Broadway
Just a little place where people go
To have a quiet drink,
Listen to the band and think.
Maybe meet a friend, you never know
I said, "Hi, I'm kinda lonely.
My wife and I just had a fight.
I've been married…
“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” - Charles Dickens
This song contains the body of the first song I ever wrote. A poem sent to me while I was away to school in Idaho in 1959 by Carolyn Opitz that I sat at an old pump organ and sang a thousand times when I was a junior in high school.
YOU CAN…
SLAUGHTER MOUNTAIN
My mom’s dad was a coal miner. Her mother died of TB when she was a kid. When she was twelve, her dad, dying of black lung, slit his throat with a butcher knife. That left her with a cripple little brother to take care of…
SLAUGHTER MOUNTAIN
My mom’s dad was a coal miner. Her mother died of TB when she was a kid. When she was twelve, her dad, dying of black lung, slit his throat with a butcher knife. That left her with a cripple little brother to take care of…
Candy Davis
I love that album. You gifted it to me a long time ago, and I still think about those hapless men becoming ill and dying, making hickory handled hardware. And "Help!' raises so many emotions in me--that people would just stand on the shore and do nothing while you risked your life alone to save that boy. All of the songs on Slaughter Mountain are ones that are so well written and so memorable!
Randy Brown and I did a little co-write this evening and this is what we came up with...
I MISTOOK IT FOR THE MOON Capo @ 2 Key D (Play in C positions)
I was coasting across West Texas/Had my top down, it was late at night
I caught a coyote…
I just listened to A YEAR IN JAIL. both versions. Yours is much better than mine.
Jeff
Jeff Prince
Thanks. I remember approaching it as a straight-ahead country-and-western song vocally, and the production is good, especially toward the end. Great song. The music is better from the 1st note.
My mom is 91 and still holding on.
The people that help her make it thru
each day have learned that there is no
sense in arguing with her about who they
are or when it is...thus the song.
MAMA HAS A TIME MACHINE key - Em
Mama has a…
You really broke me down on that one. It's like you have been looking into my living room. It took me a second to remember your names is James also. - James Bucannan
Worshiping at an abandoned alter...
Let my breaths be as long as her legs
Let my breaths be as smooth as her back
Let my breaths be as cool as her hips
Let my heart be as still as her tongue
Let my mind be as bright as her skin
Let my…
FOREVER
She stares out the window. That look in her eye
How deep can her heart know life's passing her by
The radio's playing. She holds back a tear
A song she's forgotten
Holds back the years...Forever
And she says,
"I wish I 'd loved…
FOREVER
She stares out the window. That look in her eye
How deep can her heart know life's passing her by
The radio's playing. She holds back a tear
A song she's forgotten
Holds back the years...Forever
And she says,
"I wish I 'd loved…
Well, it's like I went down town last night to see Guthrie playing with Ray and I came home with a song.
NOBODY KNOW ME IN TOWN ANY MORE Capo @ 1 in G
There’s a bird in the gutter that’s so sound asleep
He can’t hear the music that’s sweeping…
The lyrics of this song,
as they pertain to plot,
are my exact memory of the event.
I had spoken to the kid maybe a minute before the "action" started about how the pressure of the water was very strong. He was nestled down with his back…
NAAD -Just read your lyrics and liatend.to the son...w
Very beautiful, very moving...beautiful how you he'd on the rhyme scheme an dmade it work...so love the slave t rhymes as well...they're my favorite...super smooth transitions....tell me a bit about the inclusion of you garden reflections in the middle of the song...counter point? Balancing urgency and reality? Love, love, love thisnone...will.ha r to listen again.
"tell me a bit about the inclusion of you garden reflections in the middle of the song...counter point?" it all ties in when I relate it to the weather, "...there's lightning and thunder...but this summer is a wash...what we really need is rain." The reason the river was up that day was because there had been so much rain in the previous days, they were lowering the dam to lower the water lever in the lake that fed this river.
Refuge into the imagination:
Is it crazy?
Is it survival?
Is desire to survive crazy?
THERE SHE WAS Key - G 102811
G
She'd been gone for three years now so he'd been on the road
Playing every truck stop bar and every song he…
Now and perpendicular to now, where shadows are, as we will create the next song of music and make sounds together in the now but also in the perpendicular to now for the theme at sound in. of course any music on theme or not is ok. At right angles…
One night after three month of no rain, as we were driving home from singing at Gringos in Grapevine a splash of water hit the windshield.
I said to myself, "Sweet Rain."
I went home and wrote the song. It's on the soundtrack of a movie called…
I never sing this song the same two times in a row.
The lyric below is pretty close to how I sing it now.
Listening again, this is an awful version of this song...
I have my recording machine working again...I must redo this.
I PLAY C…
Like most or all of your songs, there is always something really stands out and pays off big time. That last verse (or is it the last two) is absolutely, powefully emotion packed. And it is somewhat Vonnegut like in that so much is conveyed so precisely and with elegant simplicity. "... in the dream we left behind" - my God man, it's pure genius. Not the first two times I heard the song, but the first time I "listened" to it, I thought WHAT WAS THAT! And the it sunk in.
I have a new love
Of course she doesn’t know
How can a work of art
Know when lovers come and go
And when the artist is the art!
My eyes are the eyes of the beholder
And my eyes are the eyes of the world…
…when the artist is the art…
Comments on James Michael Taylor's stuff
Jimmy, this song reminds me, what great lyrics you can slip into your songs/albums! AND I had forgotten how much I like this song/album. Thanks for reminding me about it. JQ
Yesterday afternoon, I received my copy of... The Stone Raft, the English translation of a novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1998. A Spanish-language film based on the book, La Balsa de Piedra, was released in 2002 by George Sluizer; see JMT intro above. This is a great JMT song... the lyrics of this song, represent well, the true genius JMT has with words! What absolutely great lyrics!
"Where the moon on the beach pushes time out of reach" That's Poetry!
Very catchy
I love it! 26 seconds long to convey a complete thought.
Damn, Jimmy! I am not sure what to make of this song! I really... REALLY... like this song very much! The story makes me feel "sad" ...and yet I find this song quite... ??? ..."pleasing" ??? WELL, It doesn't matter! EVEN IF I do not understand why... the fact remains... I LIKE THIS SONG! And I agree with what Jeff wrote below in COMMENTS... AND I REALLY agree with Violet!
Jimmy... I like this one, too! I like it a lot!
Jimmy, I like this one. You mentioned the other day, that you might consider adding some cello to one of your new songs... ??? This version is only 2:09... seems to me... there might be plenty of room for a few bars of cello instrumental to float around between the words! But you know me... I have often mentioned to you, how good some of your instrumentals really are... and I have often thought that you, yourself, under appreciate yourself... when it comes to your own instrumentals. Good song... JohnQ
The lyrics are so descriptive and visual, such as the lipstick from NYC. Did you read about a suicide or make up the song from scratch? Jeff P
"Your songs are so heartbreaking sometimes. I love it. Don't change a thing." Violet
Thank you for sharing
I love that...reading and listening to it..! Love the sounds...i can feel the amercan poet in the music...and the vocal sound is really full... That song just makes me want to buy an old guitar....i keep lookin in the second hand stores around here...but theres no guitars...i dream that someday i’ll walk into anthony o hallorans second hand / antique shop, and there’ll be some old gem of a six string , archtop maybe, or a rusty old tele...full of mojo...waiting there for me to find...! I check every time im passing his place....i think i’ll never stop waiting.... But yes...thats a great track....you should send that out to dream guitars shop...in ashville....paul huemiller owns it....or some such shop....i bet one of those places would love that song for a website....im doin my website at the mo....id love to put that track on my instruments page...! Then people could send pics of the old guitars they bought and i could post those pics too...wouldnt that be a bit of craic....fun...we all buy guitars....a choir of guitar pickers could sing it....we buy guitars..✌️ Also...i never saw the link between telescopes amd guitars before....but i do now...its a cold night here...and a clear sky full of stars....Matt
Cool song, well written, vivid, and fun with a wicked twist at the end.
i buy guitars....i can't play them properly .... but i buy guitars too
Excellente
Really great track!!!!
What a gorgeous voice Barbara had and what a touching song. John O'Malley
soundtrack to riding in the West Texas desert with the top down?
A bit of a departure from your usual reflective messaging. This one is a real toe tapper.
Comments made by James Michael Taylor
A true classic. Deceptively simple, yet so many feelings in there: angst, loneliness, and hope, all rolled into one. Candy Davis
“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” - Charles Dickens
Wow! Starts of so light and carefree. Then pow to rock lead guitar breaks the tranquility. Contrast. Js Bchard.
David Young That’s the album that got me started loving your music! I used to listen to it often on my drive to work and back.
Candy Davis I love that album. You gifted it to me a long time ago, and I still think about those hapless men becoming ill and dying, making hickory handled hardware. And "Help!' raises so many emotions in me--that people would just stand on the shore and do nothing while you risked your life alone to save that boy. All of the songs on Slaughter Mountain are ones that are so well written and so memorable!
Wow. That is a good one. Michelle Soto
I just listened to A YEAR IN JAIL. both versions. Yours is much better than mine. Jeff Jeff Prince Thanks. I remember approaching it as a straight-ahead country-and-western song vocally, and the production is good, especially toward the end. Great song. The music is better from the 1st note.
You really broke me down on that one. It's like you have been looking into my living room. It took me a second to remember your names is James also. - James Bucannan
Haunting voices and guitar work. Nuno
The line: "The window's a mirror when it's dark outside..." Wow! Nuno
Gerald Ray - I love this.
"Nobody Knows Me". Your voice is so different in that song. Deeper.NUNO
NAAD -Just read your lyrics and liatend.to the son...w Very beautiful, very moving...beautiful how you he'd on the rhyme scheme an dmade it work...so love the slave t rhymes as well...they're my favorite...super smooth transitions....tell me a bit about the inclusion of you garden reflections in the middle of the song...counter point? Balancing urgency and reality? Love, love, love thisnone...will.ha r to listen again. "tell me a bit about the inclusion of you garden reflections in the middle of the song...counter point?" it all ties in when I relate it to the weather, "...there's lightning and thunder...but this summer is a wash...what we really need is rain." The reason the river was up that day was because there had been so much rain in the previous days, they were lowering the dam to lower the water lever in the lake that fed this river.
Cory Michael -I listened to the song and think you should definitely sing it next week. You're a hell of a story teller, James!
Evocative stuff.
Cindy Grayson James Michael Taylor beautiful song
Pamela Steuber Anderson James Michael Taylor I love this song. Thank you.
Like most or all of your songs, there is always something really stands out and pays off big time. That last verse (or is it the last two) is absolutely, powefully emotion packed. And it is somewhat Vonnegut like in that so much is conveyed so precisely and with elegant simplicity. "... in the dream we left behind" - my God man, it's pure genius. Not the first two times I heard the song, but the first time I "listened" to it, I thought WHAT WAS THAT! And the it sunk in.
That is beautiful, James. Thank you. Rachel Eastman
It's fun trying to imagine the movie this is the sound to. "Hoooooonk." Thanks for listening to my music.