Livingston Taylor was the pesky little brother who ran around at family gatherings, the one that loved show and tell at school, and the little brother that pulled at sister Kate Taylor’s pigtails. Hopefully at their Tabernacle concert this weekend, there will be no hair pulling, only song.
“I’m amusing, but Kate is magical,” Mr. Taylor said on a recent afternoon on his back patio. “My sister is so beautiful, so spirited, and has such a grace. I’m good, but my sister is great. She’s got the magic.”
The two will be performing Saturday at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs to benefit the restoration of the building. “I’m always excited to play on the Vineyard, play to my friends, my family, and be in a place I really call home,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s a very exciting time for me.”
“It’s really a treat to work with him,” Ms. Taylor said of her brother. “He is amazing and such a wonderful artist and musician and I love when I get a chance to work with him.”
Performing on home territory makes it even more special for Ms. Taylor. “I love going to shows there, it’s a magical place,” she said of the Tabernacle. “The sound always has some sort of added special magic, like built-in harmonics. It’s got a sound of its own.”
Playing at the Tabernacle is not new to the Taylors, but Mr. Taylor finds performing in a holy sanctuary to be the best type of venue for his music. “I feel very comfortable in those types of environments,” he said. “And though I’m not particularly affiliated with a religion, I love the miracle of people’s spirituality. “
Churches, including the Tabernacle, allow Mr. Taylor to express his own spirituality, more so than any bar might, he added. While some people may turn to religion for inspiration, others to a life coach perhaps, here on the Vineyard the music of the Taylors provides another option.
“I love telling people that the life they’re leading right now is a good one, that’s what I do for a living,” Mr. Taylor said. “That your struggle is seen, it is known, it is admired, and because of your struggle others are gifted, and the quality of your life has improved. Congratulations.”
With a holy venue comes a different crowd as well. “[Vineyarders] are familiar enough with me that they are used to my mercurial nature so it doesn’t weird them out,” Mr. Taylor said. “I have to be a little bit guarded where people don’t know me so well because you have to make sure that you don’t frighten them, and my Vineyard audience is used to me and I don’t frighten them.”
Mr. Taylor will be performing new and old material, including classics like Good Friends and Never Lose Hope but mixing it up with songs off of his new album, Last Alaskan Moon, released last fall. His new CD is a continuation of his last record, There You Are Again, and the result of what he calls a “prolific burst of writing of this past decade.”
“I recorded with the best players that play, it was a terrific experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s tuneful stuff and it’s a lot of storytelling,” Stories such as that of Orville and Wilbur Wright, oil well drillers, and some Civil War based songs as well.
“Generally stories that people like to hear are stories that reaffirm the quality and dignity of the human experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s so much fun to tell people about themselves, to see their lives and what a gift that life is.”
Mr. Taylor is a melody man, and constructs his songs around such. He has drawn on composers such as Richard Rogers, Jules Stein, Frederick Lowe and Irving Berlin for inspiration. One morning he was listening to George and Ira Gershwin’s Our Love is Here to Stay, and he explained why that piece of music was here to stay.
“When you hear how beautifully assembled it is, and this notion of being able to go to the writings of George Gershwin and just weave through it and take the very best things he wrote and ask yourself why is it so good, what about this is working and disassemble it — that’s fun,” Mr. Taylor said, so enthusiastically he was almost out of breath with excitement.
And he’s just as excited about the other songs he was listening to that day on his iPhone. Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Queen, Billie Joel and the Mammas and the Poppas were just a few of the artists he played for the Gazette. He began to sing along to every song, motioning the keys of a piano, the tap of a drum, and the strum of a guitar.
“I love listening to my brother play the guitar, he’s a genius guitar player,” Mr. Taylor said as a song by his brother James Taylor came on. “He’s perfect.” Mr. Taylor was listened intently to the strings his brother was playing, relishing every note.
“I’m a good guitar player, but James is a genius guitar player.”
It is this type of analysis that he teaches his students at Berklee College of Music in Boston. “I love the new generation, you have access to all the information that has ever been,” Mr. Taylor said. “The new generation gets to reinvent the world the way they want it, not the way I want them to want it.”
As for the new generation of music, Mr. Taylor is patiently waiting for the Internet to start making musicians money. “It’s going to be unbelievable but suffers presently from the lack of direction, and that’s because the Internet has disrupted the income stream that record distribution used to allow.
“Great art is the result of wealth concentrating talent,” he added repeatedly. “This notion that somehow if I just get exposure on the Internet that would be enough. No, it’s not.”
His suggestion: increase competition among musicians. “I love talented people in close proximity, duking it out. The good rise, and the fortunate rise.”
Tenacity trumps talent, he tells his students.
But when he’s not telling stories, performing, recording new music, or mowing his lawn, as he was about to do that afternoon, Mr. Taylor likes to simply enjoy the moment.
“What I really love doing is taking it in. I love getting rid of impediments to observation,” he said, rocking in his chair. “The passion is to be able to observe, to see. That’s what’s fun.”
An Evening with Livingston and Kate Taylor is at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs at 8 p.m. Admission is $20 and tickets are available at the door or at Aboveground Records, Island Music, the Cottage Museum Shop, Bunch of Grapes and Alley’s General Store. For more information visit mvcma.org.
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