James Taylor: Long Ago and Far Away [Paperback]

All of this said, the details on the family history and make up does help put a frame around his life. Just don't think you're going to come away with a lot of interesting tales about his thoughts or actions other than some descriptions as to what the songs meant and brief descriptions of certain periods of time.

If I wasn't such a huge fan I never would have finished it.

Don't _notice_? Where the heck did he get that? As anybody who knows the song should know, the line is, "Lord knows when the cold wind blows it'll turn your head around." (And it's not a trivial point, either, He's using the "quote" to make a point about the meaning of the song.)

He's pretty tiresome in general when he tries to write about music. When, for example, was the last time you heard percussion described as "marvelously astringent"? Do you even know what that _means_? I sure don't. And why do we have to describe every third song JT ever wrote as a "sonnet"? _None_ of them are sonnets, gol-durn it. (And no, gang, Gene Pitney's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" was NOT the theme song of the John Ford movie, even if it was originally supposed to be.)

Call me pedantic if you like, but White deserves it: he's as pedantic as they come, not to mention pompous and precious. For example, he's dug up some information on Scottish "waulking" songs, and he insists that this information somehow tells us something or other about JT's music -- not because JT knew what a "waulking" song was or ever wrote one in his life, but because he released an album called _Walking Man_ and White can use that title as a source of puns. For an entire chapter.

The first hundred-plus pages of this longwinded, overwrought book aren't even about JT at all; they're a history of the Taylor family from seventeenth-century Scotland to the twentieth-century US. This is interesting stuff, but it didn't need to be a hundred pages long (over one-fourth of the length of the book!). I was buying a book about JT, not about Isaac Taylor the Scottish barrelmaker.

It's not that I mind the family history. It's just that White seems to have convinced himself he's writing some sort of sprawling epic novel that also doubles as an Important Sociological Document. But the thing reads like an extended (and very poorly written) album review.

It's okay for what it is, I guess, and White has at least included some informative history of JT himself (based on lots of personal interviews and industry-insider information). And the photos are pretty cool too. But man oh man, how much crap you have to wade through to get to the good stuff.

There's interesting material on the Taylor siblings, too. But as an earlier review pointed out, White writes as though Livingston Taylor's "My Father's Eyes" first appeared on 1998's _Snapshot_. It didn't; it was on _Our Turn to Dance_, released well before the Taylors' father passed on. White makes it sound like Liv wrote it for the old man's funeral.

There's just too much of this stuff for me to rate the book very highly. Sure, it's the best available source of information on JT -- but that's too bad.