Eric Taylor

"I write, or I starve." One of the last been-there, done-that links to Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Lightnin' Hopkins, Vince Bell and Houston's storied folk heyday, Eric Taylor is aged wine, a deep, lusty, satisfying, expensive red. Poems – rambling travelogues, dangerous character sketches, small crimes and misdemeanor indictments – roll off Taylor's tongue, memories struggling back to the surface and demanding Taylor to make some sense of it all. It's no trifling bit of made-up puffery when Taylor pulls out his Barlow knife and opens a vein, lamenting the passing of folk singer Bill Morrissey ("Bill") or an unnamed woman ("Adios") with sorrow and soul. Don't expect free gifts or easy lessons in these 10 songs: a listener has to work and engage to get to the crux of Taylor's musings on life, gambling, murder, divorce, death, friendship and the search for reason. Studio 10 finds one of the great Texas folk poets calling out to his personal ghosts across the distant artistic horizon where Leonard Cohen lives, where the true price of knowledge is summed in pain, reflection and regret. You won't be singing songs like "Reno" or "Dark Corner Ice Water" in the shower, but they'll be waiting, demanding examination and thought, when you turn out the lights. – WILLIAM MICHAEL SMITH - Texas Music magazine

The cover is stark, a sign from the door of a recording studio perhaps, or a club’s back entrance. The line that catches my eye is ‘no non-essential musicians’, and from this the word ‘non-essential’ stands out. Eric Taylor writes stories / songs that have at their heart characters who are either invisible to the world at large or who the people who populate that world would consider ‘non-essential’. They pass them on the street and don’t even see them – if they do, they don’t look them in the eye, or think about them or the lives they lead. They belong to another world, or to another, unseen layer of this one. It’s easier to pretend they don’t exist than to stop for a moment and consider the nature of their lives, of their very existence.

Eric’s songs take these people and force the listener to acknowledge that these ‘non-essential’ men and women are flesh and blood, living and breathing, taking life as it is handed to them and making the best they can make of it. Their pain and struggle is real. To them it’s not heroic or the stuff of which epic tales are made. In the end, the good luck, the bad luck, the pain and loss, the joy (when it can be squeezed out of life’s often bitter fruits), the resignation, the betrayals, the revenge and the consequences of decisions made and actions taken are simply steps on the road of life. There’s a matter-of-fact feel to these tales, but the listener should never make the mistake of thinking that Eric is taking those who populate these songs for granted. He doesn’t make judgments about them – if judgments are to be made, let them make it for themselves, or let the listener make them, if he or she thinks he can.

The characters don’t so much attempt to justify themselves as to simply relate the facts of their existence. The lyrics might follow a linear path, or they might present a slice of time that paints a picture or creates a mood. Eric does this so well that you can feel the cold steel of a blade pressed against your throat, or taste the fire of the whiskey, or the smell of burnt powder that follows a gunshot, or hear the muted roll of dice across a table. You’re there. You can bake in the southern heat and inhale the dust. You can feel the spring in the floorboards of a darkened honky-tonk. The cigarette smoke hanging like a haze in the room fills your lungs.

Here are stories carved from hard reality – every one is crafted with care. There’s not a ‘non-essential’ one in the bunch. These songs are not for the lazy listener, nor for the faint of heart. They’re not cut-and-dried tales with the endings tied up in a bow. Every aspect of the story is not revealed. These songs will make you think. Eric Taylor writes from a place deep inside, and the images he creates get under your skin. They can take you places. What you do with what you might learn there is up to you…but I have no doubt you’ll be richer for the experience.

– Larry Looney
- No Depression

By Andrew Dansby

August 2, 2013

Eric Taylor's songs are like storms. A richly detailed scene sometimes yields to lyrical lightning. A thunderous strum sometimes breaks a whispered lyric or lightly picked acoustic guitar. The serene and the stirring coexist in such a way as to never let a listener settle into complacency. Taylor's songs are made to be heard, but they're also meant to be felt.

Taylor embodies such dynamic contrasts himself: He's a forceful presence with a quiet voice. He cuts an intimidating figure, tall and deliberate in his movements. His stare is unblinking, his wicked grins are hard earned. His manner is a mix of gruff and warm, bone and heart, which also comes through in his songs. Look at the lyric sheet and no fluff is to be found. "Bill," one of nine songs Taylor wrote for his first new set in six years, includes the lines, "I've been through this town before/It's got a four-way stop and a liquor store."

That town materializes immediately.

Taylor describes the songs on the new "Studio 10" album as "having a little blood on the bone." He and his wife and co-producer, Susan Lindfors Taylor, made about a dozen trips from his home just outside Weimar to Rock Romano's Red Shack Studio in the Heights, working on a single song on each visit. The results feel intimate and urgent. They pull you in close.

"I try to perform that way on stage, too," Taylor says. "I don't use vocal monitors on stage. I want to know what the house sounds like. I'd rather have the audience lean in than be pushed back. I mean, how loud does it need to be?"

Romano has been recording Taylor for about 15 years.

"One of the things that's difficult to record about Eric, something we've developed over the years, Eric plays with punctuation," he says. "He'll play so quiet the mics won't pick it up. You can hear his breathing better than the guitar. And all of the sudden he'll slam the guitar, and I have to be ready for that to happen. It's taken a while to figure out that whole dynamic range that goes from whisper to off the graph. And it's for a reason. It's always accenting what he's saying. Leaving space for that to happen is most important."

Many of those spaces on "Studio 10" are filled with tributes to friends and mentors such as "Bill," about Taylor's friend, folk singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey, who died in 2011 of heart disease. The song follows Morrissey on the road, a blur of towns that ended midtour in Dalton, Ga. Some of lyrics are concrete, like the "Canadian whiskey, cowboy rye" that Morrissey consumed. Others are mysterious and, ultimately, wrenching. When Taylor puts Morrissey "in the middle of some kind of hobo fight," the skirmish isn't literal.

"A lot of 'bos died of loneliness or fell off a train or got pushed off a train for the little bit of money they may have had in their hands," he says. "A hobo fight, to me, is having a fight with yourself. There's pretty much no way out of that one. You can't call anybody to help you."

Taylor is nearly 64. He still speaks with tireless reverence of the musicians he considered mentors and friends, starting with those who were in Houston when he got off a train here more than 40 years ago and spent his first night sleeping in Hermann Park. A Georgia native, Taylor was initially drawn to soul music. But in Houston he found "a fertile place, a fertile town," where he observed, studied and later began to work with Lightnin' Hopkins, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. He says there were no distinctions between types of music. Rock, blues, soul, folk: The players would all converge in the same clubs.

"I was a lucky boy," he says. "I got to learn from so many different people."
He brings up J.J. Cale, the great songwriter and guitarist from Oklahoma who died last week. Lowell George, frontman for the band Little Feat, taught Taylor a technique for squeezing the neck of his guitar. Rocky Hill, one of the best electric guitarists to pick up the instrument, admired how Taylor kept his B string slightly sharp.

Hopkins scolded Taylor for watching Hopkins' fingers. "I said, 'Lightnin', how am I going to learn anything if I don't watch your fingers?' He said, 'You can put your fingers anywhere I put them on this guitar, and you ain't going to be me. Watch the strings!'?"

He picked up little tips from blues players Fred McDowell and Mance Lipscomb and folk musician Dave Van Ronk. Van Ronk inspired "Francestown," the most rollicking song on "Studio 10."

"You can't escape the influence of some of the people I've known. It comes with the territory. Read, read, read, look, look, look.

"Tim Hardin - Houston Chronicle

Live At The Red Shack Review (UK)
Northern Sky – 3 November 2011
by Allan Wilkinson
http://www.allanwilkinson.co.uk/node/2046


I've shamelessly waxed lyrical about Eric Taylor for many years now, based upon the times I've met him, the times I've attended his shows and the times I've popped onto the player any one of the half a dozen studio albums the Texan singer-songwriter has produced over his thirty-year recording career thus far. Not the most prolific recording artist in the history of music by any means but that hardly seems to matter, not when you consider the gems this Houston-based songwriter has written over the years. The mention of Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark, Steve Earle and the late Townes Van Zandt would be incomplete without mentioning Eric Taylor in the same breath. An extraordinary storyteller, Taylor takes us on a journey with each of his live performances, comprising engaging stories interspersed with outstanding songs such as Deadwood for instance, the story of the cruel death of Crazy Horse as relayed from a daily newspaper in a sleepy Dakota bar, where the old ones told lies about whiskey on a woman's breath.

For this live album Taylor has assembled a few old friends to help out during an intimate performance, recorded over two nights at the Red Shack, a recording studio in Houston, its walls stained with the 'tit, sweat and balls of all the guitar ghosts that have been coming and going for so many years.' The recording, which runs for a generous 73 minutes, includes songs, stories and monologues, each effectively shaping the American landscape before our very ears, a landscape inhabited by characters real or imagined from Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty and the Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse to the colourful carnival folks Jim and Jean, the fickle friends, the dearly beloved and the dearly departed; each story told in Taylor's inimitable gravel voice, accompanied by his assured yet delicately picked guitar.

The song introductions are almost as important as the songs themselves. Taylor leads us into his world with a natural yet mesmerising, almost poetic flow of speech that is equally tender and sympathetic yet forceful and determined at the same time; you tend to believe every word. The introduction to Dean Moriarty is probably the album's defining moment.

With contributions from both the former Mrs Eric Taylor Nanci Griffith, as well as the current Mrs Susan Lindfors Taylor, together with Lyle Lovett and Denice Franke, each lending their distinctive voices, Marco Python Fecchio provides some tasteful electric guitar whilst James Gilmer takes to the drum seat. The Susan Lindfors Taylor produced album provides an astonishingly accurate record of an Eric Taylor performance, which will leave you both spellbound and captivated, providing you allow your imagination to take you there. Go on, treat yourself to an hour or so in the company of Eric Taylor and friends; you will feel like you'd been there.

Allan Wilkinson
Northern Sky
- Northern Sky (UK)

By Andrew Dansby, Staff Writer
Published 10:41 a.m., Friday, January 6, 2012

Eric Taylor thought a lot about time long before triple bypass heart surgery allowed him to keep writing and singing about it. His songs aren't necessarily about sands trickling from top to bottom of an hourglass, but they still reflect its forward push and sometimes an attempt to preserve something precious and passed.

He ambles through his home, just outside of Weimar, wearing a faded black shirt bearing Warren Zevon's famous quote about knowing his ride was here: "Enjoy every sandwich." He points proudly to his 1939 Remington typewriter, restored, functional and beautiful. He holds up a replica of a 1949 Mercury, the same car that Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady put on the road, inspiring Kerouac's famous novel which in turn inspired Taylor's song Dean Moriarty, released 15 years ago.

Last year, Taylor revisited the song adding to it a long story that spoke to its beginnings, a story of cars and youth and freedom. Taylor revisited many of his other songs during a two-day session, recording them in a live-in-the-studio setting at Rock Romano's Red Shack Studio in Houston.

Taylor no longer calls Houston home, but the album feels of Houston, built on songs and stories he wrote when he lived here. Several of his old friends, peers and fans show up to sing: Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, Denice Franke. Taylor provided the songs, the spirit, the stories and the sauce. "A few people probably had too good a time," he says. "And we had to say, 'No, it's time to go home, now."

Taylor emerged from the sweltering studio with something that preserves a piece of Houston music history that sprung up in Montrose in the 1970s. Live at the Red Shack runs about an hour, with an emphasis on the music. But cameras were also rolling and there are more than six hours of performances and exchanges and conversations captured, too.

"It's about as live as you can get as far as I'm concerned, but it's not a concert album," Taylor says, sipping a glass of wine and looking out the window at the secluded green expanse around his home. Hogs, deer and cattle can all be counted on to pass by at some point, unlike his time in Montrose about which Taylor says, "I didn't see any deer there unless they were drug induced."

The goal was to recall those sometimes-hazy days in and around Anderson Fair, give them context and update them. "We wanted to be able to catch conversations," says Taylor, who admits that one attendee didn't realize how close he was to a microphone when he criticized another singer for not knowing the words to a song. Media wasn't invited, Taylor says, "because I felt like it would change things too much."

"I don't think any of us went in with the idea of trying to recapture anything, I think that would be a really big mistake," he says. "I was trying to make something new. It wasn't exactly a reunion. I see these people all the time. But it was like, 'catch what we got now.' " He says his own health scare played some part in coming up with the idea, which he executed with his wife, Susan Lindfors Taylor, a singer-songwriter who produced the album. The only newcomer invited to the session was Dr. Bud Frazier, the heart surgeon who gave Taylor a second wind that Zevon never had.

A lucky landing

Taylor is 62 now, a little gruff but a venerable figure from a boom time for live music in Houston. His arrival was dumb luck. A Georgia native, he sold a guitar hoping the money would get him to California. Asked if he had any plans once he arrived on the west coast he replies, flatly, "No." He ended up in Houston and thought he'd spend the night in Hermann Park, only to get run off. He eventually found work at the Family Hand washing dishes and bought a cheap guitar, but says, "I had no idea what I was walking into."

His first week in Houston he took in shows by Lightnin' Hopkins and Townes Van Zandt. Eventually he'd play bass for Hopkins and open shows for Van Zandt. "I was such a rube," he says, laughing. He recalls the time he approached Guy Clark and congratulated him. Clark had been playing Fire and Rain at his shows, and Taylor had heard another version of the song on the radio. "I said, 'There's this cat doing a copy of your song and it's playing all over the place, it's a good version too,'" Taylor says. "And he said, 'What the (expletive) are you talking about?' He glared at me, said, 'You dumb (expletive)' and walked away.

"A guy told me it was a James Taylor song, and I said, 'Who's James Taylor?' "

With Clark, Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker as mentors, Taylor and a group of like-minded songwriters set about making their art, with periods of study and growing pains. He says he and singer-songwriter Vince Bell would get together and listen to music every morning and share some of their songs. "It'd be me saying, 'Does this sound too much like Townes?' And him saying, 'Of course.' ... 'Does this sound too much - Houston Chronicle

By Andrew Dansby, Staff Writer
Published 10:41 a.m., Friday, January 6, 2012

Eric Taylor thought a lot about time long before triple bypass heart surgery allowed him to keep writing and singing about it. His songs aren't necessarily about sands trickling from top to bottom of an hourglass, but they still reflect its forward push and sometimes an attempt to preserve something precious and passed.

He ambles through his home, just outside of Weimar, wearing a faded black shirt bearing Warren Zevon's famous quote about knowing his ride was here: "Enjoy every sandwich." He points proudly to his 1939 Remington typewriter, restored, functional and beautiful. He holds up a replica of a 1949 Mercury, the same car that Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady put on the road, inspiring Kerouac's famous novel which in turn inspired Taylor's song Dean Moriarty, released 15 years ago.

Last year, Taylor revisited the song adding to it a long story that spoke to its beginnings, a story of cars and youth and freedom. Taylor revisited many of his other songs during a two-day session, recording them in a live-in-the-studio setting at Rock Romano's Red Shack Studio in Houston.

Taylor no longer calls Houston home, but the album feels of Houston, built on songs and stories he wrote when he lived here. Several of his old friends, peers and fans show up to sing: Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, Denice Franke. Taylor provided the songs, the spirit, the stories and the sauce. "A few people probably had too good a time," he says. "And we had to say, 'No, it's time to go home, now."

Taylor emerged from the sweltering studio with something that preserves a piece of Houston music history that sprung up in Montrose in the 1970s. Live at the Red Shack runs about an hour, with an emphasis on the music. But cameras were also rolling and there are more than six hours of performances and exchanges and conversations captured, too.

"It's about as live as you can get as far as I'm concerned, but it's not a concert album," Taylor says, sipping a glass of wine and looking out the window at the secluded green expanse around his home. Hogs, deer and cattle can all be counted on to pass by at some point, unlike his time in Montrose about which Taylor says, "I didn't see any deer there unless they were drug induced."

The goal was to recall those sometimes-hazy days in and around Anderson Fair, give them context and update them. "We wanted to be able to catch conversations," says Taylor, who admits that one attendee didn't realize how close he was to a microphone when he criticized another singer for not knowing the words to a song. Media wasn't invited, Taylor says, "because I felt like it would change things too much."

"I don't think any of us went in with the idea of trying to recapture anything, I think that would be a really big mistake," he says. "I was trying to make something new. It wasn't exactly a reunion. I see these people all the time. But it was like, 'catch what we got now.' " He says his own health scare played some part in coming up with the idea, which he executed with his wife, Susan Lindfors Taylor, a singer-songwriter who produced the album. The only newcomer invited to the session was Dr. Bud Frazier, the heart surgeon who gave Taylor a second wind that Zevon never had.

A lucky landing

Taylor is 62 now, a little gruff but a venerable figure from a boom time for live music in Houston. His arrival was dumb luck. A Georgia native, he sold a guitar hoping the money would get him to California. Asked if he had any plans once he arrived on the west coast he replies, flatly, "No." He ended up in Houston and thought he'd spend the night in Hermann Park, only to get run off. He eventually found work at the Family Hand washing dishes and bought a cheap guitar, but says, "I had no idea what I was walking into."

His first week in Houston he took in shows by Lightnin' Hopkins and Townes Van Zandt. Eventually he'd play bass for Hopkins and open shows for Van Zandt. "I was such a rube," he says, laughing. He recalls the time he approached Guy Clark and congratulated him. Clark had been playing Fire and Rain at his shows, and Taylor had heard another version of the song on the radio. "I said, 'There's this cat doing a copy of your song and it's playing all over the place, it's a good version too,'" Taylor says. "And he said, 'What the (expletive) are you talking about?' He glared at me, said, 'You dumb (expletive)' and walked away.

"A guy told me it was a James Taylor song, and I said, 'Who's James Taylor?' "

With Clark, Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker as mentors, Taylor and a group of like-minded songwriters set about making their art, with periods of study and growing pains. He says he and singer-songwriter Vince Bell would get together and listen to music every morning and share some of their songs. "It'd be me saying, 'Does this sound too much like Townes?' And him saying, 'Of course.' ... 'Does this sound too much - Houston Chronicle

Eric Taylor
Live at the Red Shack
Blue Ruby Music

By Al Kaufman

Eric Taylor is like that cool uncle you had. You know, the one who lived out in the woods in a cabin he built by himself. He talked a little saltier than your mom approved of, he didn’t care if you flipped through the nudie magazines he didn’t bother to try to hide, he’d tell you stories about improper things your mom did as a child, and, most importantly, he taught you a few chords on the guitar.

Although Taylor didn’t put out his first album until 1981, he’s been writing songs since long before. In 1970, he left Atlanta to try to make it in California. He got as far as Houston, where he ran into some songwriters with names like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. He worshipped them and they, in turn, thought he was a dumb kid. But Taylor kept working at it and became a gifted songwriter and storyteller in the same vein as his mentors. Ex-wife Nanci Griffith covered his “Dollar Matinee” on her debut . Lyle Lovett, a student of Taylor’s, covered his “Memphis Midnight, Memphis Morning” on his covers CD, Step Inside this House. Both Lovett and Griffith show up on Live at Red Shack to sing their respective songs (and some others) with Taylor on this, his live retrospective. Their harmonies are full of love, warmth and gratitude.

What Taylor has done on Red Shack is assemble friends (Lovett, Griffith, Denice Franke, Italian guitar virtuoso Marco Python Fecchio, and current wife Susan Lindfors Taylor) together with a handpicked audience of 20 or so guests (for whom he also bought drinks) to play some of his favorite songs that he wrote.

And while these songs are about dollar matinees and the death of JFK (beautifully told through the eyes of “Visitors from Indiana”), this doesn’t feel like some ancient guy rehashing the good old days, but rather a gifted storyteller spinning mesmerizing yarns. Taylor’s rambling intro into “Dean Moriarty” talks of the year 1957 (“It was a good year for cars. A bad year for haircuts, but a good year for cars.”) and includes school segregation, Jack Kerouac, and trying to get girls to take a ride in his car.

Taylor may sing of the past, of bar rooms and hay fields and even Johnny Cash, but his characters want the same things we do. They want love and redemption. They want some fun and happiness. They want respect and sometimes even a little vengeance. Taylor’s people are just like us, it’s just that their tales are exquisitely told.

Eric Taylor plays Eddie’s Attic Saturday, January 28 with Freddie Vanderford. - Atlanta Music Guide

written by Rob Adams

MUSIC
ERIC TAYLOR,
STATE BAR, GLASGOW

*****

Not for the first time when leaving an Eric Taylor gig, I had to adjust momentarily to the idea that I was walking down a Glasgow street and not a Texas highway, dodging bin bags, not tumbleweed.

Taylor's ability to transport an audience with his songs borders on the supernatural. On Monday, though, more than ever, he was a tale spinner as well as a storytelling singer-songwriter, singing his stories and telling his songs in that cracked, smoke-n-whisky voice that coats words -- sung and spoken -- in sun-baked Texan authority.

His involvement in Texas Song Theatre, with friends and fellow troubadours David Olney and Denise Franke, seems to have added an extra actorly quality to his spoken delivery.

Thus his Kerouac-inspired Dean Moriarty was given added, chilling historical resonance by a kind of 1957 newsreel foreground.

Personal recollections of his grandma and grandpa, a Deep South/Welsh version of sweet'n'sour, a young friend dying of a wasting disease, and an 82-year-old neighbour who rode a mule, naked, up to Taylor's porch and accused Taylor of being weird, brought poignancy and hilarity.

Through all this, the songs, sung to spare, masterfully orchestrated guitar parts, form both link and soundtrack. Brilliantly chiselled, Taylor's poetry can set a scene in a line and capture a whole mess of trouble -- well, whaddaya expect when you choose a knife-thrower's wife as your mistress? -- in a verse.

His young friend declared Taylor's song for him as even better than popcorn. I can't top that for personal significance, but if PJ O'Rourke can describe Carl Hiaasen as better than literature, Eric Taylor is better than music.
- The Herald

reviewed by Ace Eshleman in February/March ’07 issue of Dirty Linen


Eric Taylor The Great Divide

"Stunning" is definitely not too strong a word to use when describing Eric Taylor's latest recording, The Great Divide. That one musician could cover such a range of emotion and wealth of experience within the scope of just 12 songs, and do it with understanding and grace, is a true gift to his listeners. Taylor's music possesses a most unique combination of sound and feeling. His guitar-picking style, a paradox of sorts, relies on strong, clear notes rather than fancy acrobatics, yet he displays an almost fragile quality at times. His road-weary vocals, sparse and knowing lyrics, and acoustic guitar accompaniment balance one another without seeming ponderous, in spite of his heavy subject matter. In "Shoes" Taylor muses about the attire he'll be wearing when he meets the devil, and in "Big Love," his protagonist is a painfully lonely 400-plus-pound man. Taylor also covers songs by Townes Van Zandt ("Brand New Companion") and blues legend Arthur Jackson ("Ain't But One Thing Give a Man the Blues").
- Dirty Linen

Eric Taylor came on stage at the Maze in Nottingham without any ceremony. There’s no other way. There is no curtain, no announcement, just your allotted time. He took his guitar from a solid looking, green coloured travel case at the rear. He comes from the Houston area of Texas and people like Joan Baez, Lyle Lovett and his ex-wife Nanci Griffith have nothing but good things to say about his playing and his song writing. The people at the front were seated with their feet resting on the edge of the stage. Not a word was said, the room was silent, respectful; everyone in the audience was on their best behaviour.

He started a little blues riff on his blond acoustic guitar (a beautiful sounding, handmade ‘Ross-Kinscherff’). It was plugged in, like all guitars these days, but his still sounded like an acoustic guitar; warm sounding, clear ringing tones. It might have been a ‘dirty’ blues riff but the notes shone like warm honey. He’s tall, with big hands, picks on the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. He stood a little away from the microphone and he hunched his shoulders, his head a little to one side, listening, making sure the sound was right; his arms wrapped around his guitar making it look small. There was a wooden bar stool at his side with an open folder of his songs on it. He has a deep voice, sometimes a growl, always endowing his tales of American small town lives with authenticity. He sipped from a glass of whiskey throughout, fighting off a sniffle and a cold. He has white rather than grey hair, straggly, wispy, a little awry and he was wearing a white, long sleeved sweat-shirt with three buttons, a bit like an under shirt. He looked like an ageing knight of the Round Table on his day off, without his horse or armour.

He found the heat from the stage lights oppressive, leaching the life and accuracy from his guitar, so the lights were turned down. He seemed to fade a little into the background, become a little indistinct, a little mysterious; somehow appropriate. He’s read all those Southern writers, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and he writes short stories in song; stories of people on the edges, people looking for salvation, but who, maybe, don’t want it yet. His characters seem displaced, a little lost, always too far away from the surroundings they know. He’s an observer and in the sparest of words he looks to reveal something emotional about his characters’ lives. “I don’t want to reveal everything. I like people to wonder for themselves.” Surprisingly, his conversation with the audience between songs was full of humour; wry, sardonic, dry, oblique, sometimes surreal, always funny, at odds with the songs themselves. “The humour in the talk is so I can get away with the sort of songs that follow.” Someone once told him he wrote, “.. great songs but they don’t have any hope.” That seemed a little hard even to me. The characters in his stories win small victories; it’s just in a place where failure holds all the best cards.

His songs may be about bleak subjects, but his guitar playing is anything but. It was wonderful. He finds a groove, a blues influenced, blues inspired riff, and adds other touches, James Taylor finger style additions, string bends, aching guitar sounds to convey emotional colours, always at least two guitars worth of sound from one instrument and one set of fingers. It’s stylish, unique picking, using what he calls ‘substitute’ chords, although they sounded good enough to make the first team to me. He has an enviable guitar technique. “I was lucky, I learned to play from watching Lightnin’ Hopkins. There was this little 400-seat theatre in Houston. I saw Springsteen, Freddie King, Gram Parsons. I got to know Mississippi Fred McDowell.” The names alone describe a musical education in country storytelling, with a blues chaser. “I don’t see too many young players playing the way I do.” I’m not surprised.

He played for his audience but never to the crowd. He didn’t look for clichéd climaxes or manufactured endings; he isn’t that sort of crowd pleaser. He looks for an appreciative rather than an enthusiastic audience; a wrapt rather than an excited one. He doesn’t do the Wabash Cannonball. “No, I don’t,” he said laughing, “plenty of other guys do that.” The audience was quiet, reverential. Some of them pursed their lips and muttered when the barman, doing his job, racked a few glasses and intruded into the intimacy. It was always an intimate gig, a reflective affair, an evening for devotees; you needed to listen and everyone did.

I went with a couple of players, guys who know the mysteries of dadgad, who understand a little about the merits of a B string dropped down to A and the quiet craft of a good song well written. They stood either side of me and looked mean if they thought I was going to be critical in anyway. They kept pointing out things, making sure I understood; they wanted the man looked after. Eric Taylor seems to - Maverick magazine

http://www.freighttrainboogie.com/Archives/Archive-T.htm#GreatDivide

ERIC TAYLOR
*****
The Great Divide... (Blue Ruby)

Taylor gathered around the Texas songwriting bonfire that started in the early 1970's, along with Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Steve Earle. The Great Divide goes right back into the flames, recorded in Houston. This is a stripped-down classic, Taylor running short stories through your body like acupuncture needles, and you come out feeling better for the treatment. A mix of new and road-tested originals combine with bone-deep nods to mentors, as in Peg Leg Sam's "Ain't But One Thing Give A Man The Blues" and Van Zandt's "Brand New Companion", the latter opening out, stream-of-consciousness style, into variations on "Lulu's Back In Town" and "Dirty Dirty". Taylor's precise, dynamic guitar playing and midnight-narrative vocals are right across the table from you, with spare harmony vocals (Susan Lindfors) and percussion (James Gilmer) coming from the shadows behind. Raymond Carver and William Faulkner fill a booth in the corner, Lightnin's gotten into a bottle at the bar. Night time in Texas. Night time everywhere. This one's a keeper.

Released '06, reviewed by Doug Lang.
- Freight Train Boogie

Eric Taylor

By William Michael Smith

Published: Thursday, January 19, 2006

Eric Taylor may have been born a Midwest Yankee and may these days inhabit the mantle of a Columbus, Texas, gentleman rancher, but his artistic lineage is grounded in Houston. And in the beat generation. And in the blues of Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb and other South Texas masters.

Like that of his contemporaries Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, Taylor's work has always been anchored in the sparest, most wicked blues lines and licks, and deep in the heart of the artistic space occupied by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes. The most intriguing title on his new Great Divide CD (Blue Ruby Records) is "Whorehouse Mirrors and Pawnshop Knives," a sterling example of Taylor's ability to draw on the poetics of both the blues and the beats.

Since suffering a heart attack a while back, Taylor has conquered his worst personal demons and settled down as a supremely confident artist. Raised in the class that included Van Zandt, Clark, Nanci Griffith, Steve Fromholz, Denice Franke, Dana Cooper, Shake Russell, Jack Saunders and Vince Bell, Taylor seems as strong and viable today as he did when his classic Shameless Love arrived on vinyl in 1981 and sent shock waves through the Montrose music community.

Taylor's recent shows have usually included several Van Zandt covers, and on The Great Divide he shows full mastery of Townes's oeuvre with a haunting cover of "Brand New Companion." His revisitation and reinterpretation of "Manhattan Mandolin Blues" becomes a riveting existentialist statement about music, art and the Life. Like Taylor at his best in concert, The Great Divide is sparse, concise and direct. No wonder it hits the bull's-eye. This is what being a Texas singer-songwriter is all about.
- Houston Press