James Taylor and the Merits of Continuation

Good afternoon, sweet readers.  Maybe you're at work, maybe you're going to bed, maybe you're contemplating getting up, maybe you're making the gang a warming, soothing soup.  Maybe you're stuck on the highway.  Maybe the big toe on your right foot itches.  But enough about your possibilities.  You're not the boss of me.

Let's just dive right in, shall we?  I've seen JT in concert, I don't know how many times.  Great communal events, good weed passed down the rows.  However, there was the incident of being beaned by an empty Nivea bottle, for no discernible reason.  Did not break the bottle.  Did not break my head.

Uploaded by Josie Sharp to YouTube about 10 months ago

As I lay here contemplating whether this blog retains enough value to merit continuation, one of JT's songs popped into my head -- one, of course, that is not included on this hour's worth of concert video.  It's a song he wrote after his brother Alex's death: "Enough To Be On Your Way."  He wrote it in Paris, and that tugs at me, as much as anything, mostly because he gives the place import but there's not a bit of my experience of Paris in it.  I cannot fathom such... such a song being written from inspiration of walking those streets, rues, and avenues.  Mesas and mountains.  It's part of the general magic of JT.

You don't stumble on songs like this in my Paris.  He claims a bit fell out of this doorway, another from some cobbled side street.  I cannot do the fathoming, but then, I said that already.

So enjoy the first 62-minute vid, but it's this one that has my mind in its bony, bendy JT clutches.  Without searching out the date of my prior bad act, I know that I've posted it before.  Just like I could post a certain Springsteen song every day, and two or three Townes van Zandt bits of simple brilliance, shining brilliance. Songs so good that the struggle to reenact their creation -- an old bad habit from which I refuse to be disabused -- is like dashing one's self against the old smoothness of Helm's Deep, water on stone.

Before the white-handed sun-abiding orcs, when a good siege was worth the trouble.

Okay, so I've been hiding out in Lothlorien.

But it's a JT day, this day of pondering this blog's fate. 

This is what he wrote of "Enough To Be On Your Way" in the Sony liner notes:

My brother Alex died in '93 on (not for) my birthday. We all went down to Florida to say goodbye. The day after we flew home (the day after his cremation) a giant mother hurricane followed us north through the Carolina's; trashing everything in its path and finally raining record rains on Martha's Vineyard (home).
In Paris, a year later I changed his character to a hippie chick named Alice and the location to Santa Fe; but my soulful older brother is still all over this song like a cheap suit.

The sun shines on this funeral

The same as on a birth

The way it shines on everything

That happens here on Earth

It rolls across the western sky

And back into the sea

And spends the day's last rays

Upon this fucked-up family

So long old pal

The last time I saw Alice

She was leaving Santa Fe

With a bunch of round-eyed Buddhists

In a killer Chevrolet

Said they turned her out of Texas

Yeah she burned 'em down back home

Now she's wild with expectation

On the edge of the unknown

Oh it's enough to be on your way

It's enough just to cover ground

It's enough to be moving on

Home, build it behind your eyes

Carry it in your heart

Safe among your own

They brought her back on a Friday night

Same day I was born

We sent her up the smoke stack

And back into the storm

She blew up over the San Juan mountains

And spent herself at last

The threat of heavy weather

That was what she knew the best

Oh it's enough to be on your way

It's enough just to cover ground

It's enough to be moving on

Home, build it behind your eyes

Carry it in your heart

Safe among your own

It woke me up on a Sunday

An hour before the sun

It had me watching the headlights

Out on highway 591

'Til I stepped into my trousers

'Til I pulled my big boots on

I walked out on the Mesa

And I stumbled on this song

Oh it's enough to be on your way

It's enough just to cover ground

It's enough to be moving on

Home, build it behind your eyes

Carry it in your heart

Safe among your own

Uploaded to YouTube on December 27, 2009 by Astralionica