Kate Taylor

It was 50 years ago when Kate Taylor released her first full-length LP, Sister Kate. The album reached the Billboard Top 100, propelled by her version of brother James‘ lovely lullaby “You Can Close Your Eyes”. Kate was part of a whole skew of Taylor siblings (Alex, Hugh, Livingston) whose musical careers were piggy-backed on top of the rocketing success of James. After all, she was billed as “Sister Kate”, not Kate Taylor. Her musical career lost steam after the debut album, but she still occasionally recorded and performed…

Sweet Baby James (1970). James Taylor's second album, Sweet Baby James, released in early 1970, is the album that secured his spot among the most important songwriters of the 70s. The sweet, bluesy acoustic guitar and vocals on this album are authentic and interesting - this is a record that has everything from a blues inspired jam, packed with a big band horn section ("Steamroller Blues"); to a gospel revival-like track ("Lo And Behold"); to a traditional nursery rhyme made into a folk ballad ("Oh, Susannah"). And, of course, the album featured "Fire and Rain," which reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. "Country Road" was another Top 40 hit that struck a chord with music fans, especially because of its attractive mixture of folk, country, gospel, and blues elements, all of them carefully understated and distanced…

This is the final chapter of a trilogy of albums in which I explored and arranged popular songs. The entire project was made in collaboration with vocalists Theo Bleckmann and Kate McGarry, pianist Gary Versace, and the Frankfurt Radio Big Band. For the first recording, Songs I Like A Lot, I selected the majority of the songs for the album. Many of the songs I chose were from my childhood, and as I started to really listen to them again, I was surprised by how well I actually knew them. The second recording, Songs We Like A Lot, is composed primarily of songs that Theo and Kate liked and chose for me to arrange. Uri Caine held down the piano chair on this recording. And for this third and final recording, Songs You Like A Lot, we asked listeners to nominate their favorite songs for me to arrange. We then had an internet-wide vote on a list of nominated songs, and I chose (with the help of Kate, Theo and Gary) from the top 20 most popular songs.