What Does James Taylors Song I Always Thought I Would See You Again

James Taylor and Carole King, who played piano on 'Burn And Pelting'. Keystone/Getty Images hide caption

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Keystone/Getty Images

James Taylor and Carole King, who played piano on 'Fire And Rain'.

Keystone/Getty Images

James Taylor now has a happy smile, and at 52, he is tall, thin and mostly relieved of pilus. In the quondam pictures from the '70s, he has long black pilus and a somber, gaunt expression. His vocalisation hasn't changed. Even in the saddest songs, it's e'er had a kindly nature to it. He was built-in in New England and raised in N Carolina, and you lot tin hear the influence of both regions.

NPR 100 Fact Sheet

Title: Fire and Rain

Artist: Words/music James Taylor

As performed by James Taylor

Reporter: Noah Adams

Producer:

Editor:

Length: 12:30

Interviewees: James Taylor

Recordings Used: Burn down and Rain, James Taylor

Taylor wrote "Burn down and Rain" in 1968. The song has three verses. One is well-nigh a friend who committed suicide, another is nigh Taylor'south addiction to heroin, the third refers to a mental infirmary and a band Taylor started called The Flying Auto. Each poesy is followed past the same chorus, `I've seen fire and I've seen rain. I've seen sunny days that I thought would never cease. I've seen alone times when I could not find a friend, but I always thought that I'd see y'all again.' James Taylor told me he can't stand to hear his songs on the radio. He dives for the punch if "Burn down and Rain" comes on. But it remains a song he likes to sing and one that audiences e'er expect for.

"I tried to figure out at one point how many times I'd sung it," Taylor says, "and I call back it's probably budgeted a chiliad times now. I sung it yesterday at lunchtime for a benefit, and that may have been the thousandth fourth dimension. For a while I thought it would be overnice to build an odometer, like a big odometer that was visible on phase that had a big plate on the top of it that one struck with a mallet, you know, and--that every night we'd set it back to 999 and and so turn it over to the ritual thousandth singing of 'Burn and Rain,' and and then strike it with the mallet to drive it abode."

Later on such a long run, information technology's understandable that "Burn and Rain" could flatten out emotionally for Taylor after all these years. Simply his fans' reactions to the song continue to surprise him.

"I'm surprised actually at how durable it is or how reliable the connection--the emotional connexion it makes is," Taylor explains. "But does it ever go apartment for me? Yes. Yep, it has. And the fashion--if I'thou distracted or overwhelmed, I can forget where I am. I mean, there'southward a song with 3 verses with the aforementioned grade and 3 choruses post-obit them. There's no span, there'southward no release, no break. Then I can forget where I am. It's a terrifying affair, and it doesn't happen often, but information technology does, as they say, concentrate the mind."

"You want to experience as though you lot're making a connection with information technology. It helps to take an audience there receiving information technology, because and then you lot want it to happen for them, too. It's, like, just a common--you know, making music for an audition is a communal process. And and so, y'all know, they're resonating with it, I catch that, too. That'southward contagious."

Each of "Fire and Rain"'s verses deals with an adversity Taylor has dealt with in his life. The showtime is almost a friend, Susanne, who he found had died,

"At the time, I was recording in England with The Beatles, and my friends had sort of kept the information nearly this expiry from me because they thought, you know, `This is a crucial fourth dimension for him, he's doing his work, and we don't want to upset him or bring him downwards.' So my friend Richard Corey told me about it, but he had known nigh it for a calendar month or so earlier he mentioned it to me. So that'south where `they permit me know you were gone' comes in."

The 2nd verse is when y'all're however struggling to get off hard drugs,

"That was in New York, and that was when I came back to this land from London and was surprised that I'd picked up a addiction. So I was physically very uncomfortable and having a crude time."

And the third verse in the mental infirmary at Stockbridge.

"Upward at Austin Riggs in Stockbridge. Aye. Information technology was--that is not a very--that's not so much a specific 1, it's just sort of--I don't know what--kind of generally introspective kind of poetry, I guess."

Taylor notes that if "Fire and Rain" were prose rather than verse, it might be more open up and explicated and described and have less of a connection with people. For Taylor, it'southward non about the bodily information of the song, but the emotional connectedness with that information.

"You know, when someone understates something completely, you lot know, similar a song like "What'll I Do?" you know, `What'll I exercise when y'all are far away and I am blue? What'll I do?' yous know, when it's minimally stated, it simply becomes pure emotional, you know? It's--it almost makes you laugh the manner it makes you lot cry, you know, because it's so directly stated that it's nigh like it punches a hole in you. It, like, lets it out of a place where it doesn't usually come up out of, you know. Some haikus are like that. Y'all read them and it's sort of like it's almost funny how direct people are being, you know? "

Surprisingly for a song with equally deep as "Fire and Rain," the songwriting process was simple for Taylor, who says its cosmos was almost therapeutic.

"It does come very quickly," Taylor explains. "It did come up very, very fast. Just it was a great relief. That vocal relieved a lot of sort of tension. There was things that I needed to get rid of or at least go out of me or get in front of me or at least accept some other relationship than feeling them internally, either by telling somebody else or past just putting them out in a form in forepart of me so that I could say, `There they are,' you lot know, externalizing it somehow. And that part was hard, having the feelings that needed to exist expressed in that style. Merely it was actually a relief, similar a express joy or a sigh.

But these days, the songs don't come as hands.

"They come less ofttimes and possibly I don't take the aforementioned urgency to get them out. Information technology's still a delight to write something and I still love it, just I think a couple of things accept changed. One is that I'thousand older and that I'm not as emotionally intense. I've constitute other solutions--emotional solutions in my life. Another matter is that I'm more distracted. It's simply very difficult for me. I call back songs need to come out of--really out of a country of colorlessness nigh as much as anything else. You need to have empty time in gild to receive them. I'thousand much more than distracted now and there'due south less time for them to come through. And I think the other thing is that at that place is a change between feeling the demand to express something from the inside out and existence aware of yourself in the market and feeling every bit if the songs are somewhat existence pulled out of yous every bit something that'due south expected of y'all. So I've become more aware of it as something that I'g expected to exercise. And, you know, at the time that I wrote that vocal, I really didn't anticipate that anyone would hear it, you know? I mean, the motivation for writing it was quite pure. And that's non the instance so much anymore."

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2000/06/26/1075908/npr-100-fire-and-rain

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