To keep an essentially acoustic album from sounding same-y, Taylor and his team added instruments from outside the main band. There are some that it works with and some that it doesn’t - these are the ones that work.” Which is that I’m running these songs through my process. "If we’d asked a piano player to interpret these changes then had an arranger orchestrate them, it would have somehow obscured what is actually happening here. I really wanted to keep that at the centre of it. When I do a cover I basically try to adapt my technique and my voice to the material, and when it works it does. "You can get a great rhythm section and a really strong arranger, but it can sound like these songs often tend to sound.
Then the idea occurred to me, ‘Let’s make this into a guitar project.’ Because you can tend to have a kind of cookie-cutter experience when making this kind of album. I thought we were doing demos to start with. “But, yes, it was a very interesting process. And, fortunately for me, I’m calling the shots. He’s much more suited to accommodating me than I am suited to accommodating him. It doesn’t work for John to give me changes and to have me play them. "With my limited guitar technique I’ve managed to interpret these tunes. So there’s some bass notes that are coming out of the guitars that are outside of the usual range.
“I’m playing my Olson guitars and Pizzarelli is mostly playing a seven-string. “Yes, we did work them out together,” Taylor concurs. Taylor and the brilliant jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli worked out the core of the guitar arrangements for the album, which must have been an interesting challenge. they are the high watermark of popular music These were written as songs to be done by anyone. So, in my opinion, they are the high watermark of popular music.” “, they didn’t have production values that would dazzle us, and they didn’t know who would be performing the song, so it had to exist as a set of changes, a lyric and a melody. In other words, we are listening to a specific person, a specific voice, and you wouldn’t think of them being covered by other people, generally speaking. These days what we listen to are performances. “I think the difference is that these were written as songs to be done by anyone. It’s much more sophisticated than music has become. The people of our generation listened to this stuff when they were kids, and I think that it really informed their harmonic sense. “But this is the music that informed Lennon-McCartney, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell. They are the previous generation’s music. They are songs of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, with a couple from the 50s in there. So I’ve done a number of these tunes, what are thought of as American Songbook.
And I recorded an album of covers which had Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ on. “But on each album I tend to have a cover of some sort. And now Natalie Cole, of course - she’s the real deal she actually is a jazz singer. And Linda Ronstadt, who actually worked with Nelson Riddle. "But that changed when Willie Nelson made his standards album. People like Bobby Darin tried to change his stripes and become Bob Darin, and found himself on the wrong side of the generational divide. We were unkind and unaccepting of that music. It’s like folk music was okay and Celtic music was okay, but Sinatra was not. When my generation stepped out and were making themselves known, we drew a distinct line between ourselves and what sounded to us like Vegas or in any way ‘lounge-y’. It’s like folk music was okay and Celtic music was okay, but Sinatra was not My generation drew a distinct line between ourselves and what sounded to us like Vegas or in any way ‘lounge-y’. I learnt to play playing these songs that I knew from childhood. "I’ve had some of these since I started playing the guitar. We were very careful to keep the guitar as the centre of each arrangement, because these are arrangements of my own. “I purposefully didn’t iterate it with a keyboard. “It is a guitar album,” states James in typically clipped fashion. James uses his tried-and trusted chord voicings and fretboard moves, and weaves them around tunes that could have been written for his milestone JT album of 1977, the Grammy-winning Hourglass that came two decades later, or his No 1 release Before This World in 2015.
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