The east coast of America is often a very mysterious place when I'm thinking about it and what's all over there. It's this handle of land that could very well be the right arm of Miss Liberty, the one that never gets its due. It's a pocket of real estate that has New York and Boston and the District of Columbia and then there seems to be space reminiscent of Wisconsin in upstate New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. There's an entire new world of coves and quaint villages in Maine and those parts and then there's another world entirely that goes by the names of Martha's Vineyard and Chappaquiddick Island, off the coast and flush with important and extravagant people brushing shoulders with each other in impressive homes and loafers. What probably makes the place interesting is when those various impressive, well-to-do people who pay property taxes there, have children and we all know how children turn out: unpredictably. These kids will turn the island into a hippie commune, where they'll drink cheap red wine by the jugs, or they'll just forget their manners and lose the class. Those kids. Or they'll be those apples that don't fall all that far from the proverbial trees. Or, better yet, they'll be a little hellish and not fall that far from the tree. It makes for enrichment and it makes for evolution in a fine bit of progress.
Ben Taylor, a musician from those parts, whose wooded and winding lane adorns the cover of his album, "Another Run Around The Sun," is known widely for his famous parents - legendary folk singers James Taylor and Carly Simon - and there's really no certainty that could be called on to place him in either of the categories we design above. He's too cool to be hellish and he's too different to be a similar apple, so maybe there's a third sect to which he can call his own. His own music is as free of entitlement as was that of his parents and maybe more so as his mother at a young age was already experiencing yachts and men wearing apricot-colored items and working through that disdain and status ugliness. Perhaps growing up around the privileged and those leading the kinds of lifestyles forces a young man or woman to chill the fuck out and identify not with that world, but with other things entirely, things that are achieved solely through character and maybe natural suavity, not just by way of loaded bank accounts and trust funds.
Taylor gives off some of the same vibrations that his father started giving off back in the late 60s and early seventies - there's no avoiding that in his voice - but he lends more of the sea salt laze that must make up the other percentage of people calling the Vineyard home that wasn't already accounted for by water. It's a committed, but lackadaisical flair for being able to keep things in perspective and to keep the blood pressure at all-time lows.
*Essay originally published January, 2009