A gifted and wide-ranging vocalist and composer, Livingston Taylor belongs to a musical household that counts soft rock luminary James Taylor among its members. Although his path never matched his older brother James in broad commercial reach, Livingston scored chart successes with “I Will Be in Love with You” and “First Time Love,” issued more than a dozen studio albums, and sustained an active touring life across five decades.
The third of five children born to Dr. Isaac Taylor, scion of an established Southern family, and his wife Trudy, a lyric soprano from longstanding New England stock, Livingston entered the world in a Boston suburb yet grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, once his father became dean of a medical school there.
As a boy he struggled with profound emotional difficulties. While enrolled at the Quaker-operated Westtown School in Pennsylvania, his depression grew so acute that he admitted himself to McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts—the same facility that had treated James earlier. Much of his therapy revolved around singing and guitar playing. After his release in the late 1960s he stayed in the Boston area and began appearing in neighborhood clubs and coffeehouses. Talent scout and producer Jon Landau, later Bruce Springsteen’s manager, discovered him and placed him among Capricorn Records’ earliest signings in 1970. The self-titled debut album, helmed by Landau, featured the autobiographical “Carolina Day” and set the tone for Taylor’s intimate, unhurried style. His follow-up, Liv, again produced by Landau, yielded the modest hit “Get Out of Bed.” The Capricorn association ended with 1973’s Over the Rainbow, which contained “Be My New Horizon,” a new composition supported by vocal harmonies from James Taylor and Carly Simon, then Taylor’s sister-in-law, yet failed to sell strongly.
Five years passed before Epic issued 3 Way Mirror, whose track list included both “I Will Be in Love with You” and “Going Round One More Time,” a song James later recorded on 1985’s That’s Why I’m Here. Taylor promoted the album by opening Linda Ronstadt’s “Living in the USA” tour. In 1979 Capricorn assembled Echoes, a compilation drawn from his first three records.
Man’s Best Friend, his final Epic release, appeared the next year and spotlighted the minor hit “First Time Love” alongside the playful “Pajamas,” which Taylor and his wife Maggie later expanded into a children’s book. He also hosted the syndicated television program This Week’s Music and joined the Berklee College of Music faculty in 1984 to teach performance. Four years elapsed before Life Is Good, the first of two albums produced by Artie Traum and Scott Petito, reached stores. Taylor continued with the same team on 1993’s Our Turn to Dance and worked solely with Petito on 1996’s Bicycle.
He placed two further projects with David Chesky’s Chesky label: Good Friends in 1993 and the R&B-oriented covers set Ink in 1997. Unsolicited Material, issued in 1994, preserved the genial spirit of his concerts and ranged from comic numbers such as Andy Breckman’s “Railroad Bill” and “The Dollar Bill Song,” a medley titled “Songs That Should Never Be Played on the Banjo,” and the originals “Jacques Cousteau” and “I Hate Country Music” to sincere readings of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul” and Earl Scruggs’ “Earl’s Breakdown.” Razor & Tie compiled an 18-song overview, Carolina Day: The Livingston Taylor Collection, in 1998.
After the millennium, Taylor continued to record, releasing the spiritually tinged There You Are Again in 2006 and the widely praised Last Alaska Moon in 2010, both on the Chesky-affiliated Coconut Bay imprint. Blue Sky, an energetic set of fresh originals and reinterpretations of pop standards, followed in 2014. He adopted a comparable approach for Safe Home in 2017, marking his fiftieth year as a professional performer.
