by Tim Williams – A&SB Contributor

Welcome to the 0th anniversary of the Fairly New Music Anti-Listicle Listicle! Herein, I choose eight or some other convenient number of mostly recently released popular (or not) music sensations, sort of at random, but not really, because if the song is kind of boring I’ll pretend I thought I was about to sneeze and thus overcompensated and clicked the wrong track. Then, I will arbitrarily weave these threads into a sweeping narrative, with all the pandering and pseudo-relevance of a Rolling Stone listicle and the self-importance and digression of a Pitchfork album review. Everyone wins. Except for James Taylor.

Or does he? A James Taylor covers album titled, for extra laziness, Covers, seemed ripe for skewing. Especially after Taylor greeted my visit to his website with a Telethon-style video, imploring me to sign up for an e-mail newsletter and punctuating his every word with a hand gesture (for unknown reasons, but maybe it’s like how old people feel the need to shout into telephone receivers when they’re calling long distance).

It didn’t help his case either that the two most palatable-looking songs on Covers were On Broadway and Hound Dog. But as I listened, a terrible conflict in me came to a head, which can only be explained through extended personal anecdote.

I was recently aptly described as a pop-culture overcompensater. This is mostly the fault of my father’s undying love for James Taylor. Though, even in my rebellious youth, I can’t say I was ever strictly offended by the uncoolness of it. But the bland, bright-eyed lyrics and the same light jazz drum accompaniment to every song of the never-ending collection of repackaged hits were enough, especially when Alanis Morrisette was the alternative, to put me off from pop music for a good decade.

Didn’t Taylor, and my father, live during the protest era? Where’s the passion? Where’s the creative force? It’s admirable to resist making your craft political for the sake of being political, and I understand the appeal was he was of the folk movement but simultaneously a throwback to the era of white people discovering jazz. He was safe. What gave better music of the ‘60s and ‘70s its bite was its specificity; the need to only hint at events triggered a rebirth of lyric poetry in lyric writing.

It’s telling that the only James Taylor song I like, Line ‘Em Up, is one of the few grounded in an actual event, and yet also one of the most ambiguous. And he didn’t even write that until the ‘90s. The clarity extends to the composition: the melody and structure avoid most of Taylor’s traps: folk meandering, simplistic improvisation and irritating backup vocals. (Full disclosure: I wrote that bit before listening to it again: There’s actually a fair bit of irritating backup (including a cowbell); the song beats the title phrase to melodic death; it’s pretty maudlin; and, are you kidding me, wind chimes? But I’ll just put this part in parentheses and then the argument is safe, right?)

So, Covers. Let’s leave the obvious money factor aside, for a moment, and sincerely ask, why do artists do cover albums? Lately, this phenomenon has fallen into two categories. The first is the Scarlet Johansson (whose name doesn’t seem ridiculous until you have to write it out) Cover Album: the celebrity without musical talent not being merciful enough to spare us their records entirely, but at least sparing us the pretension that they can both sing and write music. Already you see the problem with this neat classification: Although it’s hard to say what Johansson’s contribution to the album besides a non-descript low alto voice was, Anywhere I Lay My Head is fairly compelling. TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek (and, seemingly so he can claim to have made a cameo in every bizarre pop culture item since his birth, David Bowie) don’t disappoint, reinventing Tom Waits for the noise rock set. Which sounds terrible, but so does Scarlet Johansson doing Waits covers, so whatever.

The adult contemporary counterpart to Anywhere I Lay My Head is Covers. (Just one more bend, and then I’ll devote a couple sentences to the actual album and call it a review). It may shock you to hear that at a certain point in your life, you will no longer want to seek out bleeding-edge pop music trends. Or at least, that was the thinking before the Internet—maybe we’ll continue to be up-to-the-minute on disposable art until our last breaths. Anyway, covers in the 40-plus world exist to extend the range of has-been stars so their fans don’t have to find new bands. (We are not over 40, so the idea that perhaps new is not necessarily better will not be addressed.)

If you’ve been paying attention, here you may think I’m going to reveal that James Taylor has done with Covers to the adult contemporary world what Scarlet Johansson did with Anywhere I Lay My Head to the actresses-capitalizing-on-their-teen-fanbases world (i.e., be neither bland nor offensive). This is absolutely not the case. There is not one song (and, dear reader, I bravely clicked on them all) that breaks Taylor’s mold or is even interestingly awful, and really, the whole thing is a poor subject to write a column about.

So! I think I’ve managed to not fulfill any of the stated goals of this round-up, and thus have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Look forward to the next installment of Themed Article next week!