A Good Review Doesn't Mean You'll Like It.

C-Hall is presenting a four-concert series of James Taylor concerts this spring, and wanting to see what all the hype was about (and wanting to see Alison Krauss, who was to be a special guest), I bought tickets for myself, my mom, and two family friends.

After hearing and reading amazing reviews of the first concert in the series, I was pretty excited to see ours last Wednesday. James Taylor and guests were billed to perform American hymnody, blues, and bluegrass—the music that influenced Taylor’s music—in his “Roots” concert. I have never been drawn to James Taylor, but to be fair, I don’t know much of his music. Despite my disinterest in James, I do really like Alison Krauss and an opportunity to see her, along with the musical genres programmed for “James Taylor Roots” and the amazing press the first James Taylor concert received, I felt drawn to attend.

On Wednesday night, the house was packed and surging with electricity. The excitement was on the brink of overflowing. Audience members around us spoke of their love for the man and recounted the many James Taylor concerts they had seen. “This is my 200-something-th James Taylor concert,” the middle-aged woman to my left said. I didn’t know if she was exaggerating or not because I was not sure if attending that many concerts by one single artists is, in practice, possible. I understood that the artist has many die-hard fans who would do many things I would deem impractical, but whether one could literally attend 200 concerts by one artist, I don’t know. I suppose if he has been performing for about 40 years, it could be. Maybe I should look this up. I might. But not at that moment, because mid-contemplation of the seemingly impossible, the lights dimmed, the audience erupted into an applause hardly customary for a classical music venue, and from my row-H side balcony seat thousands of feet away, I saw James Taylor walk on the stage.

Two minutes into his first number, I remembered, “Wait, I’m not 60 years old! I would never want to go to a James Taylor concert!” Why was I there?

Just because a famous non-classical musician was performing at Carnegie Hall and had received incredible publicity and has many, many fans (who do in fact like his music), it doesn’t mean that I would enjoy his concert. And about five songs in, I realized I had heard a lot of his music but never bothered to remember it because it was all the same.

I was so bored and I wanted to leave. Alison Krauss was amazing, but I had hard time deciding whether her 10 minutes of excellence was worth the remaining hour of destined mediocrity. Probably not.

I felt badly, though, sitting with my mom and being so unenthused. I was afraid I was ruining the concert for her. At intermission, the couple next to us commented on how nice it was for mother and daughter to attend a concert together, and I felt even worse! Here I was, resentful at having to sit through the repetitive and relentless acoustic folk stylings of James Taylor (and despite what he and his fans—nostalgic for their drug-addled days of yore—think, adding chimes and synthesizer only makes the music worse), while these strangers admired me and the relationship I share with my mother. “I must be a good daughter!” I resolved. “I must live up to the standard thrown on me by that couple!” During the second act, I livened up and tried to act engaged.

Fortunately, the second half was a bit more to my liking because the music played was predominantly “root” and not at all “leaves” or “fruit”. JT and his band played blues with hardly any sixties acoustic folk flavor, and then a real blues musician, serving as a special guest, came on stage and played blues significantly better than JT and his folk-band ever could. The plucked, broken guitar chords that characterized almost every song in the first half were far less frequent in the second half, and dare I say scarce among the blues numbers.

After a super-surprise performance by Tony Bennet, James Taylor played, to my sweet relief, his final number: “Oh, what a Beautiful Morning,” from Oklahoma. The man grew up on listening to musicals, among other things (like hymns, bluegrass, and blues, apparently, as I learned from the program notes and his on-stage musings), and while I would never before have heard a connection between Taylor’s music and that of Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s, I did that night. However, I have a suspicion that this was due more to Taylor’s interpretation of the song than of any real connection between the music of Oklahoma and say, “Fire and Rain.” Regardless of who influenced who, the strong link hit me during the intro. “Wow,” I thought, “This is exactly like all my favorite James Taylor music!” And that’s because it was. James played his go-to plucked intro of broken chords that he had been playing all night long (the reason I have heard and forgotten—and consequently deemed indistinguishable—all of his music), and then began to sing Curly’s opening strains.

After the concert, my mom commented, “I liked it better before the guests came on. They were so much better than him, I didn’t really want to listen to his music anymore.” Well, that was good news. My lack of interest didn’t ruin the concert for her after all. James Taylor did that all by himself.