Samuel James Taylor
Wild Tales and Broken Hearts
KI AN Projects
21 October 2022
While the lockdown prevented numerous musicians from playing live, for Sheffield’s Samuel James Taylor, this became a musical lifesaver. Initially feeling like jacking it all in because he was removed from the human interaction of touring, he found that without those pressures, he was able to reconnect with his muse and start writing again, soaking up influences from albums that had first inspired him to become a songwriter, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Carol King, The Beatles. Listening to the nasal timbre of his voice, you might suspect Steve Forbert was in there too.
Recorded live in Nashville with Neilson Hubbard at the controls, Wild Tales and Broken Hearts opens with the catchy chorus title track, the lyrics about finding your fire and voice again pretty much summing up that moment at the crossroads (“You awoke from your slumber, lying in a haze/You couldn’t even recognise your own face/Searching for something in the back of your mind/That downtrodden fool, that you’d left behind/Wild tales and broken hearts/When you think you’re nearly washed up/You’re just at the start”) and inspiring him to keep singing.
Harmonica introduces the slower pace of the pedal steel-flavoured Faith, Hope and Fortune, which continues on a similar line of feeling you’ve played your last hand (“I sold my soul to the night games, then folded on an ace/Looked inside for a memory, but there was just a stranger’s face”), leaving him “stood beneath the sunset at the edge of the world/Shouting out for the thunder, still trying to dive for pearls…standing at the station, just the ember of a flame”.
Fingerpicked acoustic with echoes of Streets Of London to the melody, the fingerpicked 70s soft folk rock of Churchville Avenue is a gentle “memory, of a time, from long before”, of “a little girl, who grew into my world” as he sings about following your dreams (“I guess you could have stayed/But the world it couldn’t wait/There was something, a feeling deep inside/So you left your childhood room, here on Churchville Avenue/But it’s still there, every time you close your eyes”) but how the past will always find “a way to pull us back inside”.
A more uptempo urgent rock-n-rolling strum, Virginia Girl, with another infectious chorus (“You’re in trouble now I know/Just ask for the future in the palm of your hand/And she’ll point to the wishing well”), speaks of looking through a dreamer’s eyes and embracing life, creation and the “flame of lucid courage/Burning brighter than the stars she sees”.
Slowing it back down to a simple fingerpicked acoustic and pedal steel, I Kissed Your Sister By The Apple Tree is a simple confessional of fleeting stolen young love (“Out in the garden where the flowers grow free/Gone too soon, like a summer’s breeze/A kiss and a moment at quarter to three”), moving on to the more adult complexities of the soft offbeat scuffed chiming shuffle Exquisite Pain (“I left a boy, returned a man/I was holding all the answers in the palm of my hands/But it’s clear now that something’s changed”) as he reflects “I was looking forwards, while I was standing in the past/You left me like a statue made out of glass”. In similar territory, on the Springsteen-coloured acoustic Through The Silence And The Half Light, looking to rekindle old flames, he refuses to let “the poet of my life” slip away as he avows “I’m overcome with a vision…I’m not leaving this memory as just a dream we had…take a chance on a history and turn back time”,
Hubbard laying down a simple, steady drum beat with pedal steel weeping in the background, keeping hold of love is also a theme of Rage and Fight (“Fight for love, fight for you, fight for us”), the shimmering notes of Map Of Love draw on nature imagery to celebrate the contentment found with his wife (“We found a home in the forest of our love/In the branches, the arms of our love”) who is “the map of love, that guides me through this life”.
There’s more of such imagery anchoring the Simon-influenced jauntiness of the gospel-tinged Rolling Thunder about finding clarity through the inspiration or help of others or perhaps a higher power when you’re lost (“you roll your thunder, from a hundred miles away/Roll your thunder, the lighting strikes again/I was shouting out and calling, searching for the truth/Then I heard your rolling thunder, I saw the living proof”).
A barely there fingerpicked pattern and piano notes guide the wistful The Best Is Yet To Come My Love carrying its upbeat message in its title, dissolving into the acoustic guitar instrumental Reverie before ending, conjuring his namesake on the dreamy shuffling Time May Dance with its warming theme that, while “We’ve all felt pain, sorrow in vain”, the years may pass and “This candle flickers and burns right out”, we can still hold fast to who we are (“Time may dance around these ageing bones/I’ll still be the one you used to know”) as love endures and life is “what we seize throwing caution to the breeze” to “Foster your light and carry all your dreams”. An album about resilience and reigniting the fires to follow the life you dream, to not give in to despair and to rise in the hope of brighter days ahead because, as he says in the title track, “Dreams can last forever/Just don’t tear them apart/Keep singing”.
Order via Bandcamp: https://samueljamestaylor.com/album/wild-tales-and-broken-hearts