Chip Taylor
The Cradle Of All Living Things
Trainwreck
31 March 2023
At age 83, after 52 years of making albums, you might think Chip Taylor would perhaps slow down and ease up a little. But no, he released his 27th album, Whiskey Salesman 1958, in 2019, since when there’s been at least three more that flew under the radar without any promotion, and this, The Cradle Of All Living Things, is a double album with 28 tracks.
Although featuring more instrumentation than usual with bass, drums, vibraphone and keyboards (by Norwegian collaborator Goran Grini) augmenting the usual combo of acoustic and electric guitars from Taylor and John Platania, it’s firmly in the now well-established style with the mostly spoken songs delivered in a 3am intimately confessional whisper, often deeply autobiographical and honest, with lyrics about regret, advice, compassion, apology mortality and, most frequently, love. There’s also protest and social commentary, such as the opening title track, a slow waltzing duet with Hege Brynildsen as he sings, “Bless the children… forced to work in the fields and bless the mothers …who invent every meal and the fathers …who trade in all their dreams in the cradle of all living things“, essentially a hymn to those humble souls who keep things turning with the seat of their brow, summed up in the refrain “you save the world when your alarm clock rings”. Social commentary continues into the philosophical, harmonica-haunted Animals On The Beach, an observation of watching animals, dogs one assumes, run on the beach, let loose by their masters, and imaging some time in the future where things are reversed, the song’s refugee message encapsulated in how “We’re all animals on beach” and “after running on that beach, some swam far into the water/I’d rather swim until I die than go back there”.
Again featuring Brynildsen, the spare piano accompanied True Love is the first of several reveries on the subject (others including It Is Written, I Don’t Know Much and So Selfishly Loved) before, following the spoken intro, Anthony offers a melancholic tribute to American chef Anthony Bourdain written shortly after his suicide.
Elsewhere on the first disc, How Come That Always Happens? is basically about looking on the bright side when things are dark, drawing on gambling imagery, Even Money is about how love and life is always a gamble, a theme that also underpins The Good And The Bad (“Before we go any further with this thing we have had/Let me warn you about the good and the bad/Well the good thing is I will love you till the day that I die/And the bad thing is I have a past that I just can’t deny/And the good thing is I will promise you I will walk out that door/,,and the bad thing is I’ve promised that before”), echoed perhaps in On Reflection and wishing we could take back things done and said and trying to be a better person while Twenty Years Ago has a late night piano bar mood musing on mortality (a theme returned to later on I Don’t Know What Song I’ll Sing Tonight).
As an old-school troubadour, Oh It Feels Kinda Different could well be seen as a swipe at the current auto-tune obsession, and he sings, “I just want it with feeling, don’t give a shit if it’s in tune/ Just give me old Elvis and some song from Memphis/And keep old John Prine in the room“.
Part one ends with Closing Time, another end-of-day love song, while Disc 2 opens with Lost Pictures, a further dip into forgotten memories and nostalgia, specifically nodding to Phil Sinclair, who ran a music store in Belfast and was responsible for turning many on to Taylor’s music. Prine, who Taylor supported on tour in Belfast, gets another mention in the slow bluesy strummed Give Her Away Johnny, offering advice on dumping the woman stringing the title character along. In contrast, conjuring thoughts of Kristofferson, Wounded Bird speaks of taking broken hearts under your wing. The healing power of music forms the backbone to Only A Song, and That’s What I Like About The Sky is about how you sometimes have to just enjoy life without thinking about the cost (“Kate never checks the prices, she just like the food she likes”) just as Planetary Scheme Of Things is about not kicking up a fuss and upsetting the order but understandably still wanting what is your due because, as he says “we all come first”.
Completing the second set are the dobro-stained, Prine-like One More Dream To Go, a call to pick yourself back up and put one foot after another, the compassion-infused Do You Feel OK? and the bittersweet Someone To Live For which, basically says that while you may screw up on love, your mum’s always there for you on the other end of the phone. And it all closes with the five-minute Why Didn’t I Think Of That Before? a guitar and piano philosophical rumination that captures the album’s running thread about humanity and thinking of others, and doing “some little thing for somebody else”, ending on a prayer that, his truth marching on, manages in the refrain “Glory Glory …what is your story” to combine both The Battle Hymn Of The Republic and Oasis. Designed to be listened to in those quiet twilight moments when you need reassurance that you are loved, you have loved, and that the world is not the hell it can sometimes seem, Taylor will rock you to sleep in the cradle of all living things.