James Taylor - Walking Man CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

because it is the most obvious, contradiction in Taylor's work is his relationship to rock & roll, a style he occasionally embraces, but with a scholarly gentility that minimizes the vulgar and exhibitionist elements of rock — elements without which it cannot live — and treats it more as an exploration of musical dialect. To those for whom rock & roll is sacrosanct, Taylor's interest seems duplicitous in the restraint of its aggression and therefore patronizing. To others, like me, who view contemporary music as a pluralistic, continually eclectic phenomenon, Taylor's approach seems legitimate on its own terms, affectionate and certainly not patronizing. I emphasize this particular contradiction because Walking Man contains Taylor's most unabashed rock efforts to date. "Rock 'N' Roll Is Music Now" pays direct tribute to the black origins of rock & roll and its assimilation within our cultural lifeblood and Taylor delivers Chuck Berry's 1964 hit, "The Promised Land," with understated fidelity. Both cuts work in the way they're supposed to, as energetic polished homages. Of the remaining eight songs, only one, the other non-Taylor composition, David Spinozza and Joey Levine's "Ain't No Song," fails to please. A tuneful medium rocker, arranged soul-style, its inane lyric contracts the phrase, "Could hardly sing about you," into an unintentional pun, "Carly sing about you."

While the album's rock artifacts add dimension to Walking Man, six Taylor originals develop its central theme—the psychological reunion between material and incorporeal perceptions of reality. The opening title cut depicts with striking imagery the contradictions between social integration and visionary solitude, locating both possibilities in the autobiographical persona of the walking man, "moving in silent desperation/Keeping an eye on the Holy Land, a hypothetical destination." At the end of the song, Taylor bids "so long" to this isolated figure, a metaphor for the once-dominant darker half of a divided sensibility. The question of resistance or inaction in the face of Watergate is raised in "Let It All Fall Down"; its resigned chorus (featuring Paul and Linda McCartney and Carly Simon) seems to advocate inertia as our only alternative. "Let