Listen Well: One Man Dog by James Taylor (1972)

December 30th
Kim Taehyung, born 1995
Album recommendation: One Man Dog by James Taylor, released November 1, 1972.

Kim Taehyung turns 28 today. He’s lived a lot of life for someone not yet 30, and his old-soul personality makes his youth — the second-youngest in BTS — even harder to fathom. His fascination with jazz and mid-century American music is well-documented in his fashion, his social media presence (not many other idols are posting “Bill Evans” like an incantation on Weverse, a Korean fan platform), and most of all his music. No one was surprised when his debut EP, Layover, turned out to be a pop-jazz record, complete with a 70-second flute solo on the title track, “Slow Dancing.” 

That flute solo tickled my brain for weeks. What did it remind me of? I didn’t connect the dots until ARMY Twitter, left idle as the last four members of BTS prepared to begin their mandatory military service, started batting around songs they’d like to see the band’s singers cover. As I read through suggestions for Taehyung, my brain finally offered up The Answer: “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”

If Kim Taehyung is unexpectedly youthful today at 28, James Taylor was practically an infant when One Man Dog, his fourth full studio album, was released in late 1972. The singer-songwriter, born in Boston in 1948, was just 24 — but he’d lived a lot of life by then as well. Signed to The Beatles’ Apple Records at 20 in 1968, Taylor’s first record at that label was a miss, but his second, issued by Warner in 1970, was a smash hit. Two singles from that record, Sweet Baby James, made the Billboard Hot 100, and it was nominated for Album of the Year at the 1971 Grammy Awards. His 1971 follow-up, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, spawned a #1 hit in his cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” But there were always critics put off by Taylor’s background — “a spoiled rich kid,” per Lester Bangs, lacking a proper rags-to-riches rock n’ roll story — and his “male Joni Mitchell” confessional style, so it’s perhaps not surprising that a not-so-traditional album like One Man Dog would be received with hesitation by some critics and outright hostility by others. Accusations that the album feels “unfinished” due to the short songs and instrumental interludes were popular, which Taylor and his producer countered by emphasizing the “consciously musical” aspects of the record — the brass arrangements, the “musical ideas other than songs.” (Rolling Stone, November 23, 1972)

They’re right about the musical ideas beyond just “songs,” and I’ll get into that soon, but I have to pause and defend the short songs themselves as well. Outside of the final suite made up of six continuous songs, three tracks clock in under two minutes, including the transcendent “New Tune.” If any one song could make an argument for keeping things short and sweet, it’s this one. Lyrically, it’s a gut punch: “And who am I to try to compete with the din/as the silence so easily rushes in,” Taylor sings at the climax, high and plaintive. And where can you go from the closing lines of “It was something that I’d only dreamed of/something that I’m not quite sure of/something that I’ll never tell you about”? The other two quickies are a pair of blues tunes, one a proudly goofy ode to the chili dog (“so delicious, and good for you too”), the other a sexy number about, well, sex (“she jumps at the chance to tease me with her body”), and bite size is absolutely the right size for those numbers.

Like many of the songs, the lyrics that make the biggest impact are short, distilled down to the essence of the thing. In fact, the weakest track, “Someone,” stands out partially because of its attempts at lyrical profundity. Lyrics like “love is the force from which all beings live” pale in comparison to the unvarnished honesty of “tell me lies but hold me tight.” “Someone,” though given life by the same complement of performers who shape the rest of the album, also has the unfortunate distinction of being an “outside” composition; it was written and composed by jazz fusion guitarist John McLaughlin. Everything else on the album, with the exception of the Taylor/Linda Ronstadt rendition of the ballad “One Morning in May” (pleasant, but also a misfire in my opinion) is by Taylor or his band, making “Someone” feel more like padding than anything else. The James Taylor house style is too strong, particularly on this album, for it to feel like anything else.

You don’t need me, a person who evaded remedial music theory in graduate school by a four-point margin, to explain why James Taylor’s music is great — complex, full of melodies that feel good in your throat, accompanied by fingerstyle guitar that Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers called “more akin to keyboard playing”  in a 2022 article for Acoustic Guitar . But I will highlight what I think is the “musical key” to the album, the thing that makes it hang together as a single work.

It starts in the second track, “Nobody But You.” Taylor apparently told Jon Landau of Rolling Stone that this song was “a throwaway number,” but considering that he makes musical material from its instrumental the focal point of the album-ending suite, I find that claim hard to believe. “Nobody But You,” is a curious song in many ways, but its structure is especially notable. Essentially, we get two verses right off the bat before Taylor even hints at a refrain. The refrain, when it comes, is immediately followed by the “musical key” I mentioned earlier: the pitches D, C-sharp, A, B, C-sharp, and B on the top line, harmonized with the chords G, A, F#m7, Bm9sus4, and E. Here’s a transcription:

The “musical key” of One Man Dog

After a truly excellent Danny Kortchmar guitar solo, this motif returns, this time elaborated as a four-measure melody. But it remains an instrumental, and Taylor’s voice returns for an unrelated outro of the phrase “nobody but you” repeated to fade.

We don’t hear the “musical key” in full again until “Fanfare,” the second individual track in the final suite. But pieces of it are scattered across the album. Just the distinctive motion of two major chords a whole step apart evoke it; in “New Tune,” we hear the G to A major motion immediately, accompanying the opening lines. In “Hymn,” the beginning of the final suite, there’s an F to G major motion embedded in the progression that has a somewhat similar flavor, as well as a G major to A minor resolution in each verse that finally transforms to a G to A major motion in the track’s closing lines. It’s elsewhere, too — even in the Kortchmar-penned “Back on the Street” — but I’ll leave that scavenger hunt to the reader if you’re the type tempted by that sort of thing.

Finally, “Fanfare” takes the full “key” and makes it the song’s instrumental introduction, arranged as a horn chorale, and then later serves as the musical climax, now with the following text:

Picking up, carrying on
Lead your children by hand
Carry on, carry on

Not only does the music directly reference “Nobody But You,” but the lyric “lead your children” ties back to the refrain text of the earlier track, which asserts that “[if] you come on talking about angel bands/they think you’ve come with your soul in your hands/to set their children free.” Like Taylor sings in the opening of “Nobody But You,” he’s “just a Joe that likes to hang around/talking about my problems,” not the wunderkind he felt pressured to be. 

The rest of the suite continues in a similar vein, lyrically, with the melodic gospel number “Little David” taking the subject of heaven and its roads “paved with solid gold,” while “Mescalito” extols the eye-opening and mind-easing powers of the eponymous drug. In “Dance,” the last texted song on the album, Taylor’s warm voice entices the listener to “don’t be nervous, don’t be shy/and give yourself a chance” and join a moonlit dance, where “nobody here tonight came to look at you.” All is well, says the smooth instrumental accompaniment and sweet melody. There’s even a nice inversion of the G to A major motion — each verse begins with C to B-flat major, a whole step motion down instead of up. The reversed direction feels grounded, maybe even resigned, despite the lyrics about freedom. Just when you feel like it all might work out for our Sweet Baby James, he hits us with the final line of the album:

If I could lose my mind
If I could throw myself away

And then we’re thrown into the final instrumental track “Jig,” as if his words have been snatched right out of the air by the dance band from “Dance.”

It’s hard to read some of the contemporary reviews of One Man Dog without feeling a little amused and a little sad. So many saw this record as the product of a newly settled, newly happy James Taylor, a boy genius who had “grown up” and found happiness with his new wife Carly Simon. But with 20/20 hindsight we know that Taylor was so, so young, and his troubles — with drugs, with women, with his family — were far from over. That final line feels more like a cry for help, swallowed up by sound and fury, every time I hear it.