When You Can’t Get Back Home, Part Two

James Taylor is one of my favorites from when I was in my teens. I find that his compendium stirs a particular set of emotions. He is an open book. Most of Taylor’s songs have a feel of nostalgia, and I think that even his voice longs to retrieve something lost, like his divorced parents and fragmenting family. During his high school senior year he checked himself into a psychological hospital in Massachusetts.

He wrote “Sweet Baby James” for his nephew and namesake, James, son of his brother Alex. They loved their family, but it, in some ways, slipped through their fingers. 

Another composition, “Enough To Be On Your Way,” he says is about striving for reconnection. After his brother, Alex, died, he was struck hard over how life had kept them apart. While their love was real, their journeys were very different. James saw the life and relationship they shared as boys as “home.” They never got it back. Alex became an alcoholic. James became a heroin addict and, in fact, wrote the hit “Fire and Rain” while in rehab. He was trying to express the grief and sorrow he held from a lifetime of not getting “home.”

Time passes while we wait for relationships to work out. We think we have no control because we have little control. The fact that we cannot immediately fix everything does not mean we should give up on improving anything. 

Baby steps. Our longing for home is as legit as our hunger for food and is just as essential.

Craving for love? Go “home” and feed it. You can do this.