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Album
Taylor, Chip
Yonkers NY
(Train Wreck)

Price: 169 SEK

If a songwriter of some accomplishment who is also a singer predominantly known for his work in country music was looking for a subject for a deeply personal cycle of songs, it’s pretty unlikely that Yonkers, New York, a small city bordering on New York City’s borough of the Bronx, would be the subject.

Not, of course, unless the writer is Chip Taylor, who grew up there. With Yonkers NY, Taylor, a veteran songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Johnny Cash, Peggy Lee, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, the Hollies and, of course, the
Troggs (who waxed his first big hit, “Wild Thing”), has gone back to his childhood and adolescence and come up with eleven songs filled with warmth and humor, enlivened with spoken reminiscences and packaged with a book of lyrics and vintage photos of
the people and places that are their subjects.

In an era where revelations of childhood abuse and torment are routinely dished out on daytime television and in best-selling memoirs, Yonkers NY stands out for its depiction of a fairly normal childhood spent with loving parents and two older brothers who only tormented young Jamie, as Chip was known back then, in the ways older brothers
always do. The family was different from its grey-flannel-suit-wearing suburban neighbors only in that the elder Taylor was a golf pro, not a businessman commuter (although he managed to convince his youngest son for years that he was also an FBI agent), as well as a high-stakes gambler on occasion. The songs on Yonkers NY take us into this
family and into Taylor’s discovery of music, horses, and girls, opening these subjects up with a skill only a master songwriter can summon.

Yonkers NY is a milestone in a career which has seen Taylor give up performing for songwriting, then take up performing again in the 1970s, when he recorded three highly-regarded albums for Warner Bros. When they failed to sell enough to impress the company (although they created a cult following both in the United States and Europe which has only grown over the years), Taylor retired to gamble full-time. In 1993, he felt the old itch and un-retired, and in 2001 he met fiddler Carrie Rodriguez at the South by
Southwest event in Austin, Texas, initiating a creative partnership that catapulted both to the upper ranks of Americana music and saw them perform all over the world. The two parted ways in 2006 so that Rodriguez could concentrate on her solo career, but Taylor has continued, releasing Songs from a Dutch Tour in 2008, and, now, Yonkers NY.

Yonkers NY is being released by Train Wreck Records on 9/29 in a deluxe package with a 35-page book designed by Andy Taray. The book is filled with photographs of Chip Taylor’s family and, of course, Yonkers itself, and also contains lyrics to all the
songs, as well as Taylor’s commentary on them. The album will contain two discs, one of which will have the full cycle, including Taylor’s spoken material, in which he tells stories and shares memories of this period of his life, the second of which will contain
edited versions, with just the songs.

Throughout, Taylor is accompanied by a superb band, consisting of John Platania, electric guitar; Greg Leisz, steel guitar, dobro, and mandolin; Tony Mercadante, electric bass; Seth Farber, piano and accordion; Kendel Carson, fiddle; and Tony Leone, drums.

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