Fire and Rain

Reassessing a James Taylor classic, as LA meets a new weather normal.

The rain is falling hard in Los Angeles this week. Grey days, closed in, permanently wet. Stupid drivers, the sound of sirens. A mild panic. Pounding storms have taken the place of more regular rainfall.

It’s not unlike what we just went through with the wildfires. Nature takes hold and the normal predictability of a city disappears. Order is revealed to be a myth, once again.

Given how quickly we’ve been beset by both wildfire and heavy rain, the James Taylor song “Fire and Rain” keeps coming to mind, unprompted. Aided by the line; “I’ve seen sunny days I thought would never end”. An LA echo that even Randy Newman might be envious of.

I’m about as into Taylor as any other slight sentimentalist who likes guitar. I don’t own one of his records, but you don’t really need to, do you? Any more than one needs to own the elements themselves. His “unique brand of bittersweet, folk rock”, as Buzz Aldrin described it in The Simpsons, is just out there in the atmosphere (like Homer).

In that way we can take it for granted, so I went back and took a listen to “Fire and Rain” this week. The lyrics came off a bit corny, which wasn’t a shock. But the very-1970 production and splashy drum sound doesn’t help. The song is sad, but uplifting, which may be its secret. “Fire and Rain” worked, obviously, or it wouldn’t still be in my head.

So I read a little about its creation, too.

"It did come very, very fast,” Taylor told NPR in 2000. “But it was a great relief… There was things that I needed to get rid of or at least get out of me or get in front of me or at least have some other relationship than feeling them internally…”

He’s referring to the song's three verses, each directly related to three personal traumas; the loss of a friend, drug addiction and his time in a mental hospital. Tied together by the simple idea of weathering harsh, contradictory elements; fire and rain.

Speaking of his most well-known song and its origins, Taylor went on to elaborate on the mysteries of songwriting in general:

"They come less frequently and perhaps I don't have the same urgency to get them out… I think a couple of things have changed. One is that I'm older and that I'm not as emotionally intense. I've found other solutions--emotional solutions in my life. Another thing is that I'm more distracted. It's just very difficult for me. I think songs need to come out of--really out of a state of boredom almost as much as anything else. You need to have empty time in order to receive them. I'm much more distracted now and there's less time for them to come through.”

Fire and rain have both come to feel like standard weather events in Los Angeles in recent years, far from the merely poetic and raw, impressionistic emotional picture Taylor was painting from his subconscious. We’re learning to be bombarded by both, almost simultaneously.

Now I feel that if by chance, Taylor were to sing “Fire and Rain” at some kind of charity benefit in LA, it would seem rather on the nose. A thought sadder than anything a six-string might possibly muster.