Oh, uh, oh, oh, your first encounter. Yeah, first encounter. Yeah, first encounter. First encounter.
First encounter. First encounter. First encounter. Some of that.
I think it's first. Hello and welcome to WNC, original music episode 116, The Golden Plates episode. That's for you, Utah. Very happy to have returning this week, Taylor Maxin.
Taylor is a very talented singer-songwriter from Asheville, North Carolina, and really from all around the country, presently from Asheville, North Carolina. I want to point out in the opening clip, he was right. It was close encounters of the third kind, so he's a better movie buff than I am as well. You can find Taylor's music at TaylorMaxin.bancamp.com, and also you can find him on Facebook and SoundCloud.
There are links in the show description for that. On top of everything else, Taylor is a licensed clinical and mental health counselor. You can find the link to his page for that in the show notes as well. Now here he is, Taylor Maxin.
Christmas and Easter, life's the season. Me, I miss the children. We're too old for Santa. We got time to wait.
This is how we landed in this God for sake and play. Now know when we won't conquer, all our troubles great and small. Me, I am with you. Here we are, the stranger.
One cares to see. Spirits are not safe to hear. The bar keep my inquiry. One man talks to people that he alone can see.
Who will take care of him on this Christmas Eve? Every question, great and small. Having answer to them all. Bag and anchor through the darkest of last fall and fall.
It's Christmas and Atlanta, but we are here together. Come on, take my hand. That's a sad song. It's without getting into too much detail, but it's kind of important.
Because it's one of those songs where I'm holding my cards a little bit. I think if I were the listener, the song is written in the mode of like a rich, rich, rich, rich song. He's a great American songwriter who I learned about through uncle T. Below and well co.
He toured with him. He put out three great records and he's still doing stuff. He disappeared. He's still out there.
He's really good. It was inspired by his style of songwriting. It was a difficult juncture in my life. We were crossing into 40.
My wife and I and child free and thinking we wanted to build a family, but also ambivalent. We went through a process of adoption and that totally failed. It was just a really hard time. That song was written out of as a reflection of where I was at.
It was a grief song. It was a sad time. It's Christmas in Atlanta. The thing that was going on is this was true.
It was in Atlanta maybe four or five years ago. It was in the upper 70s and 80s. The entire Christmas time. It was just weird.
It was a good time. It was not like how I felt. Things aren't right. We're off the rails.
The climate is running. I'm feeling a muck. There's no official chorus but there's a little kind of what you call the chorus. It will say it's been hard but we've been dragging anchor through the darkest of line and squalls, but here with you, I know we'll make landfall, which is kind of weird that a landlocked song I'll get landed on using it, but I'm gonna forward it.
See, there's a song or anything. You could say, that doesn't really belong in that song. Maybe I should change it, and I'll probably change it now. They got lakes.
Thanks, Ron. They do have lakes, and they got rivers. Yeah, exactly. Here at home, every day was just the same.
All alone, making up my own games, sister said, Oh, don't you ever play alone, father said, Boy, it's just too headstrong, kicking up dust, making up the city roof, kicking off my tennis shoes. Shit out of luck, here comes the best of the sun. I'm gonna let up, got me looking for an end to run. Build the world a mile, I can do it up at high place.
And when I build the world a mile, build it up with people just like me. It's your turn, lost in all the thoughts from my life. It's just a time-lapse, you've had enough. I'm sending in for the rest of the tunes, I'm all crammed up, secret play.
Rising up in a fairy tale, watching the moon, sweep across the cloudless sky, full of sky. So I can go wherever I play. People who... Inspired by maybe a dream, but wherever it came from, I got sort of tuned by the universe into the idea of like a weird kid, maybe like an autistic kid who doesn't have a lot of friends and just like a little fictional character, almost like a short story or a vignette type of thing came to me.
I wanna write a song cycle about a kid who has decided to build his own tower to the moon, which is like totally what you could see at children's book, kids like always tracking the moon and you know, can't get along with his parents and you know, they put him to bed because he paints the dog with grease on the song. It's just kind of a silly little thing. So he decides to build a tower to the moon so he can be in the air and the sky with the moon. And it definitely pulls in because you can't not.
There's a lot of me in it. The whole, there's an alternate verse in there that's like, what is it? It's sort of like a tired of these fluorescent tunes. Like I'm talking about being in school and the experience I had as like a kid with super ADHD and just like how hard that experience was to like be expected by the world and teachers to like perform and to be competent in like whatever else it says I'm supposed to do when I did not naturally, I did not jibe with how I work naturally.
You know, mostly just cause like my attention is always on other things. I wanted to like, I was thinking about piano or the guitar when in the middle of class. And so that was very much my experience that I was filtering into that song. And I mean, you can, you said it was very much like a children but I think it would be great children because also very much what a child would think.
Like I'm gonna, you know, build a, what, tower to the moon? Tower to the moon. Yeah, it's like get some 10 pin emails of hammer and some two F-words I'm gonna build. Yeah.
Keep working on it. I'm still doing this. I was doing it with my wife's who's in it yesterday. I built a cracker tower with like crackers and cheese.
I was like, you know, six inches high. I don't know where this comes from, but. I mean, that part sounds a little bit like, what's the Steven Spielberg movie? Oh, oh, oh, your first encounter.
Yeah, first encounter. Yeah, first encounter. Yeah, third, first, first kind. Close encounter is the first kind.
Oh, the first, first kind. Some of it. First, I love that movie. It's funny.
We can't remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Well, like a little kid's use like the ships and he's like, Ice cream.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's funny thing like that. Oh, you know, but the dad, that's right. He builds.
They all, they all have this image in their head. Yes. And he's able to get it. Yes.
And it brings them together and it's like he builds the devil's tower out of the mashed potatoes. Yeah. That's brilliant. That's right.
Exactly. Came to me. This means something. And so the second in that, so it's moon.
I saw word of all moon and evil things. No, the third one is not in that. Oh, and that's not only that's a teaser. It's out there though.
Good thing. Next step, people have to know what's the name of that song. I'll have to relearn it. What is the third one?
I have to think about it. I can think of the name of it right now. To this day, I think he knows the name of that song and he just won't tell me more from Taylor Max and in just a few moments. I want to remind you to find Taylor at TaylorMax and dot bandcamp.com also other links in the show notes to find Taylor.
Search for Taylor Max and music on Facebook and Instagram. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcast. Original music is what to look for. You can also find the podcast at wncoriginalmusic.com.
Also, we are on what else? Amazon now. I don't quite know how that works yet, but also audible.com. And you can find this by playing on your smart speaker.
Just say Alexa Play Podcast WNC Original. Also, don't forget just in general live music is starting back up and live music by and large means your local musicians. If you choose to support them and please do that wherever you live, go out and support your local musicians. Do it safely.
But do it as much as you can. If you can see them live, that would be great. If you can, you can buy their music or merchandise or just send them a note and a letter or yeah, send them a letter or just a message of support and let them know how much you appreciate them. This is Jonathan Taylor from Hustle Souls.
You're listening to WNC Original music. That sounds like a good question. It sounds like a good question. How long were you a musician before you decided to write songs?
Yeah. It was interesting to send it about. I started playing guitar when I was in P. Well, I started playing piano when I was like five.
And I did, I learned in music theory as a really young kid and did recitals and played little classical pieces and stuff. And then throughout my early through pre- Keita lessons and I played kind of everything. Like my parents were like, oh, you have an ear and nobody else in the family goes. So let's give you a trombone kind of thing.
And so I was like, I did cello, trombone. I think I did a step with saxophone. Keita played in the piano. And then once I, my brother, I have two brothers, both older and the one that's closest to me to me, brought home on acoustic guitar at one point.
And I think I like, it was all busted up and I strung it. He wasn't doing anything with it. I strung it and I was into, you know, because of the older brothers. I was into a lot of their stuff like Warren's of John, like it was big into like a lot of that stuff.
And like the SNIS and R.E.M. And so that's the stuff that like, like some of my earliest guitar playing was like sitting with Johnny Marr of the SNIS and like, what's he doing? How's he doing? You know, that was my early.
So I totally dropped all the other instruments once I found the guitar. Like a lot of musicians do. I just fell in love with it. And I said, well, hyper focus, six, eight hours a day.
Like, even more of the homework, don't eat, you know, learning playing Floyd songs, you know, just classic stuff. High flying with wit, weight, I spent a head this day. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, and the scubbers out the gray. Leaves and eyes are sky so clear it gets lonely out there far, would you like to take my place?
I'll take two skis, but not just like a sleeping room. Then that begins to flesh out. World of My Own Can first. That character, that boy.
Can we just talk about Moon? No, no, no. World of My Own Amoon are the same. Okay.
So they're part of it. And so I'm just saying, so yeah, the kid from the World of My Own, that's the, that's the kid in Moon. And now he's, now it's getting specifically into him and his world a little more. And so there's like, it starts to like, um, hear it home.
Everything is just the same all alone, making up my own games. Sister says, why don't you ever play along? Father says, the boy's just too headstrong. So it's just setting the scene and that the world of my own is obviously like going to the moon is to a way to create a, this world of my own.
I can't make sense of this world around me. So I'll make my own. Were you thinking about, I remember you've talked about this, you know, when you played me before, were you thinking about like actually writing a children's book? Yes.
That's right. We do talk about it. Um, this goes down in the annals of many half-baked ideas that I get that I don't know. I never followed through own because I tend to shift focus so quickly.
I would still love to do it. In fact, we have a friend who's a theater, she's an actress and a theater aficionado. Um, who's from San Diego and she's like, she really liked these songs and she's like, you should seriously think about working this up. Like this could be a play.
Oh yeah. You can do all the music for it and incidental music and have it be a whole thing about this kid and his family and building the tower of the moon. We'll have this awesome moon backlit and you know, so that's really exciting. But that takes focus.
Yeah. You gotta focus on that for a while. Yeah. And I tend to just want to kind of move on to the next thing that appeals to me.
It might be the kind of thing that if you could contact some theater folks around here that, you know, if you had somebody doing other parts of it better, they could do like quickly, you know, and they're thinking, hey, I wish I, you know, I wish I had someone to do the music and I would totally do it. If somebody approached me and was like, I heard this and I'd love to do this and what are the other songs and they liked it. I could totally see doing it. I think I would need a collaborator to keep me focused on track.
Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Um, one thing I liked about, I can't remember if it was World of the Home or Moon where you have an instrumental break.
Yeah. And I see a lot of, um, I see a lot of people play, especially like, like, sing or songwriters play, you know, just in a piece of guitar live and they'll do like a, um, like a chord break and it always seems kind of weird, you know, so you do a great job of having the chords, but also putting some, you know, actual lead and, um, you know, melody in there, but not losing the chord. Cause I think that's what they're afraid of. They're afraid of, okay, if I just play lead, it's hard to play lead.
Yeah. Keep the chord there. So you did a good work. Yeah.
Thank you. You know, early on, I'm actually less of whatever fast-solved guitarist than I was 20 years ago or 25 years ago. I spent hours learning, it's almost embarrassing. You know the Windham Hill catalog?
Do you know what's wrong? Yeah. Yeah. So like that's the stuff that, well, I listened to a lot of stuff.
I mean, I was like doing everything from like shredding, like Megadeth solos, like Dave Masne, to, uh, to playing like Windham Hill songs. So like kind of new A.G. And that's where I got into these weird out tunings and tapping and a lot of the stuff. So I was really long before I did any songwriting, uh, formal songs.
I mean, I wrote songs before I did lyrical work. I was writing pieces that I was attempting to put together the, the, the bass and the melody together like a Windham Hill type of guitar tonight. Yeah. Or classical.
I mean, I play, I took a little classical too. So that, you know, you're trying to keep the bass going while you're editing, simultaneously. And that's probably where that comes from. If I practice more of even better.
Oh. Yeah. Thanks. All the things I do right as a child, maybe I could go to the path to save it for me.
Try to drag it away. Thanks. Some days I feel naked against the unknown. I hold off a trip.
Every question down to the real thing. My apprentice will pop her if she can. Try to stand in my way. Even thanks.
I'm never standing my way. Try to drag you away. Never drag you away. Never drag you away.
Never drag you away. Never drag you away. Never drag you away. Yeah.
You were there for that, actually. That was like written in the room with you. Pretty much. Yeah, I think so.
Like all that. That came out whole except I think like I changed the bridge and which is why I forgot it. Which my brain was like which bridge. So there's one of the cons back to the question you asked me.
That creep sand changing. Once you have all summers, it'll be interesting to see which version you play. You remember the older version. One time.
I do. Thanks, man. I'll take it back. I'll take it back.
Which one is it's weekend of all summers. Evil things. Yeah, so yeah, that's man. That is one of those weird things.
So I would ask you like when you does it work for you when you do you just get a bug sometimes? You get an earworm almost. It's just a weird little idea, right? And then you chew on it for a while.
Yeah. And it might be years before you turn it or never. This was one of those earworms that was just a bug in my ear. And I think it was just the phrase evil things.
You know, like I have a list of like song titles and snippets in my phone. Like a lot of songwriters do now. And I think a kept evil things and I was like, oh, like that. Like just evil things.
I think it was picturing. I think it was a type of orch for some reason. I just wanted to write a song. The had evil things.
And then it's not a far stretch to go from evil things to for me to think about how we're complex and how I myself have kind of a dark side. That's what that song is. It's like I love you and I'm sort of true you and I have a dark side. And it's talking about acknowledging my own evil things.
Yeah, basically. It's interesting about the title thing. Somebody I wish I remember who it is and I apologize. Whoever it was.
I feel like it was about a year ago. I was talking about song titles and how hard it is to think of song titles or songs. They were like, I can write three songs for every song title, like good song title I can come up with. And so if a song title comes to you, you're like, I'm definitely writing the song because it's so hard to think of a good song title.
Absolutely. It's like a... I'll edit in who that was. Cool.
It's like almost like it could be a sport. I mean, it's so common among songwriters because you have to... People think that songs come from the... I hear Jeff Twee who I think is a great songwriter and I love that he's evolved every time.
I hear him talk a lot about his subconscious. He's constantly talking in interviews about... Yeah, my subconscious does a lot of the heavy lifting. I just try to get out of its way kind of thing.
And I actually do agree that that's big, but also it doesn't come from nowhere. It's like you got to... It's sort of garbage in, garbage out, quality in, quality out. So I think if you don't read, pay attention to things, you know, hey, how do other people engage in the world?
Where do you get songwriting ideas? Like where do they come from? You have to... I think they come in from the creative channels of experience, right?
And it's like... So you need input. And so that's what I do. I try to capture.
And it's a greater or lesser degree. There's phases in my life where I'm like, I'm not... The energy is low for that. And I'm not doing it.
And then I don't know why, what are the differences? But there's phases in my life where it's really actively happening. And I'm just like tuned to like song ideas and melodies and riffs and... Hey, FedEx.
Yeah. But anyway, so there's time... There's like, I go through these like live and sort of dead phases with this whole thing. That came out of the world of life.
That's it for part two with Taylor Maxine. I want to thank Taylor for being on the show. Don't forget to follow Taylor at TaylorMaxine.bankamp.com. Also, go to the show notes for links to his other music websites.
Follow him on Instagram and Facebook. And also check out that link to his counseling service. Make sure to follow the podcast where you get your podcasts. That is WNC Original Music.
Also follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Links in the show notes as well. For the closing song this week, we have the band Violet Twinned. They're an Atlanta based indie pop band and they're led by songwriter and producer Ron Harris.
Look for Nightlife, which is their debut album. And it should be out around April 2nd. I'll try to remind you of that here. Here is Violet Twin.
Have a good week. And then all my time in a van.