James Taylor: He's Seen Fire, Rain and Redemption

"There's an intimacy to his music that everybody feels," continues Carole King, who has toured off and on with Taylor since 1971 — the year he covered her "You've Got a Friend" and scored his biggest hit. "He makes you feel he's singing directly to you. The first time I heard him, he threw back his head and sang these notes and I thought, 'Oh my God.'" Their 2010 Troubadour Reunion Tour, which spawned a live album, sold 700,000 tickets and grossed more than $59 million.

Yet there were days when Taylor couldn't have dreamed of such love and acceptance, and much of his work reflects his troubled past.

His early childhood appeared serene. His mother, Gertrude (an aspiring opera singer), and his physician-father, Isaac (dean of the University of North Carolina Medical School at Chapel Hill), encouraged James and his four siblings to play instruments. He started out on cello, then switched to guitar.

But at Milton Academy, a Massachusetts prep school, he tumbled into depression. His father wanted his son to follow him into the sciences; James, feeling marginalized and alienated, had "a tough time finding a place in this world," he remembers. He sought ways to escape his family's expectations.

Taylor's grades began to slide his senior year, and he started sleeping 20 hours a day. Near the end of 1965, 17 and suicidal, he spent nine months in McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., where he was treated with thorazine.

His draft board classified him as unqualified for military service, which kept him out of the Vietnam War, and he received his high school diploma from the hospital-affiliated Arlington School. His brother, Livingston, and sister, Kate, would also spend time in psychiatric facilities. Father Isaac waged a fierce battle with alcohol, which eventually killed James' older brother, Alex; he died on James' birthday in 1993. (Taylor wrote "Sweet Baby James" for Alex's son, his namesake.)

"It felt like the whole thing blew apart between '65 and '70," Taylor recalls. "I was in my early 20s. I had a really rough stretch. I see it now as a typical adolescent emotional roller coaster, and that gave into a really hazardous addiction. So at the same time that I felt extremely vulnerable, I was hospitalized in various rehabs and my family came apart at the seams. My mom and dad split up. We left North Carolina and eventually moved up to Martha's Vineyard."

At McLean, Taylor discovered his love of songwriting. "Self-expression was a way of coping," he says.

Upon his release, Taylor moved to New York to become a professional musician. He got hooked on heroin within a year. "I learned a lot about music," he has said of that era, "and too much about drugs. I just fell into it. It was as easy to get high in the Village as to get a drink."

Taylor achieved his first number one album in the U.S. in 2015 with his recording 'Before This World'.

Timothy White

One especially bad night, he made a frantic call to his father. Isaac Taylor flew to New York and rented a car to bring his son home. A 1997 song, "Jump Up Behind Me," evokes that painful drive back to Chapel Hill.

Taylor continued to battle depression and addiction, enduring stints in rehab and five overdoses before finally getting sober in 1983. Three decades on, he remains mindful of keeping sobriety a priority.

"If you don't," says Taylor, "you can surprise yourself by how quickly it can come back and get you. There's an 85 percent chance that if you are an active addict, you will die of it. I have been in 12-step programs for 32 years. I go to meetings when I'm on the road. There are other people in our traveling community who go too, so we have support."

And much that is good has come of his struggle. "Fire and Rain," for example, forged a spiritual connection to millions of others wrestling with loneliness and loss — especially boomers. "The world was young," Taylor says. "The baby boomers surrounded me as a population, and I played to those people. To me, music offers an escape from the isolation of human consciousness."

In 1972, Taylor married singer Carly Simon. The couple recorded their biggest hit, "Mockingbird," two years later, and often performed together. Before the marriage unraveled in 1983, they had two children: Sally, now 41, and Ben, 38. Both are musicians.

A good place to come to

With his current wife, Kim, marketing director for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Taylor looks happy." Kim understands what I do," he says. "It was one of those things that made our finding each other such a great match."

Just as Taylor's childhood home was filled with music, so is his own house in western Massachusetts today. Twins Henry and Rufus, 14 (born through a surrogate), sing and occasionally perform in a small band with their parents.

Her husband is "a failure as a disciplinarian," Kim laughs. "James is so loving and kind that he has a hard time drawing the line. I think because he is away a lot, too, he doesn't want to cause any upset."

Taylor tries to give his boys as normal a life as possible, often taking them hiking or sailing. "I think of myself as a working musician, as a father and husband, and as a recovering addict," he says.

To build stamina for his rigorous tour schedule, the singer cycles, rows and cross-country skis. He also does voice exercises regularly when not performing. "You sort of use it or lose it," he jokes. "I got that from Tony Bennett. He is my role model."

Though it's well past midnight in Paris, James Taylor's night is far from over. His tour manager, Chip, knocks on the door to say it's time to board the bus for the 11-hour ride to the next gig, in Barcelona.

Sweet Baby James reacts with gratitude, not fatigue: "I've been fortunate over and over again — to survive a suicidal adolescence, to find music at just the right time, to survive my addiction. I don't really feel I have anything I want to accomplish or need to do. I'm happy just to carry on."

Formerly an editor and writer for People magazine, Joanne Fowler is a London-based freelancer.