The first time I met Eric Taylor, by Kyle Shiver, ©2000
Kyle and Shawn Mullins, 1998
i met eric taylor at eddie's attic in decatur georgia(atlanta). i was there playing in the regular monday night open mike contest, and eddie came up to me and said "kyle the best song writer in the world is here and i will introduce you to him" well i made it into the finals that night and after i played my song, i went to the back of the room and this tall lanky guy who leaned over and said "if they dont vote for you they are crazy, you were having fun up there". well i didnt win, and he says "they are crazy man......"
the tall guy (eric and i are both tall dont know which is taller) turned out to be eric and a few of us hung out at the bar till late. eddie was playing a video recording of eric's show from a couple of days earlier and they were all drinking and talking. eric and eddie discovered that they were distant cousins and they knew some of the same family and i sat there watching the video and catching lines here and there.....
"her mother was a carney cotton candy tuinals,
her father was a mason skin and bone
and when she shot him he just sat down
in the floor there in the hall" (from sweet sunny south on the cd resurrect)
i was pretty impressed with the songs and the guitar and we just small talked and then we all left. three months later i was back at eddie's attic for the monday open mike and there was eric again. i remember that night while playing my song "star in his eyes" i looked up and eric was standing right in front of me looking at me and listening hard to the song. it made me feel good to have somebody listen like that but he never commented on it. we wound up hanging out at the bar again and this time the guitars came out. a couple of other singer songwriters had hung around and at some point during the evening i decided to play a new song i had learned off a lyle lovett cd. just as i started singing the first verse eric says "thats my song and youre fucking it all up!!!" haha , you can imagine how everybody laughed because i honestly didnt know that eric had wrote the song....it was "memphis midnight memphis morning" from the lyle lovett cd "step inside this house" everyone else knew but me...........
i had been listening to that song repeatedly and had been playing it a lot i loved it and you can imagine how strange this was for me. i mean it is a big world and you dont have an experience like this every day.....he showed me the chord i was missing and i have played the hell out of that song since......
the last time i saw eric was this past june again at eddie's but this time he was playing. i had seen the video that eddie made of him plenty of times while hanging out but the live show was incredible. to see him play guitar is an incredible experience. he is so accurate and his notes are very presice and calculated. his guitar playing reminds me of the folk musician martin simpson, not that they play the same but they both have a very definative style, it is clean and eric's attack is awesome.(he uses thumb and steel finger picks) his musical compositions are great too....i could easily just sit and listen to the music. then when you add the words.....they are the same in that they dont need music....and when you put this music and these words together......it is a living breathing entity of its own....
he
creates strong images with his sounds and words like few can.....he is a
visual artist that uses sound....if you have his cd's "eric taylor" or
"resurrect" that is what he sounds like live. he plays guitar just
like that. i dont think there are any guitar over dubs on these albums.
we
sat at the bar and a few folks hung out and we played music....everyone