An Epiphany of Sorts

An Epiphany of Sorts

I went away this weekend on business to Toronto Canada. I drove up there with some business friends of mine. We spent the ride up talking music, business and generally having a nice relaxing ride. It is funny that when you are on a Road Trip with friends stuck in a car for many hours at a time you almost start to feel encapsulated. The world outside of your car becomes distant and time kind of slows down giving you a feeling of peace and tranquility.

I spent the day on Sunday doing my business things and talking the business talk and walking the business walk. We finished working, got back in my Jeep and drove back to the hotel. We relaxed for a while, got a nice buzz going on, and everyone retired to their respective rooms to relax and get refreshed before we headed out for dinner later on. Still in my encapsulated mood I got comfortable, got my I Pod revved up and laid down on the bed to lose myself in some Taylor Hicks. My Taylor music of choice for the moment was “The Nashville Set”. This has almost become a road trip favorite of mine. It has gotten me through many miles on many of my Taylor adventures this past year. It has brought me many epiphanies in both inebriated and other altered states.

As I lay on the bed falling deeper into my Taylor induced coma the music started to reach a place inside of me. Somewhere around the middle of “Son of a Carpenter” my heart began to race and I was overcome by a sense that the person that I was listening to had opened up his soul and was allowing me inside him at that very moment. This is not a new revelation or experience for me or for any other Taylor Hicks fan in fact. It was just at this moment in the mind set that I had been in, in my Road Trip world; I began to understand something about Taylor Hicks and his music.

With all the speculation that has been going on surrounding Taylor’s career and where it is going, I understood that there are two sides to Taylor Hicks. There is the scary smart, business savvy person that has scratched a place for him self in this world. There is the Taylor that is creating a campaign of name recognition by slowly allowing himself into the hearts and minds of people one fan at a time. Then there is the person that announces in the middle of “Heart and Soul” that he is gonna “play the blues” and then prepares to rip our hearts and minds opened with some mind boggling harp playing. There is the person that could make my heart race simply by letting the notes and the music come from his soul to reach into mine and grab it and not let it go until the time that he chooses to let go.

How can these two extremely different people exist in one body? How can such a career be balanced without having the music suffer? The answer is simple. Taylor Hicks will never compromise the music. He will never allow anything inside that part of his psyche that will hurt the notes or the music or the vibe. That is something that he saves for the people that are lucky enough to get him. That is the place that he closes up when the business side of music steps up to the plate and that is the place that he again opens when the first notes of the music waif into the air, when the guitar starts to sing its song and the base notes start to reverberate through your body. The place that allows him that reckless abandonment that has taken us on so many wonderful musical rides with him.

How can this be a mistake of any kind? How can we allow the music world to make the music on their terms and tell us what we want to hear and what we want to feel? How can someone that can make his fans feel the music, the way that only he can do, be wrong in the way that he wants his career to go and where he wants it to take him?

We need to have the faith that he has put in him self and in us. We need to hold on for dear life and just let the ride take us where it is gonna go.