SOUL SEARCHING

There is a plywood-and-metal contraption, roughly the size of a Mini Cooper, sitting in James Taylor's barn in Lenox. A large cylinder rests in the center of a colossal wooden cube that sprouts an array of pegs, arms, and platforms. It looks like a Rube Goldberg creation or a wacky final project from wood shop. Anyone looking at it for the first time, or the 10th, would be hard pressed to name its purpose in the world. Taylor calls it "the monstrosity." You and I would call it a very eccentric way to keep a beat. It is, in fact, a time machine. The 57-year-old musician built it with the help of a Berkshires cabinetmaker last year, and now he's using it, onstage, to visit the past.

The machine creaked to life in May at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, not long after the last chords of "Country Road" faded. As the pegs the cylinder rotated, slowly at first, then with zeal, they triggered a pair of beams that smacked a homemade bass drum. One arm conked a cowbell. Another arm smashed down on a cymbal, and yet another executed a perfectly timed rimshot on a snare drum, which Taylor pirated from one of his 4-year-old twin sons' starter kits.

"It's very simple," says Taylor, circling creation, "but it's loud." Though it travels quite nicely from town to town, the drum machine does seem like an awfully cumbersome attraction to haul around for just two songs a night. "That's the secret, though, to use it sparingly," Taylor explains. "A one-man show can be a little bit pedantic. So this thing is a relief, along with an occasional gag about Karen."

Poor Karen. Once upon a time (as fans of Taylor's song "Carolina in My Mind" recall), she was a silver sun watching the morning come. Thirty-eight years later, in Taylor's "One Man Band" show, Karen returns in a police sketch - an artifact of the pair's four-day odyssey on an island off the coast of Spain in 1968, just months before the Beatles heard Taylor's demo tape and signed him to Apple Records.

Taylor is traveling back - not just to these songs, which he routinely performs in concert - but also to black-and-white photographs rescued from the backs of his bureau drawers, to home movies and old girlfriends and true stories. At one point during the show (which comes to the Wang Center the 12th, 14th, and 15th of this month), on a large white screen, Taylor shows a photo of his mother at the family home in North Carolina. It's next to a photo of his father, bundled up and grinning, at the South Pole. Taylor makes a joke, which is not entirely a joke, about family togetherness.

The "One Man Band" tour, which the artist quietly road-tested in the South this past spring, is actually a two-man show; Larry Goldings plays keyboards. Occasionally, members of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus sing harmonies, via video footage recorded in Taylor's barn.

But while the concert's title is technically dubious, the idea of James Taylor as cosmically unaccompanied rings true. Yes, he's happily married to his third wife. He's a father of four and nearly 40 years into a musical career that has made him a friend to millions. But Taylor is also (to paraphrase a lyric that would echo through the years) a one-man parade. Tying on his highway shoes. Holding on. "I'm someone whose experiences, laid out on paper and in song, somehow supplied people with a language that was helpful to them," he says, "and it has put me in the strange position of being the center of attention and still feeling like I lack a center. I've written some about it."

Indeed he has. In the laid-back poetry of introspection, and with the unabashed intent of fostering comfort and connection, Taylor returns in his new show to a form he is widely credited with pioneering - one man with a sensitive soul and a sweet guitar. Taylor, a reluctant pioneer, begs to differ.

"What about Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and Cisco Houston? How about Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Huddie Ledbetter? Harry Belafonte."

He is listing the singer-songwriters who preceded him as proof that he didn't start anything. And of course he's right. People have been stringing chords together and setting words to melody for ages. But Taylor and his contemporaries - Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Paul Simon, among them - were responsible for a seismic shift in music. When pressed, Taylor cops to it, sort of. "We just took that thing pop," he says. "Our songs made it on the radio."

But it was more than that. Their songs were different from the folk tunes that came before in at least one important way. They were intentionally, and intensely, personal. In the early 1970s, on the heels of an era defined by explosive cultural and political upheaval, the singer-songwriters turned inward. Music lovers were happy to follow, and so was the next generation of musicians. It's not hard to spot Taylor's contemporary descendants: John Mayer and Jack Johnson, David Gray and Jason Mraz, James Blunt and Willy Mason. But his influence stretches farther and deeper than the guitar-strumming tunesmiths. Listen to the emo screamers and the pop tarts. Listen closely to Coldplay or Lindsay Lohan or Fall Out Boy. Any artist who tears a page from his journal or scours her heart and turns it into verse and chorus owes a debt to the soul-baring '70s icons. In today's pop-music culture, where styles materialize and vanish at warp speed and the music business bows at almost any creative cost to the bottom line, the confessional has survived.

Taylor hates the "original singer-songwriter" tag, although in conversation even disdain - for the way he's labeled, for the current administration, for abusers of the environment, for the corporatized music industry - is graciously conveyed. He speaks slowly, chooses his words carefully, and never raises his voice. He is as mild-mannered and composed as his catalog.

We're eating a lunch of poached salmon, soba noodles, bok choy, and spring rolls in the dining room of his large, unfussy hilltop house. The meal was prepared by Taylor's wife of six years, Kim, a longtime executive with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The couple's 4-year-old twin sons, Rufus and Henry, are hurling themselves onto their father's lap and biting my nose with a snapping turtle made out of a paper plate. Taylor feeds them chunks of fruit and sings "Kumbaya" with new words about honeydew melon until Kim manages to shepherd them into the family minivan for a trip to Seiji Ozawa's pool.

"A song like 'Fire and Rain' takes something internal that you're struggling with and lays it out in front of you in such a way that you can at least see it," says Taylor of his first hit tune. "It's a way of working through it and coming to rest with it. Yes, most of my work is, for better or worse, self-referred and autobiographical. I think everybody's writing music about themselves, essentially. But mine is admittedly so, and if it has value, it's that it's emotionally useful to people."

That's the fundamental secret to Taylor's enduring success - the reason 2002's October Road, his 15th album of new material, reached number four on the Billboard charts, and 2004's A Christmas Album has sold close to 2 million copies. And it's also why the music magazine Blender recently anointed Taylor the Biggest Wuss in popular music.

Certainly, many of the rock cognoscenti never took to Taylor's soothing anthems. "Taylor is leading a retreat, and the reason us rock and rollers are so mad at him," wrote Robert Christgau in a 1972 concert review, "is simply that the retreat has been so successful." A year earlier, the critic Lester Bangs composed a tribute to protopunks the Troggs entitled "James Taylor Marked for Death," in which he complained that if he had to listen to one more "Jesus-walking-the-boys -and-girls-down-a-Carolina-path-while-the -dilemma-of-existence-crashes-like-a-slab-of-hod -on-J.T.'s-shoulders-song," he would personally drive down to North Carolina and kill Taylor with a broken Ripple bottle. Bangs, it should be noted, died at 33 of a drug overdose. Taylor, himself a former junkie, is still here.

"How tough is James Taylor?" muses his brother Livingston. "He's tough enough to make career out of being sensitive."

For someone so understated, Taylor inspires radical range of responses. Garth Brooks is fond of saying that God and James Taylor are the reasons he's a musician.

In an e-mail to me, Sting offers this recollection of seeing Taylor in concert for the first time. I was 18 and a budding singer-songwriter myself at the time. The lights went down and a spotlight caught James as he walked onto the stage of Newcastle's City Hall, guitar in hand. He was impossibly tall and intolerably handsome. James's singing seemed effortless, soulful, and sweet at the same time, and his guitar playing, as much a signature as his voice, all hammered fifths and pull-offs, suspended fourths, again executed seemingly without effort, was woven around songs of such deep melancholy and longing that had to seriously reconsider my chosen profession, or at least how I would get there. Imitation would no longer suffice."

Transparency has been a driving force for Taylor since he started writing songs, and that has cut both ways. His aspiration to authenticity has kept him from stepping outside his comfort zone. "I seem to have written the same 12 songs over and over again," he says. "But the thing that's served me well is I don't play a character. I may repeat myself, but I'm not being someone other than myself."

There's a cherished photo of Ray Charles, who Taylor says never sang a false note, on the barn wall. His only indulgence was installing floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on the surrounding woods covering much of his 50 acres. In one corner, there's a military-spec kitchen that appears to have been molded from one large sheet of metal. Opposite the kitchen is a space walled with temporary partitions that will be used as a control room when Taylor brings in recording equipment - this where he'll record his next album. But right now, the only thing in it is an inflatable mattress for visits from Taylor's 29-year-old son, Ben, one of two children (Sally is 32) from his first marriage, to Carly Simon.

The main space, cavernous and bright, home to a grand piano, a child-sized metal tractor, the monstrosity, and a screen and projector that Taylor used to design the visuals for the "One Man Band" show. Taylor is "pretty sure" his six Grammys are in his LA manager's office. A few awards sit on a table next to the bed in the barn's loft; one is for selling an impressive number of concert tickets at a mid-size venue in a small state. His songs may be "self-referred," but Taylor's decorating tastes are decidedly undivalike. The wall opposite the stairs is lined with half a dozen rough-hewn, hand-painted acoustic guitars in various states of decay. They were sent to Taylor by a mentally ill fan.

Under the barn is Taylor's workshop, which began as a garage but has morphed into a tool-filled playroom for a serial tinkerer who spends six, sometimes eight, hours a stretch down here.

"It's like being married to a carpenter," says Kim. "Once he left this breathless message on my cellphone saying, 'I have a huge surprise for you.' I'm thinking Harry Winston. I met him down in the barn, and he unveiled a table saw. His very own table saw. Do you want to know what James's idea an enthralling evening is? Watching a show about the history of the ball bearing."

Given the life he's led, it makes a certain sense.

JAMES MET KIM BACKSTAGE at Symphony Hall in 1993, when he appeared as a guest with John Williams and the Boston Pops. She was the marketing and PR director the BSO, and Taylor called her the next day to inquire about an antique pocket watch that had been stolen from his dressing room. At the time he was married to his second wife, actress Katherine Walker, and Kim - divorced from former BSO trumpet player Rolf Smedvig - was in a relationship. She never found the watch. But James kept her number, and used it again two years later, after he and Walker had separated.

For their first date, Kim picked James up at a gas station in Marion after his nephew's high school graduation and took him to dinner at the Elephant Walk in Brookline. "He seemed somewhat nomadic," says Kim.

"I didn't have to cut away much rigging in order to drift over and take up with her," says James. "We're well-matched in terms of our emotional temperament. I've felt in relationships before that my volume was turned up to about three and that I was living with someone whose volume was turned up to 11. I have nothing negative to say about my other marriages. I know that I'm primarily culpable and just wasn't ready to settle down. It's a surprising stroke of luck that the third time turned out so well."

The Taylors bought the Lenox property in 1999, rebuilt the house in 2003, and spent their first winter here this year. They had been commuting from the Berkshires to Kim's house in Chestnut Hill, where Rufus and Henry were born. The twins were carried by a surrogate, a close friend of Kim's, after she suffered several miscarriages. With the boys starting kindergarten in the fall in the Berkshires, the couple decided to set down roots. Kim notes that John Kerry's loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election was another factor in the decision to shift gears. Taylor, a longtime supporter of environmental and political causes, co-headlined the Vote for Change tour, which stopped in swing states in October 2004, with the Dixie Chicks. He and Kerry are good friends. "It was a huge disappointment to James," says Kerry. "He cares enormously about a lot of issues and was unbelievably dedicated to moving the country forward."

Taylor has created a simple, focused world in the Berkshires. He roams his hilltop refuge barefoot, in worn jeans and a loose white shirt; his lanky body is muscled from rowing, rollerblading, and biking during the warm months, cross-country skiing the winter. He drinks strong coffee and chews nicotine gum. Laika, Taylor's Belgian shepherd, follows him everywhere: through the house, to the rolling grass field behind the house, where we throw tennis balls and hose her down, and into the barn, where she blissfully shreds cardboard boxes. Taylor, who speaks French and German, is training her with Flemish commands.

"The western end of Massachusetts is the America I recognize more than any other," Taylor says. His stardom has hardly been a blip on the radar in this laid-back community, where the only nod to his celebrity is an omelet named after him at a local restaurant.

For the sake of the family, Taylor has arranged his touring schedule so that he's gone for no more than 17 days at a stretch and then home for at least 11. He's found that if you stay away for three months, when you come home, "they've learned to live without you." Taylor rises at 7:30 to fix breakfast for Rufus and Henry. He tries to sing them to sleep, but neither is much interested. "It's shameful how little they've been played music," Taylor says. The concerns of home life - caring for the boys, settling in this house, succeeding as a family man - weigh heavily on him. On one of our several jaunts between the house and the barn, Taylor says that he hopes he can sit still for 10 years.

"I do feel as though I'm capable of being decent husband now and balancing my work and my home life with some kind of control. I don't mean to suggest that Sally and Ben suffered from having been shortchanged, but I do have some regrets about the first time around," says Taylor, who entered rehab when Sally was 9 and Ben was 6. "It's important to me to be a decent parent."

THE MEMORIES AND ANECDOTES that surface in the "One Man Band" concerts feel closely connected to Taylor's life today. It's as if looking back is the key to moving forward. Danny Kortchmar, Taylor's childhood friend and longtime musical collaborator, doesn't believe this show would have happened 10 or 20 years ago.

"It would take James until now to want to put something like this together," says Kortchmar. "Like a lot of people in his position, he wears his heart on his sleeve in his songs and is incredibly guarded in his life. But growing up and becoming adults and facing our history. . . . We can't hide from This makes total sense."

At one point during the show, Taylor confides that lately he's come to realize that "The Frozen Man" - which he wrote after reading a National Geographic article about a sailor who was found encased in the polar ice 100 years after freezing to death - is really about his father. No matter the starting point, a song wanders in its own direction, Taylor says, choosing emotional material from inside your head as it goes. The deeper meaning often remains a mystery for years.

He also believes that one person's interpretation of a song is as good as another's, including his own. Maybe you think of "You Can Close Your Eyes" as a child's lullaby. Taylor's association is quite different. He wrote the song in a motel room at the end of a mescaline trip with then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell. "It rapidly became very generalized," says Taylor. "But it started there, that motel room."

"The Frozen Man" is a sad song - about the displaced life of a man whose heart has been iced over. Dr. Isaac Taylor, James's father, moved his wife, Trudy, and their four young children from Weston to North Carolina in 1951, when he was named dean of the medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (A fifth child, Hugh, would soon join Alex, James, Livingston, and Kate.) Ike Taylor was often gone, first to a posting at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland to fulfill a military obligation he'd deferred to attend Harvard Medical School, and then on a two-year voluntary polar expedition. The elder Taylor, by nature remote, returned with "the family demon," alcoholism. Trudy, essentially a single parent, raised the kids in the provincial, mid-century South as best she could as Ike's alcoholism worsened and the marriage decayed.

"I was a good son," says Taylor. "I was convinced that trying to lighten the load and be part of the solution was part of the job. I've grown up as a people-pleaser, in a way. It has evolved into what I do for a living."

Trudy hauled the family off each summer to Martha's Vineyard - which in those days was filled with socialists and communists, Taylor recalls, people they would have never met in Chapel Hill. "Back in those days, it wasn't a string of McMansions and jets idling at the airport waiting to take the investment bankers to Long Island," he says. "It was a cheap place to go spend a summer, an outpost with really interesting people." Trudy, who now lives year-round on Martha's Vineyard, sent her kids to science camps and language-immersion programs, enrolled them in drama clubs, and took them to museums and Broadway shows in New York. But the Taylor children grew into troubled teens whose problems would plague them into adulthood.

"I spend a lot of time thinking about it, because I think these things resonate down the generations," says Taylor. "I'm mystified by why there was so much dysfunction in my own family, where that came from. My older brother dead at such an early age from alcoholism [Alex died in 1993, on James's birthday; Isaac Taylor passed away three years later]. Three of us at McLean [the psychiatric hospital in Belmont], the whole thing coming apart at some point. My father's reaction to all of this was in a sense as if he'd been expecting it. He wasn't running around trying to put out fires. He was very stoic and saw everyone as being on their own track. I wouldn't call it neglect or dispassion, just a fatalism he lived with."

Taylor suffered his first bout of depression as a boarding student at Milton Academy - largely, he believes, from the pressure to excel on the academic path that generations of Taylors (most of them doctors and lawyers) had walked before him. He dropped out and checked into McLean for what would be the first of three stays in mental hospitals. "It gave me an exit from the sort of expectations I couldn't bear anymore," he says. "And it gave me a free license to go to New York and play rock 'n' roll with my friends."

It was 1966, and within months of moving to the city, he and his Vineyard pals Danny Kortchmar and Zach Weisman, who dubbed themselves The Flying Machine, had a regular gig at a Greenwich Village club. They played the blues, and then started introducing songs written by their 18-year-old singer - among them "Knockin' 'Round the Zoo," inspired by Taylor's time at McLean, "Night Owl," and "Rainy Day Man," all of which would wind up on Taylor's first record.

His biggest influence at the time was Joel O'Brien, the band's drummer, who introduced Taylor to jazz, Irish music, Sinatra, and hard drugs.

"I've often thought that the drugs saved my life," says Taylor. "It's at a huge cost, of course. In the end, it's nothing but a waste of time. It's a lot like walking around dead to be permanently drug-addicted. It kills a lot of people. But generally speaking, over the course of my 18 years as a hard-drug user, I was self-medicating in order to function."

Taylor was a full-blown smack addict when he moved to London in '68 and became the first artist signed to the Beatles' short-lived vanity label, Apple Records. He recorded his self-titled debut during the late summer and early fall at Trident Studios, where the Beatles were making the White Album, arriving to record in the morning after one of the Beatles' allnight sessions or at midnight when they were knocking off for the night. He sings a line in "Carolina in My Mind" - "With a holy host of others standing 'round me/Still I'm on the dark side of the moon" - that refers to the experience. McCartney plays bass on the track.

Taylor's career took off with the release of Sweet Baby James in 1970. He had begun writing the album's first single, "Fire and Rain," when he was still living in London, and finished the song (about the suicide of his friend Suzanne Schnerr) in his room at Austen Riggs, a private psychiatric clinic in Stockbridge where Taylor committed himself shortly after returning to the States. "Fire and Rain" was a massive hit, and in 1971 Taylor was featured on the cover of Time magazine under the headline "The New Rock: Bittersweet and Low." All but one of his albums for the rest of the century would go gold or platinum (representing sales of 500,000 and 1 million, respectively). His 1976 greatest-hits collection was certified diamond, with sales of more than 10 million copies.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in nearly 40 years, James Taylor doesn't have a record deal. October Road, from 2002, which he recorded on the Vineyard, was the last album he owed under his contract with Sony, Taylor's label for 25 years. He's rereleasing 2004's A Christmas Album this year with a couple of new tracks, including a recording of Joni Mitchell's "River." Taylor will personally bankroll his next project, write and record the songs in his own barn, and partner with a label for distribution on his own schedule. The absence of a corporate parent pressuring him for fresh product suits Taylor, who concedes that the creative spark arrives less frequently these days.

"I think you get more considerate and cautious at this end," he says. "Songwriting is more of a craft and less of a lightning bolt. There are still inspirational moments, and I trap as many as I can on my little recorder, and then come back and roll them out and work on it. It comes slower and it takes longer. There's more going on in my life that competes with it. But I look at Ray Charles and Tony Bennett and Neil Young and Willie Nelson and B.B. King, and I'm encouraged."

The flip side is that several decades of songwriting experience prepared him to write "Mean Old Man," a sophisticated jazz tune from October Road about a difficult fellow who's saved by the love of a good woman. The whole album - written in the first blush of his marriage to Kim and released the year the twins were born - seems to marvel at, and revel in, his unexpected good fortune, and at the same time evokes an inescapable history. "Shame on me for sure," Taylor sings on "My Traveling Star," "for one more highway song."

But there it is. And here he is, so close to the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston memorialized in Taylor's first highway song, "Sweet Baby James." Near the end of a marathon interview, Taylor would rather analyze the song's structure than the remarkable blur of past, present, and future.

"'Sweet Baby James' is as good a lyric as I've written," Taylor says. "It starts to a newborn baby but quickly includes me. I'm obviously singing a lullaby to myself. Then it turns around and it's about the song - 'There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway, a song that they sing when they take to the sea.' Then it turns again and says that, for me, it's all about the music. In the end, it gets back to this simple idea of a cowboy, alone, by himself, on the range."

And here he'll be when the winter comes and the Berkshires grow dreamlike on account of a frosting, singing a lullaby to himself.