Livingston Taylor – Livtaylor.Com Livingston
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Livingston Taylor – livtaylor.com Livingston Taylor’s career as a professional musician has rattled along for over thirty years. He has toured—some might say, perpetually—with such major artists as Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Buffett, Fleetwood Mac, and Jethro Tull. He has recorded thirteen albums, and there are with three retrospectives as well. He currently maintains a performing schedule of more than a hundred shows a year, which include club, theater, college, and full symphony repertoire. A strong television background includes hosting a daily syndicated pop music show This Week’s Music for Viacom plus the occasional soap-opera cameo (reporter Sam Cocharan on the now-defunct soap Texas). Now a full professor, Livingston has lectured regularly at the Berklee College of Music in Boston since 1985 and has taught a performance course there since 1989. The concept, and much of the inspiration, for his book Stage Performance come from those classes. Born in Boston in 1950 and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Livingston is the fourth of five children of Isaac and Trudy Taylor. He was sixteen when he moved back to Boston to finish high school. “Barely,” he says, noting that the next year he began performing in the Boston coffeehouse circuit. At eighteen he met Jon Landau, who later became Bruce Springsteen’s producer and manager. It was Landau who produced Livingston’s first recording in Macon, Georgia, for Atlantic Records when he was nineteen. Livingston has written most of his music repertoire, including such Top Forty hits as “I Will Be in Love with You” and “I’ll Come Running”; and, recorded by his brother James, “I Can Dream of You,” “Going Round One More Time,” and “Boatman” (off the double Grammy-winning album Hourglass). In 1988 he received the Boston Music Award for outstanding folk artist. He is the author of two children’s books, Pajamas and Can I Be Good? Both were published by Harcourt Brace. Describing himself as a pop singer, Livingston also includes his guitar, and piano in his performances. The piano has supplanted the five-string banjo as the difficulties of air travel have forced him to leave it at home. He says it is a nice idea to be able to sit down to play as one grows older. “It’s no mean feat, making a living as a professional musician for thirty years,” he says. No mean feat. But to do it with style—ah, there’s the beauty. Livingston was an Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University for five years, and now serves in an advisory capacity there. .