But parallels between DeMarco and Taylor extend beyond their sound: they’ve both been known as boyish wild men who are fond of the bottle, and whose unpredictable, spastic personalities are at odds with the mellow, emotive songs they write. They confirm that a truly great song exists outside of time and trend. It’s always cool to find congruities like this cover. When Rolling Stone reviewed “Gorilla,” it observed that the track was “sure to sprout cover versions before long.”
His friends tried to warn him, he admits, and he can still hear her “lovely lies,” but, despite it all, he emerges from the experience with no regrets-’tis better than to have never cared at all. On “I Was a Fool to Care,” Taylor writes from a universal perspective: a heartbroken “country fool” retraces his steps through a relationship with a woman who has left him limp. Marvin Gaye dominated pop the year before its release for “Gorilla,” Taylor dipped into Gaye’s tender sound as he regrouped from a previous album, “Walking Man,” which bombed. Taylor’s “I Was a Fool to Care” is the best song on his 1975 album, “Gorilla,” next to, maybe, “Music.” It’s honeyed and addicting, all open-palm drums and soul strings, with a two-step R.-&-B. But Jon was in town and we decided, “Might as well cover a little James, we have nothing better to do.” Then Jon was like, “No, no, no, no, no, my friend.” He showed me “Gorilla,” which is an album from 1975, and that’s where that song is from. But I was dabbling with “Sweet Baby James,” “Fire and Rain,” that kinda stuff. I think I was going through a Paul Simon thing, and somehow from that I went to James.
But my keyboard player that joined the band last summer, Jon, he’s always been a James Taylor guy. I never really got into James Taylor until very recently. It’s easy to feel guilty about such pop blind spots, but it was comforting to find out that even the loyal nostalgist DeMarco had come to Taylor’s deep cuts late in his twenty-six years. When I brought him up to a friend around my age, he remarked, “I’ve listened to James Taylor, but I don’t listen to James Taylor.” And it’s true we’ve all heard “Fire and Rain,” and Taylor’s “unique brand of bittersweet folk rock”-as “The Simpsons” famously characterized it-remains as widely recognizable as Bart and Lisa. Like Billy Joel, or Bad Brains, or MF Doom, Taylor is so cemented in his stature and cherished by his fans that we take his presence, and his music, as a societal given. Taylor is a daunting artist to engage with, even for devoted young music enthusiasts. His cover of the Taylor song would usually auto-play after his “Ode to Viceroy.” I knew it was special then, but I still don’t know why my brain auto-played it ten months later. I’d heard it last summer, when I went on a brief “Salad Days” bender and would play DeMarco’s music videos on my television every morning. This was the version I was humming, I realized.
The first result was “I Was a Fool to Care,” by James Taylor the second, a cover of the Taylor song by the Montreal slack-psych god Mac DeMarco. Soon, the line “I don’t care, even if I was a fool” bubbled up, and I entered the words into the search box. You can’t hum a tune to Shazam or Siri (yet), so I was stuck digging for a lyric or phrase that I could Google. A melody sneaked its way into my head last week, as involuntarily as a dream or a sneeze, and wouldn’t budge.