Fire, Rain, Loss, and Wisdom

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In 1970 my college roommate played Fire and Rain nearly every day on his turntable. I liked the melody, but I heard the lyrics without listening. It's taken 50 years for me to understand James Taylor better: [bold added]

“My first successful song was ‘Fire and Rain,’ which starts with losing a friend to suicide. There’s a cumulative emotional quality to it, a message that’s useful to hear....generally, we don’t engage with things that are hard. In modern culture, do we go too far in the direction of never doing anything that’s unpleasant? It’s almost like we’re entitled to not having negative feelings.

I’m 71, and when you get older you lose more and more. Your accumulated memory and personal history are a huge compensation, but you have fewer people to share that with. Maybe cumulative loss is what old age is.”

Though "Fire and Rain" never reached number 1 on Billboard, it's on several top-100 and top-500 lists of the greatest songs of all time.