Jade Elizabeth Taylor

Closer Than You Know - Victor Cummings

This song is part of a series that Vic Cummings calls his "soul songs," and it became a true touchstone in my life. I don't know a single person who hasn't been touched by anguish or depression at some point. For me, that darkness arrived around the age of 40.

I had made the decision to try and get pregnant as a single woman through artificial insemination. The deep depression that came each month when it hadn't worked was profound. Fortunately, I found a group of men and women who were going through their own journeys with infertility, and we would meet to talk openly about the struggles of trying to conceive. Eventually, tests revealed that past endometriosis had left my fallopian tubes blocked; I was unable to bear a child that way.

Closer Than You Know also became a touchstone for my loneliness. At the time, my entire family was living in England while I was living in California. I had a wonderful circle of friends, a vibrant community of musicians, and a great job. During the day, everything was fine. But late at night, that was when the darkness and isolation would really set in.

In those days, I chose to numb that pain with alcohol. Today, I am 10 years sober. While late at night remains a trigger time for me—now showing up as a habit of emotional snacking—it is something I am deeply aware of.

Ultimately, I believe that anyone who has faced the darkness within themselves and made it out the other side comes closer to their own soul and is so much better because of it.

To this day, recording this song remains one of my absolute favorite experiences in the studio. The journey of this track started in Dallas with Tom Prasada-Rao, and eventually arrived at Gadgetbox studio in Santa Cruz.

For this particular song, I was truly able to paint a picture of exactly what I wanted. There is a haunting quality to the lap steel guitar that makes it feel as though your soul is just passing by and you can almost reach out and touch it. Andy Zenczak poured an incredible amount of his own talent, time, and energy into creating this track, and it is something I am so immensely proud of.

What Would You Do - Jade Elizabeth Taylor

The origin of this song came from attending the Sisters Songwriting Academy. The festival organizers would bring in the main stage musicians a few days early to teach hopeful students—myself included—the nuances of their craft, from songwriting to instrumentation.

I had just arrived in Oregon from California when I realized I had forgotten one of my blood pressure medications. Although my doctor quickly sent the prescription over, the local chemist couldn't fill it because I was across state lines. Up until that point, I had met a solid wall of rules, regulations, and flat-out “nopes.”  Finally, I had the idea to say to this lovely pharmacist, "If I were your daughter, what would you suggest she do?"

The shift was instantaneous. He went quiet, told me to hang on a second, and disappeared for a while. When he came back, he said, "I've worked it out." By reframing the situation through the lens of family, the barrier melted away.

That interaction set my mind racing. I began to wonder: What would we do if the people we disagreed with were treated like our own relatives—our brothers or our sisters?

At that time, I was also looking for work, and as a woman over 40, I was finding that a lot of corporate doors were closed to me. That lived experience shaped the second verse: If I were your mother, would my age be a valid reason you wouldn't hire me?

From there, the chorus came quite easily: If we see each person that we meet as if they were our kin.

I know that family dynamics can be full of conflict, but so many of us choose our own tribes—filling them with people of all different ages, sizes, shapes, colors, and backgrounds. To me, that is the blueprint for a peaceful world. It’s a place where we stop actively hunting for our differences and start looking for our similarities, treating one another with baseline human respect.

May I Suggest - Susan Werner

At the Sisters Songwriting Academy, I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Susan Werner. I already knew Susan's music and deeply respected her as both a writer and a singer. During the academy, I sang Consider Me Gone (another song on this CD) for her. The performance reminded her and her touring manager, Jane Paul, of a close friend of theirs who had recently passed away, which instantly created a deep, quiet bond between us.

When I returned home to Santa Cruz, I immediately went to my favorite local record store and hunted down every single Susan Werner CD I could find. Tagged at the very end of one of those albums, marked as an epilogue, was the song May I Suggest.

I was listening to it in the car while driving over Highway 17 on my way to Cupertino to visit my partner at the time. The song came on, and it stopped me so completely in my tracks that I had to pull over to the side of the road and burst into tears. It moved me on a profound level. For the rest of the drive, I listened to it on a continuous loop. The second I walked into Larry’s apartment, I told him, "Step away from the CD player," put the track on, and said, "You have to listen to this." As I started singing along, Larry turned the volume down on the recording and simply said, “Keep on singing.”  Since then, it has become another true "soul song" for me—one I have sung a cappella at funerals and gatherings alike.

The story of this recording is woven with incredible connections. Back at the Sisters Academy, I had been working on harmonies with a singer-songwriter named Perry Hollman, who asked me to sing backup with him at the student concert. He also invited Allison Russell to join. Alli and I worked out our harmony parts in about two seconds flat, and she and I ended up having an amazing conversation about a song she had written called Follow Your Bliss, based on the work of Joseph Campbell.

The next time Ali was performing in Santa Cruz, I asked her if she would come into the studio to sing harmonies on some of my tracks. I originally started recording this song with Keith Greeninger, so both Keith and Ali sing harmonies with me on this piece. 

To round out the track, one of my absolute favorite musicians, Kimball Hurd, joined us to play mandolin. Kimball and his wife, Alisa Fineman, are brilliant singer-songwriters in their own right, known for creating songs rooted in love, understanding, and hope. In a world that often feels intent on tearing itself down over differences, the energy and delight Kimball brought to this mandolin track is pure hope.

I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Different Girl - Jade Elizabeth Taylor

This song was written with a couple of different people in mind over the years. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t been in the position of having a deep friendship with someone they secretly harbored feelings for.  I sometimes wished for the innocence of schooldays when you could send your best friend to ask their best friend if they fancied you.  When I was younger I used to try and be what the other person wanted in order to be liked.  Now I know that if I am myself then the right people will find me and love me for exactly who I am.  

Not only was that my own truth, but sometimes, years after the fact, I discovered that friends had secretly harbored feelings for me as well. I don’t know if it would have made a difference at the time if they had spoken up, but this track is ultimately a song of unrequited love.

Be With You -  Bridget St. John

I believe that when Bridget St. John first wrote this song, it was about a lover and feeling completely safe within a relationship. Over the years, however, this song has transformed for me. It became about the relationship I had with my grandmother, my Nana—my mom's mother.

To this day, if I am upset or overwhelmed, I can still vividly remember sitting at her knee and having her stroke my hair. Nana worked in the cotton mills when she was younger, and because of that hard labor, her hands were so rough. Yet, that distinct, scratchy feeling on my hair was the most soothing, grounding thing in the world.

When I sing this song now, it is for anyone who has ever had that "safe person" in their life. It could be a partner, a sibling, a parent, or a grandparent. It is about finding that rare place where you feel entirely protected and loved—where, in times of trial and discomfort, you can finally come home to yourself and return to a place that never lost its innocence.

Kindness - Jade Elizabeth Taylor

This song was born from a moment of quiet reckoning, when I found myself wondering what I actually had to show for fifty years on this planet. At the time, I didn't own a house or a fancy car. I was no longer married, had no children, and had no grand vocation to speak of.

But during a songwriting workshop at Esalen in Big Sur with Johnsmith, a profound realization washed over me: my legacy is my kindness. It lives in the quiet, tiny acts that so often go unnoticed—picking up a piece of litter and dropping it in a bin, sharing a genuine smile with someone in the checkout line, or simply carrying a heavy guitar for a fellow musician.

This foundation was laid early in my life. My Nana always used to say that kindness costs absolutely nothing. And when I was transitioning from primary to secondary school, terrified that I wouldn’t make any friends, my father gave me a piece of advice I’ve never forgotten. He told me that everyone else was feeling just as anxious as I was, and that if I was simply kind to them, they would be kind in return.

Over the years, kindness has also become my greatest antidote to depression. Sometimes, when my head is full of racing, heavy thoughts, I force myself to go for a walk. I make a point to look at the people I pass, notice something genuine, and say it out loud: "I love your hair," or "That dress is my absolute favorite shade of blue." So many times, that one tiny spark has blossomed into a beautiful conversation where two strangers suddenly have something meaningful to share.

These days, I have my dog, Loki, walking by my side. He has an incredible radar for discerning exactly who needs a cuddle. Invariably, whenever he stops us to greet someone, we end up talking—and we quickly realize there was a beautiful reason our paths were meant to cross that day. 

Land of Broken Dreams - Matt Stone

Once again, the Sisters Songwriting Academy played a pivotal role in this next song. We were passing a song around the circle. There was someone who hadn't been there for most of the workshop, and when it came to his turn, he played Land of Broken Dreams.

Once again, I was stopped completely in my tracks. It was a incredibly profound song, and so deeply indicative of its time. In America, predatory lending was rampant—loans were being handed out to people who could never realistically pay them back, and families everywhere were facing foreclosure.

The writer, Matt, had been looking to buy a home himself when he wrote it. The vivid, haunting images in the song—the forgotten photograph left in a kitchen drawer, the cross in the babys room —were all things he had actually seen while touring these abandoned properties.

Matt is a spectacular guitar player, and the song originally appeared on his album Northern Lights. Sometime later, after a songwriting workshop at Esalen with John Smith, we met up at Gadgetbox Studios. I had him play guitar on his own song, but using my arrangement.

I remember painting a clear, atmospheric picture of exactly what I wanted this song to sound like for Andy Z and our engineer, Patrick. I am still so incredibly proud of how it came out.

There is a little ad-lib at the very end of the track that was pure magic. We had run through the song about three times with Matt playing guitar and me doing a scratch vocal. That quiet, whispered line—"breaks my heart"—at the very end was completely spur-of-the-moment. Even though I went back and re-recorded the main vocal later, we absolutely had to keep that authentic, raw moment in the final mix.

Kiss You - Jade Elizabeth Taylor

The very first song I ever wrote was Boozin' Blues (which you can find as a video on my YouTube channel). In that song, the woman holds her ground—she does not take him back, and she wakes up in the morning completely alone, safe, sound, and happy.

Kiss You is a completely different take on a strong, sassy woman. Instead of walking away, she plays him at his own game. She sees right through his weaknesses and shows those transitory transgressions exactly who the real woman is.

It might not be the most politically correct song in the world, but I sure had a lot of fun writing this one!

Consider Me Gone  - Sting

This version of Consider Me Gone came into being during a vocal workshop I took at Cabrillo College. The class was taught by Wally of Wally's Swing World—a remarkably dapper gentleman. Truth be told, more than a few of the ladies sitting in the front row were there mainly to be close to Wally rather than to learn how to sing!

Fortunately, I sat next to a wonderful woman named Kath Robinson, we were there for the craft—to improve our art, breathing technique, and vocal range—so he tended to leave us until the end of the class and gave us slightly different assignments. One week, he tasked us with taking a popular song and rearranging it in an entirely different style. I had recently heard Holly Cole do a beautiful, jazzy version of Sting's Fragile, which inspired me to take Consider Me Gone and give it my own little jazzy flair.

Vic Cummings worked out a brilliantly simple chord structure that allowed me to pull it off on guitar. It’s essentially just an A chord that slides up two frets and then resolves to an E. That simple progression became the foundation for what we affectionately call our "greatest hit." It allowed us to seamlessly vamp and loop together Consider Me Gone, Summertime, and Van Morrison's Moondance, adding a little ad-libbed flair at the end. It was the perfect arrangement to play in a song circle; people could easily pick up the tune, which meant I could stop playing entirely and just sing—which is what I love to do best.

There is also a deeply personal backstory to the lyric in the song: “Cancer lurks in the sweetest bud.”  One of my musical companions was Paul Bass. I actually met his wife first, and she asked if I would be willing to play some music while he was on an upswing from his chemotherapy. I started going over to the little studio he had set up in his garage in Santa Cruz; he would play piano and I would sing. Miraculously, he went into remission for a couple of years, and we were able to share a fair amount of music together before the cancer ultimately returned.

The line "Cancer lurks in the sweetest bud" is dedicated to Paul, and to absolutely anyone who has lost someone to cancer. It is a cruel, unforgiving disease that takes people way too early, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the integrity or the vibrant life within a person. If you are anywhere on that journey yourself, this song is also for you.