Instead, his songs have become a vehicle for an ever-deepening faith and an ever-widening array of 19th and 20th-century authors. “I’m someone who just loves to write.”īefore the advent of modern recording technology, Taylor would doubtless have been a poet, a novelist or a short-story writer. “I happen to be what they call prolific,” Taylor recently told the True Tunes podcast. He’s been doing this for so long that he ends up being his most significant influence. The fans that have stuck with him through the years - through 14 DA albums and multiple solo albums, plus releases from stellar side projects the Swirling Eddies and the Lost Dogs - are now rewarded with a sprawling masterwork in which Taylor, now 71, wears all his literary, biblical and musical influences on his sleeve.įlashes of the Beatles, Beach Boys, Moody Blues, Smashing Pumpkins and Jellyfish are all there, but the real wonder of “This Beautiful Mystery” is how much it sums up his long career working mostly in obscurity as one of the nation’s most gifted songwriters. The Southern California band also known as DA started out as a Christian version of the Eagles but quickly - in the early ‘80s - became an outlet for Taylor’s ever-expanding palette of musical and literary influences, losing a lot of fans along the way with the release of “Horrendous Disc” and “Alarma!” There is no other way but to take a journey through its 21 songs - 1 hour and 40 minutes of wit, whimsy, wordplay and, yes, mystery.Įver since the early days of his band Daniel Amos in the mid-1970s, Taylor has shown himself to be an artist comfortable with exploring the outer edges of the songwriting craft and pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an evangelical Christian.
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