His father was, as he puts it, “the ultimate academician” - a star student who went from Harvard Medical School to head resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. Growing up, Taylor often felt crushed by the weight of his family’s unspoken expectations. He was on the precipice of adulthood, but he didn’t have any direction. was living under the threat of nuclear annihilation amid the Cuban Missile Crisis. His parents’ marriage was coming to an end. But “it had been building,” he says, “to a real discontinuity:” His father’s alcoholism had reached a critical point. For Taylor, that moment occurred when he left his Massachusetts boarding school, Milton Academy, and went to McLean. Taylor decided to call the audio memoir “Break Shot: My First 21 Years.” The title is a reference to the first shot of a billiards game, when the cue ball slams into the other balls, sending them off into various directions. It was there that he composed the majority of his first hit record, 1970’s “Sweet Baby James” - a story he shared whenever he spoke about his songwriting. A couple of years later, he checked into another residential treatment center in an attempt to kick his heroin addiction. In his senior year of high school, he spent 10 months at Boston’s McLean Hospital during his first depressive episode. But in recent years, Taylor says, he has found his anxiety becoming “a bear.” From the inception of his career, the musician has been open about his mental health struggles. It’s difficult to imagine a more tranquil environment. He keeps on his trademark newsboy cap while tending to the fire in the wood-burning stove.

It’s early January, and the 71-year-old, who has just driven the mile of his maple-lined entry after visiting with his therapist, walks into TheBarn - his recording studio, a building just a few paces from where he sleeps - and takes off his coat. But some of us need to become conscious of what we’re doing that we need to stop doing.” It’s a little bit self-centered and navel-gazing, to a certain extent, to focus on yourself to that degree. “I think any attempt at mental health is an excellent idea. I haven’t seen her since before the break,” he says.

“I was glad to get a chance to see my shrink. He has to be conscious of how he enters his days, since he most often experiences stress during the first six hours of being awake. Even here, in the stillness of the Berkshires forest, James Taylor grows anxious.

Sally taylor