Fire And Rain

It's so funny that the legends of this song still persist. Timothy White's excellent James Taylor biography "Long Ago and Far Away" and Joel Risberg's "The James Taylor Encyclopedia" both make it pretty clear what the song is about. Both quote James from a few interviews where he's explained the songs. The interviews are a few decades old, so it's funny that the legends still persist. I guess that's the effect of a truly powerful song - people will let it mean what they want. Anyway, from James' own mouth: "I knew Suzanne ['Susie' Schnerr] well in New York, and we used to hang out together and we used to get high together; I think she came from Long Island. She was a kid, like all of us." The two mental institutions James stayed in were in Massachusetts, so they did not meet there. They met while James was in Greenwich Village. Susie was a friend of Flying Machine drummer Joel "Bishop" O'Brien. James goes on: "But she committed suicide sometime later while I was over in London. At the time I was living with Margaret ["Maggie" Corey], and Richard [Corey] was around a lot and so was Joel O'Brien. All three of them were really close to Susie Schnerr. But Richard and Joel and Margaret were excited for me having this record deal [with Apple Records] and making this album, and when Susie killed herself they decided not to tell me about it until later because they didn't want to shake me up... I didn't find out until some six months after it happened. That's why the 'They let me know you were gone' line came up. And I always felt rather bad about the line, 'The plans they made put an end to you,' because 'they' only meant 'ye gods', or basically 'The Fates'. I never knew her folks but I always wondered whether her folks would hear that and wonder whether it was about them." So, he wrote that first verse while in London within a week and a half after O'Brien finally told him one late night. He then tried to kick heroin while in London, flew back to the States to continue his rehab in Manhattan, and began writing the second verse. His mother then took him to Austen Riggs, a psychiatric clinic in Massachusetts, where he wrote the third verse about the break-up of his New York band of 1966, The Flying Machine. From long-time friend and musical partner, Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar: "...Every word in ["Fire & Rain"] was just James telling the blow-by-blow truth about how he felt. Even the line when he sings that he wrote down this song, and he 'just can't remember who to send it to' had to do with the fact he'd signed a contract with a new publishing company, Blackwood Music, and he didn't know who he was supposed to send his stuff to!" James told Rolling Stone Magazine in 1971: "The first verse was a reaction to a friend of mine killing herself. The second verse of it is about my kicking junk just before I left England. And the third verse is about my going into a hospital in Western Massachusetts. It's just a hard-time song, a blues without having the blues form."