Popular singer-songwriter, Livingston Taylor, will appear at the Emerson Center on Saturday, February 14, for a Valentine’s Day concert.

InsideIndianRiver’s Milt Thomas recently spoke with him:

MT: I know you have some love songs in your repertoire that you will surely sing on Valentine’s Day.

LT: I don’t think there’s anyone out there, Milt, that doesn’t have a fistful of love songs, and I too have plenty of them.

MT: You are quite prolific as a songwriter.

LT: Well, I love melodies, I love lyrics, I love it when a song shows up in my brain.

MT: I worked for Chappell and Co. Inc, one of the largest music publishers.

LT: Then you’ve processed a lot of songs. And I know when you are looking for good ones you kiss a lot of frogs.

MT: It’s certainly not an exact science.

LT: No, you never know when the stars are going to be aligned.

MT: How much of your time do you spend songwriting with such a busy schedule?

LT: If I have a song idea everything gets put on hold because there is nothing more fun. When you start writing a song it is like new love. It is an infatuation and occupies all your time. Then the reality of the relationship settles in and the song has enough strength to continue or I simply get bored with it and set it to one side.

MT: what instrument to you compose on?

LT: Both guitar and piano. If I’m composing on guitar and I have a problem, like I need to write a bridge or I need a turnaround** or key change, I’ll go over to the piano, work out those things on the keyboard, then take it back to the guitar. The piano is easier to solve problems on.

** A bridge in songwriting connects two distinct sections of a song, a segue. Turnarounds are short chord progressions at the end of a section of music that lead to the next section.

MT: Was piano your first instrument?

LT: Yes, although I am a much better guitar player than a pianist. However, I do play piano in my concerts because there are certain things you just can’t do on a guitar that you can on the piano.

MT: You were born in Boston and moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina at a very young age. Your Dad was dean of the medical school at UNC.

LT: I was raised there, then at 16 went back to the Boston area to finish school and I’ve been there ever since. That is, until I get to come to Vero Beach on Valentine’s Day.

MT: Have you been here before?

LT: Many times. It’s a lovely community and I’m really looking forward to being there.

MT: …as we’re looking forward to hearing and seeing you. Do you still have a place on Martha’s Vineyard?

LT: Yes, I have a little house there. I’m a pilot and I have a beat up old airplane that I fly back and forth to my condo in Boston and I get down here when the wind and weather allows.

MT: You just put out your 14^th album.

LT: It’s called Blue Sky. I put it out last spring and was just delighted that I had another one in me and worked on it in Nashville and Boston. I’m a teacher at the Berklee College of Music in Boston so I was able to work with a couple of my students on this project.

MT: Do you record at home or in the studio?

LT: I don’t do much at home other than rudimentary stuff on my iPhone. I really prefer concentrating my energies on what I do well, which is writing and interpreting songs, then I take it to somebody who records well.

MT: Your first recording was on the Capricorn label?

LT: Yes. It was very, very long ago. The continents were still together and you had to dodge dinosaurs to get to the studio. The first record I recorded was in 1969 in Macon, Georgia at Capricorn Studio.

MT: For those who don’t know, Capricorn is where the Allman Brothers got started and Marshall Tucker Band, Elvin Bishop, among others. Are you on your own label now?

LT: Sure. The record industry today is not a single entity. All creativity that is digitizable today is on the internet. No sense of a record company unless you are a Katy Perry. It makes so much more sense to record on your own and sell through your website. If you want Livingston Taylor music you can plug into any search engine and it’s all over the place.

MT: Everyone knows you come from a musical family.

LT: Yes. Our oldest brother, Alex, passed away about 25 years ago. And then my beautiful brother James, has had a remarkable career. Our sister Kate is a guitar player, songwriter and singer as well and little brother Hugh is not a performer but runs a restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard called The Outermost Inn.

MT: Do you all get together musically?

LT: We don’t get together musically like the King Family or the Osmonds but when we get together we talk about who’s doing what musically. James and I talk careers all the time, the practicalities of being on the road, and at Berklee I teach a course called Stage Performance, which is a very popular course. I wrote the course and it’s in a book called Stage Performance that is available on any media where my other digitizable material is available. I speak a lot about why you go on stage, what it’s like to be on stage, above all, why should an audience give you money.

MT: It used to be that the concert tours were a loss leader to promote album sales, now it’s the other way around.

LT: Not entirely, but certainly the economics have changed. If you can sell an album for $10 or $15, and you can get radio play and do concerts to promote that CD, yes that can involve a large revenue stream. But it’s difficult. The internet is so very porous that it’s difficult to find these income streams and difficult to contain the distribution channel. The internet is so full of holes that it all just drains away. So yes, your performance and your relationship with your audience becomes absolutely non-negotiable. And I sure do love my audience.

How appropriate for Valentine’s Day. For ticket information, call the Emerson Center Box Office at 772-778-5249 or buy tickets online at www.TheEmersonCenter.org.