Chip Taylor – Seven Days In May…A Love Story
Grant Alden
Posted On May 1, 1999
Two years ago, when I first wrote about Chip Taylor’s return to songwriting and performing, I titled the story “When A Man Grows Older,” borrowing the phrase from an obscure Italo Svevo novel about an older man’s unrequited love for a younger woman. It was meant neither as curse nor fortune telling, but that is precisely the story behind his follow-up, the bluntly autobiographic Seven Days In May.
It’s a simple tale, really. Man sees woman across an upscale New York bar, buys her a drink, finds out she’s French, speaks little English, is five months pregnant, and unmarried. They spend a week together before she returns to Paris and the father of her child.
Well, the outline is simple enough; it is in the execution that the story becomes either an Emily Bronte romance or a Jerry Springer stalking segment. Taylor has written such a painfully open and confessional album — reminiscent, in those qualities, of Robert Ellis Orrall’s Mistakes — that one is provisionally tempted to settle for a nineteenth-century romance.
For most of his career, the author of “Wild Thing” has written simple, open-ended songs that left plenty of room for great interpretive singers to work their magic. His recent work is quite another matter, songs so profoundly personal that, at times, one wishes they’d not been made public.
Framed as a diary of that week (and, perhaps, written during that period; certainly it retains the immediacy of the moment), Seven Days In May is as uncomfortably honest a love letter as you’ll ever hear. Indeed, several songs are so directly written to Florence (her name appears in three titles) that one feels voyeuristic listening.
And yet, Taylor remains a gifted songwriter. Taken out of the story’s context, the duet with Lucinda Williams, “If I Don’t Know Love”, is a beautiful song. And it’s hard not to respect the honesty of the Guy Clark duet, addressed to Taylor’s successful rival: “One Hell Of A Guy”. The hidden track, originally written to be sung over transatlantic lines, has a wonderfully gentle, infectious refrain that’ll do the baby proud some day.
One more detail: Florence is now European marketing manager for Taylor’s Train Wreck label.
