Description
This Beautiful Mystery is a solo album by the American singer, songwriter, and producer Terry Scott Taylor of Daniel Amos, The Swirling Eddies and the Lost Dogs fame, Kickstarter-funded and independently released on Stunt Records in February 2022. The basic tracks were recorded by Derri Daugherty at Jackpot Studio in Portland, Oregon; with Terry Scott Taylor and Rob Watson producing. Mixed by Daugherty, Ken Riley, and Mark Linett. Orchestration by Rob Watson.
Featuring Terry Scott Taylor on lead and backing vocals, as well as acoustic, rhythm, and lead guitar, guitar synthesizer, and bass, backed by a session band consisting of co-producer Rob Watson on keyboards and synthesizer, Paul Averitt on bass, and David Raven on drums (with Terry’s son Andrew Scott Taylor sitting in on tracks 1-08 and 1-10). Special guest artists: Derri Daugherty, Greg Flesch, Jerry Chamberlain, Michael Roe, and Phil Keaggy on guitar; Chris Donohue and Marty Dieckmeyer on bass; Alex MacDougall, Ed McTaggart, Jesse Sprinkle, and Terl Bryant on drums and percussion; with Carolee Mayne, Deborah Taylor, Jimmy P. Brown providing backing vocals. Trumpet and euphonium provided by Arnold Henry-John (track 1-08). Violin, viola, and cello provided by Andrea E. Mills and Andrew Smith (tracks 2-01 to 2-05, and as well 2-09). Trumpet, flugelhorn, French horn, trombone, and bass trombone provided by Chris Tedesco (track 2-02).
If asked to contribute to a hypothetical “Best faith-laced Rock & Alternative Music Albums of All Time” list, my contributions would be dominated by the music of Terry Scott Taylor. As I enter my fifth decade writing about “Christian rock” bands and their releases, there’s never been a time when records by Taylor’s primary band, Daniel Amos, (especially Horrendous Disc, Alarma!, and Doppelganger,) weren’t my gold standard of creativity and innovation in a musical field where those qualities were rare. DA’s last album was Dig Here Said the Angel in 2013, which came 12 years after Mr. Buechner’s Dream. And it’s been longer since Taylor made a singer/songwriter solo album, 12 years since the last Lost Dogs album, and even longer since we’ve heard from the Swirling Eddies. So, the arrival of a double album like This Beautiful Mystery feels like a visit from a dear old friend who’s been away too long.
In recent months, Taylor has been turning out fresh recordings from his home in Portland, Oregon for the folk in his Patreon community. Sometimes he revisits an older song, and sometimes he offers demos of new material. These “bedroom studio” recordings are often performed entirely by Taylor, extending his special relationship with some of his most committed fans. As the number of new songs grew, Taylor and some ardent supporters promoted a Kickstarter campaign to help fund a new album. The result is this double-album masterpiece.
This Beautiful Mystery opens with the ethereal tones of «Be That As It May», which will likely remind long-time Taylor fans of his early solo albums, Knowledge & Innocence and A Briefing for the Ascent. Those albums considered the influence and mortality of his grandparents. «Be That As It May», which also muses on human frailty, mortality, and failings, extends the thoughts on Mr. Buechner’s Dreams’ closing cut «And So It Goes» from 2001. The second track, «Signs & Wonders», echoes Taylor’s early work similarly. However, this time, the song is dedicated to his granddaughters Eva and Mia and is inspired by the “grace” of their sweet faces. These artistic echoes, reverberations, and re-examinations add to the listening experience.
Lest you think once edgy rocker has become “kinder and gentler” in his later years, Taylor hits us with the punchy rocker, «The Meek». This scorcher is driven by the solid beat of DA’s veteran drummer Ed McTaggart, (with percussion support from DA’s one-time second drummer Alex MacDougal and Iona’s Terl Bryant.) Original DA bassist Marty Dieckmeyer shows up as well, delivering an earth-moving bass line worthy of the late Tim Chandler. Taylor even brings in DA’s two historic guitar players, Jerry Chamberlain and Greg Flesch, to beef up the rhythms to a raw roar and then, surprisingly, steps in to play the song’s bristling guitar solo himself. The juxtaposition is fun. He reflects on the promise that those who refuse to abuse their strength and who walk in humble quietude will inherit the earth (with a wink toward them as “fools that turn the other cheek.”) He names the ultimate winners, calling out repeatedly, “The meek! the meek! the meek!” While there are echoes of DA throughout this 21-track collection, here we get the most vital and vivid reminder of what a kick-ass band they are.
Once he has blown out the cobwebs and disabused you of any notion that a 71-year-old grandfather can’t still rock, Taylor settles in. Much of what we find throughout the remainder of This Beautiful Mystery is the artist – aided and abetted by more of his many musical friends – at his poetic and melodic best. On most of this fine double-album, Taylor is joined by long-time DA keyboard player Rob Watson, who adds traditional keyboard work and composes the string and horn orchestrations throughout. The principal rhythm section on much of the project consists of Swirling Eddies drummer David Raven and DA/Lost Dogs utility man Paul Averitt, who admirably fills Chandler’s big and wide shoes. Taylor is also joined by guests including Phil Keaggy, Mike Roe (77s and Lost Dogs,) Jimmy Brown (Deliverance), with additional drumming by his son Andrew and Jesse Sprinkle of Poor Old Lu. Derri Daugherty of The Choir reprises his role as DA’s early live sound engineer by mixing about half of the album. Famed studio engineer and producer Mark Linnett, who remixed many of The Beach Boys’ classics, including Smile Sessions, and Pet Sounds Sessions, mixed ten of the songs as well.
Taylor’s long-time fans will love most everything here, of course. But many of these songs would fit nicely in any eclectic indie rock format. «A Song You Cannot Hear», percolates around a melody that taps lots of Taylor’s natural inclinations, while he strives to sing a “deeper song” of a “love strong enough to assuage your doubt.” «Worried Waters» seems to compare the chaotic seas of Gen. 1:1’s narrative of creation with our modern sense of anxiety, only to remind us that “all will be well,” because life itself is good.
There feels like a bit of Swirling Eddies’ satire at work in «The High-Tech Tribulation Force», which takes on a theme that goes all the way back to Taylor’s first album. With this “Tribulation Force,” however, Taylor parodies military images of a Lamb of God action figure who seeks “the blessing of this violence,” reminding believers that Jesus is better remembered as the Gentle One. To further stress the point, Taylor suggests in «These Are The Last Days (For You and Me)» that “Armageddon’s on the back burner now” for the “late great planet earth,” so we should realize our own time is limited, and “draw on love when the weapons get drawn.” As we find ourselves «In Our Waning Days», we should avoid “little tin gods with a jones for praise,” and keep our eyes on a “more enlightened Christ with ready advice” because “we need a Lover… who will bring us home.” (Whew!)
Taylor concludes the first chapter of this epic musical masterpiece with «Deep Calling», an attempt to cast the sufferings we experience in this life as a sign of God’s desire for us to see that everywhere we turn we are on “Holy Ground.” Then in the grand and glorious «This Beautiful Mystery», which opens the second disc, we are warned that we cannot “grasp love this profound,” or limit ourselves to “brick and mortar theology.” Something far greater than our imagination is at work in the “paradox,” and “parable,” of the signs and wonders that await us when we live not by knowledge but by faith – not in certainty but by mercy and grace.
Then Taylor honors some of his other long-time literary influences. In the orchestral pop tribute, «The Everlasting Man», he sends a love letter to G.K. Chesterton and a reminder for us to “love the saved, love the damned/ like you and me.” It also includes a fun quote from St. Francis and a kicking rock beat. Then with a more subtle, brooding arrangement, Taylor captures the dark poetic imagery that fills O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted” stories when he invites us to see through «Flannery’s Eyes». In a touching moment, the opening measures of «From the Case Files of C. Auguste Dupin», (Edgar Allen Poe’s fictional detective,) Taylor adapts a brief but potent bit of the late Tim Chandler’s bass playing, accompanied by layers of effected guitar ambiance by Phil Keaggy, to establish the dense, spooky mood of the piece. The next track offers some wonderful contrast to those darker tones as Taylor asserts (along with George and Louisa MacDonald) that «A Great Good Is Coming». It’s set to a big, bright Sgt. Pepper’s-like refrain, because “there’s much more here than meets the eye… inside the world’s great dissonant roar is the stillness of the kingdom come.”
On the surface, «Ave Eva!» tracks a grandfather who loves reading classic children’s literature (including references to MacDonald’s The Golden Key, Kingsley’s Water Babies, Burnett’s Secret Garden, Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, and Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles.) A closer look reveals a reminder to a child that when the elder has gone beyond the mortal coil, they can still be found in the ever after “reading there beneath the portrait of your face.” Then in the wistful, ethereal «The Real Dream», Taylor imagines “the more of something else” that awaits us all in that inevitable future. Assuaging the grief that inevitably accompanies the loss of a loved one, Taylor visualizes joining «The Cloud of Witnesses», where he can watch his granddaughters live out their lives, knowing that here in the meantime all he can do is his very best. It’s a dear and lovely affirmation, if also bittersweet. That image continues in «Under The Mercy», where he resigns himself to submit to the “irresistible tide” of love.
The long, lovely journey of This Beautiful Mystery concludes with a final paradox/ parable. «Talitha Kum», which is based on one of the few Aramaic phrases that make it into the Greek language Gospels, dreams an exotic fantasy in which the singer meets the ghosts of C.S. Lewis and JFK. Like all the sleeping dead, the specters hear Jesus say, “Rise, child, you’re only sleeping.” Like many of a certain age – especially those of us who have had a close encounter with illness – Taylor’s mind is on that which awaits us: the hope that we rise again to our loving Savior.
Terry Scott Taylor has given us a great gift in this musically and lyrically rich rumination on life’s greatest mysteries. He generously invests his humanity and longing for connection into every track. Though I can’t imagine how this music will be heard by someone unfamiliar with the vast amounts of music that Taylor has offered throughout the years, as a fan of nearly five decades I find it to be a welcome gift of great depth. Though Taylor has suggested this might be his final major release, I hope there’s still more to come. If this is his ultimate creative contribution, however, it is a strong closing chapter. [Brian Quincy Newcomb, True Tunes, February 24, 2022]
> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/this-beautiful-mystery/1596993543)
2CD tracklist:
Disc One
1-01. Be That as It May – 4:07
1-02. Signs and Wonders – 3:47
1-03. The Meek – 4:34
1-04. The Very One I Love – 4:36
1-05. I Plan, God Laughs – 4:28
1-06. A Song You Cannot Hear – 4:12
1-07. Worried Waters – 3:17
1-08. The High Tech Tribulation Force – 3:23
1-09. These Are the Last Days (For You and Me) – 5:06
1-10. In Our the Waning Days – 3:54
Disc Two
2-01. Deep Calling – 5:19
2-02. This Beautiful Mystery – 3:49
2-03. The Everlasting Man – 6:48
2-04. Flannery’s Eyes – 4:22
2-05. From the Case Files of C. Auguste Dupin – 5:35
2-06. A Great Good is Coming – 5:46
2-07. Ave Eva! – 5:14
2-08. The Real Dream – 4:12
2-09. Cloud of Witnesses – 4:08
2-10. Under the Mercy – 5:14
2-11. Talitha Kum – 5:19
Note: Released on both CD (2CD; new album plus a bonus disc) and Limited Edition tri-colored (Blue; Clear; Purple) 12-inch vinyl triple LP. (Vinyl edition is packaged in a 3-panel gatefold sleeve; comes with 12″ lyric booklet as well as smaller illustrated lyric book w/ bookmark. Includes bonus tracks – demos, instrumental – not available on the CD version.) Available at Bandcamp: https://terryscotttaylor.bandcamp.com/album/this-beautiful-mystery
https://terryscotttaylor.bandcamp.com/album/these-beautiful-demos
TrueTunes @45RPM: Feat. Terry Scott Taylor. (In honor of the release of his stunning new solo double-album This Beautiful Mystery, this premiere episode features a conversation with Terry Scott Taylor from the Daniel Amos Alarma! Radio Special – produced by our own Bruce A. Brown in 1981 – alongside a clip from our conversation with Taylor in the fall of 2021.)
TrueTunes, October 26, 2021: The Beautiful Mystery of Terry Scott Taylor (Part 1) (In this first of two installments, we hear about Terry’s roots, his influences, and his general formation. In Part Two we will explore This Beautiful Mystery in great detail; as both the present culmination of a well-traveled journey and as a roadmap for another generation of restless creatives looking to make soulful sense in these crazy days.)
Terry Scott Taylor wraps his near 50-Year career with ‘This Beautiful Mystery’
Review by Stephen Huba, 2021In George MacDonald’s short story “The Golden Key,” the child Tangle is seeking the “country whence the shadows fall” with the help of the Old Man of the Earth. The old man finally removes a large stone and points to a hole that the child must go through.
“That is the way,” he says.
“But there are no stairs,” the child says.
“You must throw yourself in,” the old man replies. “There is no other way.”
The same can be said of Terry Scott Taylor’s new double album, ‘This Beautiful Mystery,’ a culmination of 40-plus years laboring in the vineyard of Christian music with a quality and reach far beyond that much-maligned artistic ghetto.
There is no other way but to take a journey through its 21 songs — 1 hour and 40 minutes of wit, whimsy, word play and, yes, mystery.
Ever 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.
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!‘.
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.
Flashes 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.
He’s been doing this for so long that he ends up being his most significant influence.
“I happen to be what they call prolific,” Taylor recently told the True Tunes podcast. “I’m someone who just loves to write.”
Before the advent of modern recording technology, Taylor would doubtless have been a poet, a novelist or a short-story writer. Instead, his songs have become a vehicle for an ever-deepening faith and an ever-widening array of 19th and 20th century authors. These are all on display in ‘This Beautiful Mystery,’ which explores themes not only from literature but also from theology, eschatology and, most profoundly, mortality.
In the 2013 Daniel Amos album ‘Dig Here Said the Angel‘, Taylor turned the lens on his own mortality with an almost morbid and obsessive precision. Here, he’s thinking more in terms of his musical and spiritual legacy, especially in songs dedicated to his granddaughters.
“I was thinking, this could be the last (album),” he told True Tunes. “The last one could’ve been the last one.”
For inspiration, Taylor taps into the writings of the aforementioned MacDonald’s “A Great Good is Coming,” as well as G.K. Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man,” Flannery O’Connor’s “Flannery’s Eyes,” C.S. Lewis’ “Ave Eva” and “Talitha Kum,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “From the Case Files of C. Auguste Dupin.” Taylor’s songwriting on Disc 2 is enriched by this “cloud of witnesses.”
Taylor’s sheer love of word play is most evident on disc two. In «Under the Mercy», he uses drowning as a metaphor for going deeper into the things of God:
The water is living
I’m not here for a swim
Over its surface
I’ve gone further in. …
The river is flowing
Toward places unknown
I’ll either survive this
Or I’ll sink like a stone.In «Ave Eva», a palindrome dedicated to Taylor’s granddaughter Eva, Taylor name-checks no fewer than five beloved children’s authors, including Lewis and MacDonald. Elsewhere, his more adult musings rely on the writings of Chesterton and O’Connor.
In «The Everlasting Man», arguably the beating heart of disc two, Taylor skillfully has Chesterton in dialogue with St. Francis of Assisi and Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”:
I ran into Chesterton outside the bar one sultry summer day
Roly-poly, sweating, he was wrapped in woolen folds of gray
St. Francis stood beside him, here’s what they had to say
“Everlasting Man
We see that you’ve still got your chest.”In «Flannery’s Eyes», he references her short story “Greenleaf” and its charging bull as a metaphor for Christ. Like a rock ‘n’ roll literary critic, Taylor captures the essence of O’Connor’s reliance on violence as a vehicle for grace:
The bull is charging now
He will thrust and open up your side
Embrace him as he violently abides
In a rosary of mystery inside
The glint in Flannery’s eyes
Like the eyes of God watching you.On disc one, Taylor turns to his back catalog as front man of DA for inspiration. In «Signs & Wonders», «A Song You Cannot Hear» and «In Our Waning Days», Taylor sounds like the young man who — in the ‘80s heyday of the religious right, Crystal Cathedral and TV evangelists — regularly skewered the cultural forms of American Christianity that he saw as shallow and hypocritical. Conversant in the discourse of evangelical Protestantism and its focus on the Bible and a personal relationship with Christ, Taylor keeps the best of that tradition — the Sermon on the Mount, especially the Beatitudes — and leaves the rest.
He especially has no patience for the dispensational, premillennial end times theology that he once embraced in the early ‘70s — he devoured Hal Lindsey’s “The Late, Great Planet Earth” as a young convert and once thought Henry Kissinger was the anti-Christ — or its latter-day manifestation in the bestselling “Left Behind” series of books.
Taylor’s humor is on full display in the oddball «The High Tech Tribulation Force», which he describes as the “theme song from My Left Behind”:
The lamb of God’s now an action figure
With one pierced hand he pulls the trigger
As he texts his thoughts on Skype and Twitter
He’s big and bad
With six-pack abs
Barbed wire tat
Reversed ball cap
With his bill in back
He’s a real go-getter!Taylor’s answer to that muscular eschatology is the more introspective and personal «These Are the Last Days (For You and Me)» and «In Our Waning Days». Yes, Taylor says, these are the “last days” for those of us who are closer to death than the day before, who are “fallen and crawling to the same finish line.”
If Taylor’s mature theology is most evident in the songs on disc one, it is a theology that accepts and celebrates God’s transcendence in «Signs & Wonders», God’s beauty in «The Very One I Love», God’s sovereignty in «I Plan, God Laughs» and God’s holiness in «Deep Calling».
Taylor, once he puts easy sarcasm aside, ultimately wants his listeners to go deeper into Christian discipleship, to do the hard work of really listening, to follow the way of obedience and even suffering. As a songwriter comfortable with paradox, mystery and contradiction, he’s not asking listeners to go anywhere he himself has not gone in ‘This Beautiful Mystery.’
Does he have any listeners? And do they have “ears to hear” his sometimes unpopular message? More importantly, can a Christian even get a hearing in American popular culture today? These are questions he addresses with self-deprecating humor in «A Song You Cannot Hear»:
I’m singing
Maybe just to myself. …
When my lips move
Your head turns
In the opposite direction
My heart beats
On the radar
Flying under your detection .It’s a sentiment consistent with the frustration Taylor expressed 40 years ago in 1981’s «Through the Speakers» — “How can I love you/ Do the best I can/ Through the speakers” — or in 1983’s ode to rock star estrangement, «Here I Am»: “Here I am/ There you are.” Both songs were written at a time when Taylor was spreading his artistic wings and trying to move beyond DA’s first two country albums, influenced as they were by the expectations of Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel — where the band cut its musical teeth — and the Jesus movement of the ‘70s.
Although his spiritual journey has taken him to some strange places, as a legacy artist of early Jesus music, Taylor has landed in a place where he can preach to the choir of his Patreon and Kickstarter supporters and not have to spend as much energy trying to explain himself or his Christian walk.
For insight into Taylor’s core beliefs, one need look no further than «The Meek» and the title song. The meek of the Beatitudes inherit the earth — that is true, Taylor sings, but in a way that reverses the values of the world. There’s a sense of both impending promise and doom in the way Taylor sings about the meek. The meek are “easy to defeat” — in fact, they have a “2,000-plus-year losing streak.”
“The vote is in: their future’s bleak,” Taylor sings. “What’s this foreign language that they speak?”
The title song, «This Beautiful Mystery», is about as close as Taylor comes to worship music. Here he pulls out all the stops to proclaim Christ crucified and risen in one of the most beautiful stanzas in his body of work:
When we could not grasp love this profound
We subdued it with a thorny crown
Whipped it into shape and nailed it down
Sealed the exit from the burial ground.This is a time of intense scrutiny for American evangelicals. Taylor himself has been among their most consistent critics. But he also is a product of that subculture. In ‘This Beautiful Mystery,’ he embraces and preaches the best of that tradition through the idiom of popular song — without the political and cultural baggage that has hamstrung the witness of the evangelical movement in these last days.
Taylor’s music can be purchased at danielamos.com or terryscotttaylor.bandcamp.com
[Stephen Huba, religionunplugged.com, November 30, 2021]
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