Music Review: Julian Taylor, ‘Beyond the Reservoir’
The acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter’s new country/folk album tells a devastating but ultimately empowering coming-of-age story.
Julian Taylor Beyond the Reservoir album artwork.
Julian Taylor has worn several hats in his 25-year musical journey: Frontman of rock band Staggered Crossing. An under-the-radar solo artist, including a stint hosting a storied open stage in Toronto. A re-emergence in the funk/R&B/pop/rock fusion Julian Taylor Band. And, most recently, a country/folk singer-songwriter whose 2020 release The Ridge hit the sweet spot of inspiring and comforting a world rocked by a devastating pandemic, an isolating lockdown and a profound reckoning with racial injustice.
But before all that, Taylor was a kid, spending idyllic summers at his grandparents’ country home in Maple Ridge, B.C., and a teenager growing up in the decidedly less sheltered city of Toronto. As a Black youth with Mohawk and West Indian roots, he was targeted by police for his identity even as he struggled with it, even wanting to reject it at times.
While The Ridge connects with his earlier childhood memories, Taylor’s brilliant new album Beyond the Reservoir is a coming-of-age story that reopens old wounds but also heals them with the clarity and wisdom he’s gained in the years since his teen experiences. Throughout the record, there’s a gentleness to Taylor’s vocals and instrumentation that makes the lyrics and meaning behind the songs all the more incisive and profound. Musically it floats like a butterfly, but each song contains decades’—sometimes generations’—worth of pain and insight.
Julian Taylor. Photo by Carol Roth, 2022.
The opening track, “Moonlight,” sets the scene beautifully, contrasting the sweetness of receiving a meaningful gift from his aunt on his 21st birthday with scenes from his earlier years when “I wanted the world to see me but I didn’t want to be me / So I shed my skin and became a restless hollow shadow trying to fit in.” It was impossible, of course, as he illustrates in the next verse, recalling when he was “handcuffed to the backseat of a policeman's car / I was arrested a few times but the real crime is all the friends that I buried.”
The anthemic ending telegraphs the main purpose of this album: to mine that past in order to heal and prepare for a better future:
These are the moments that make all of us who we are...
The sadness and the sorrow, and every tomorrow makes you who you are...
The pain and the suffering, the hope of recovering makes us who we are…
Similar lines repeat again and again as the chorus of voices builds and then gently subsides.
As if to show that no growth can come without confronting the darkest parts of our past, the second track delves straight into the pain with “Murder 13,” a starkly sorrowful song about a childhood friend. The simple understated chorus (“I’ve had enough, excuse me I’m leaving / Just don’t feel like being here anymore”) could be about something as innocuous as being ready to leave a party, but the verses about an increasingly tough life and the ache in Taylor’s voice infuse the words with heavy meaning. The final line is like an epitaph: “My name is Alex, and I was murder 13.”
“It Hurts (Everyone Was There)” contains ostensibly carefree memories in the verses, but the chorus belies the apparent happiness (“It hurts so bad / It hurts so much”). Sometimes it seems like it’s about the bittersweetness that comes along with nostalgia and revisiting memories, but it also feels like the verses could be glossing over darker things happening alongside the recollections of parties and laughter.
Either way, why remember the old times if they make us sad? “Wide Awake,” the next track, directly addresses that question. Reminiscing about the care and worry provided by parents and grandparents in the verses, the chorus brings us to the present: “I’m wide awake / I chalk it up to all of my mistakes / and all the heartache that I’ve had to face / and all the choices that I had to make in my life.”
At first I interpreted “wide awake” as insomnia brought on by agonizing over the past, but I’ve come to think of it as being awake to the possibilities opened up by learning from choices and mistakes made. This is borne out by the verse where Taylor is in conversation with his mother: “I once asked her / Why are good memories so heavy / She simply said / Aren’t we lucky.” The chorus also speaks to the value of experience: “There is an abundance of hope that lies within the oceans of time.”
The next track, “Seeds,” speaks specifically to the strength that can come from resisting and overcoming oppression: “They knocked you down, erased your name / You stood your ground and wouldn’t change.” But it’s about more than survival; there’s also growth to be found: “Smoke signals in the air evoke / From the darkest depths that our hearts can be freed.” The refrain paraphrases an oft-evoked idea originated by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos: “They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds.” Sung by Taylor in a lilting, gentle way and framed by his other powerful lyrics, the concept takes on a new potency.
Julian Taylor. Photo by Carol Roth, 2022.
While all the preceding songs referenced racial injustice either directly or obliquely, “Stolen Lands” confronts the issue head-on, provocatively challenging Woody Guthrie’s beloved lyrics “This land was made for you and me” with a much starker truth: “This land was taken and now everyone sees / One family had their land stolen / The other was stolen from their land and here I stand.” The verses relate stories of Taylor’s dual lineage, alluding to the First Nations children taken and murdered at residential schools (as well as the loss of Native languages and lands) and the Black children taken from parents by police brutality.
The next track, the serenely triumphant “I Am a Tree,” ties back to “Seeds” and defies the devastation of “Stolen Lands”: “I weather the storm around me / Many have tried to cut me down / I am a tree.” The simple, impactful lyrics and steady drumbeat illustrate resilience and generational wisdom and history as a path to survive and thrive throughout time.
“Moving” is also about the passing of time and memories, but from another angle. The song seems to chronicle thoughts about the ending of a relationship: “In my head I see it all, pictures of your family on the wall / There was a time when I was there as well.” The lyrics encapsulate the world-shaking impact of such changes: “Outside there’s a lightning storm / The natural world sounds like it’s being torn.” But there’s also acceptance that even painful events are a normal part of life’s progression: “There’s nothing strange about it / It’s just the illusion of time and without it we’d be standing still.”
The final track, “Opening the Sky,” hits fast-forward and imagines the end of life, both the final struggles of a body breaking down and the memories of the life that’s come before. But most urgent is the desire to make sure learnings are passed down to the next generation: “Always love beyond your own comprehension. / In a world that may not see you for all that you are, never forget you have so much power.” The flood of final words of advice and encouragement end with “find time to simply stay still.” When the words repeat, they become the last living moment of the narrator and also a reinforcement of his lasting presence despite death: “Time to simply stay ... still.”
A bonus track, “100 Proof,” is a cover of a song by Canadian artist Tyler Ellis. Written as an “antidote” to everything that was going on in May 2020, it opens with an instrumental riff on Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” and tells the story of a long life marked by achievements and losses but, above all, defined by kindness. It’s a fitting companion to the story arc of Beyond the Reservoir, a reminder that compassion and connection are always appreciated and worth striving for, even in a world as chaotic and damaged as ours.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley!
