Taylor Carves Out 'beautiful Road' On Front Door Records

Incredibly, more than two decades have passed since Kate Taylor's last album, It's in There . . . and It's Got to Come Out, came out on Columbia in 1979. So when Taylor releases her new album, Beautiful Road, on her own Front Door Records July 19, long-awaiting fans will finally have something to cheer about.

"Four or five times each week for the last two years people have come in and asked when the new Kate Taylor's coming out. To know it's really coming out now is like a breath of fresh air," says Mike Barnes, owner of Above Ground Records in the Martha's Vineyard village of Edgartown, Mass.—near Taylor's home in Aquinnah.

Since her last album, Taylor and her late manager and husband Charles Witham raised their three daughters. "I realized that the most important thing in life at that point was being there for them," she says, though she continued writing music and performing in and around the Vineyard before starting her new album in 1997.

"We had a good beginning, with Charlie co-producing with Tony Garnier, a wonderful musician who plays with Bob Dylan," Taylor says. "We got Levon Helm on the record, and I did a duet with Mavis Staples, whose '60s records I sang to in my living room."

A "fantasy" come true, Staples accompanied Taylor on the gospel-blues "Rain on the Water."

Taylor says, "Charlie was a poet and songwriter, and he incorporated a dream I had into music that was evocative of Pop Staples' rhythmic thing." Witham also adapted the words to Robert Burns' Scottish ballad "Auld Lang Syne," which Taylor sang accompanied by her brother James Taylor on a single released in time for the millennium. The track is also included on Beautiful Road.

But the project was delayed by "various life events," as Taylor calls them. Most prominent was Witham's death last September after a long illness.

"His goal was to create a [musical] framework for my spirit," she continues. "He was very careful about where the music was coming from—and how it complemented my voice. And he had an amazing library of musical ideas in his head from the music we all grew up listening to: R&B, gospel, blues, rockabilly, Everly Brothers, soul singers, and as my brother Livingston calls it, 'the great folk scare' of the '60s. And he had the vision to incorporate my musical roots from growing up in North Carolina with country, bluegrass, and Appalachian music."

Witham's album-opening cut "I Will Fly" is "very evocative of the same kind of place," she notes. The mountain-type ballad features a backup vocal from her brother James and acoustic instrumentation by fiddler Mindy Jostyn, mandolinist Helm, and guitarist Arlen Roth.

Erica Wheeler's title track is also specially noted. "It describes what's important and meaningful to us," Taylor explains. "The places and feelings and some of the life experiences."

Barbara Dacey, PD at Martha's Vineyard triple-A station WMVY, liked the song so much that she played it immediately during her What's New for Lunch show after Taylor dropped off an album advance there last week.

"It just sparkles on the air, but I love the whole album in general," Dacey says. "It showcases Kate's diversity and sounds fantastic as a whole."

And because of the Taylors' interest in Native American art, Beautiful Road looks fantastic, too. The cover graphic bears an example of the wampum bead-making skills of the Algonquin language tribes of the Northeast seaboard, which the couple learned and developed into a cottage business in the '70s.

The bead belt pictured on her album cover represents the town of Aquinnah, she says, as well as "the continuity of the life therein." The self-managed and booked artist, whose publishing company is Devil's Bridge Music, now looks to celebrate the album's release with July 19 and 20 gigs at Edgartown's Hot Tin Roof club.