You and I Again

Album: Before This World (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • James Taylor wrote this love song for his third wife, Caroline "Kim" Smedvig, whom he met when she was the director of PR and marketing for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The song describes the happiness he felt after meeting her.

    "'You and I Again' is basically about that sense that in the first six months that I knew Kim, it felt as though I were encountering her from a former life," Taylor explained to The Daily Telegraph. "As if we had been maybe siblings in a prior existence, or parent and child, or maybe we'd been lovers. But there was piece after piece after piece that we were so in sync. It was so remarkable that I wrote this song about finding someone on the other side of death, in this lifetime.'"
  • Asked about Kim's reaction when she first heard the song, Taylor replied: "It's funny, it's a song written on the piano, and I don't really play the piano, but I had this little piece and I was driving her crazy with it. She plays piano, and she was saying, 'That's something Bach would have played when he was three.' I got it together enough to be able to write a lyric to it, and a melody as well."

    "I called her up from Rhode Island, where I was borrowing a friend's flat to write, and said, 'I got this new song that I need you to hear,'" he continued. "But she didn't hear it until we had cut it, and it was a fait accompli. Her response was most satisfactory."
  • The Chinese-American classical musician Yo-Yo Ma played the cello on this track.

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