At 71, James Taylor has a new audio memoir, loves watching ‘Blue Bloods’ and won’t dish on Carly Simon

Even here, in the stillness of the Berkshires forest, James Taylor grows anxious. But as he remembers in “Break Shot,” Taylor wasn’t getting any clear instruction from his parents on how to achieve such success — about how to apply to college or pursue a career. “Maybe that’s why Bill suggested we do that early part, so as not to have to make decisions like that,” Taylor says of excluding his romance with Simon from the story. To own the whole thing — I’m glad I didn’t have to talk about those intimate relationships with people who are still alive.” Simon — with whom Taylor has two adult children, Sally, 46, and Ben, 43 — made a very different choice when she wrote her own memoir in 2015, “Boys in the Trees.” In the book, she wrote extensively about her 10-year marriage to Taylor, detailing how she watched him shoot up in a room at the Chateau Marmont and her intense physical attraction to him. Raising his younger boys, Taylor says, he was especially cognizant of making sure his sons realized that “their parents’ emotional needs are not their responsibility.” As he recites in “Break Shot,” he often felt he had to parent his parents — particularly during ages 7 to 9, when his father left the family for two years to serve as a medical officer for the U.S. Navy in Antarctica.