Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer lived with his aunt and half-brother on the wrong side of Civil War Missouri. He loved skipping school to go fishing and cavort in the local swimming hole. He was a prankster who would hang out with his friend Huck Finn and have adventures.
Tom’s pretty much namesake would be the North Carolina band Time Sawyer, led by Sam Tayloe. Their music has some of the same lightheartedness with a resourcefulness and loyalty to friends stirred into its gumbo. “That’s always been hopefully the ethos of the band”, Tayloe said, “Whoever is in the group, their input is a big part of what we do. It becomes that band, not something that I say or the decisions that are made.”
Over the years, Time Sawyer has developed into a band that Tayloe is spearheading. They got together in college at UNC Charlotte. “All the guys that were part of the original group were from Yadkin or Surry County in North Carolina. My best buddy was Houston Norris, who I’d known my whole life. He and I had some banjo lessons. He was from a bluegrass-oriented family but not really played a ton, and I didn’t play until college. Getting the fingering down was the hardest jump, feeling you can make these weird shapes”.
They began as a quartet without a bass player. Guitarist Kurt Layell and drummer Clay Stirewalt were students at a rival high school. Both Norris’ parents played bass, so they filled in during recording sessions, occasionally playing shows with the group. That lasted for a couple years until Tayloe decided to push to create something that would be sustainable as a career.
“We had a rub with the other two fellas that we were going down different paths, not really seeing eye to eye”, Tayloe said in trying to soft-pedal the split. “Houston and I rebuilt the group with Jordan Nelson (drummer) and Court Wynter (bass). We’ve had different lead players”.
Then two years ago, Norris decided that he desired a different career path and went back to college, graduating with an engineering degree. Replacing him was like going through the dating stage, trying out different musicians. Nick Lawrence seems to have stuck. Tayloe has also begun doing some solo shows as a test-the-market of sorts in areas the band has not reached. Of course, having less overhead on the road is an advantage. He has also branched out into other areas of the music world.
“I’m tour managing this great group Shadowgrass and helping work on the Reevestock Music Festival held in Elkin, North Carolina”, Tayloe remarked, adding that you have to have your hands in a number of pots to make a living in music. “I’m also putting together a community music show called ‘Sam on Someday’, which started during the pandemic as a livestream. We put together a band once a month and highlight original music and songwriting”.
As Time Sawyer evolved so did its sound, noticeably maturing with their fifth album, “Wildest Dreams”. Songs like ‘Sea Green Eyes,’ ‘Oak & Pine’ and ‘One House Down’ had a vivid lyricism and an upbeat sound that was a step up in musicality.
“I haven’t really talked a lot about this,” he said, “but I knew the transition in our music was taking place then. I was writing these songs that I really liked but felt they weren’t fitting with what I thought Time Sawyer needed to be, weren’t fitting the mold. That was worrying me but looking back it was probably me not having a lot of confidence”.
Tayloe was writing songs that felt genuine to his personal experiences whether or not they would fit with Time Sawyer as it was back then. “Songwriters are all looking to have an earnestness in their songs, a sense of being real as opposed to drawing a line in the sand that stops it from being genuine.”
You could relate this period in the band’s timeline to when Twain wrote the sequel to Tom Sawyer in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. As the young boys approached adulthood, their paths diverged. Huck remains a character who values his independence and avoids the constraints of society. While he is influenced by the societal norms represented by Tom, Huck ultimately chooses his own path, often at odds with the established order. The band’s name didn’t change but most everything about it did.
“Our earlier records were much longer, 15 songs sometimes, as everyone wanted their songs on them”, said Tayloe as an explanation of why those songs are not representative. The albums weren’t renewed for distribution. “We let those songs come off the digital sites because those guys weren’t in the band anymore and we stopped playing the songs. I wasn’t ashamed of them. It seemed the best way to head the band towards a different trajectory”.
Two years went by and in 2019 along came “Mountain Howdy,” a record even more cohesive than “Wildest Dreams.” You can look at it as how the video game “Heaven’s Vault” upgraded that same year. Its crux is in translating a lost language, a daunting task. It rises above nostalgia and represents progress. By the time you’ve finished, the past, present, and future all bear your fingerprints, traces of where you’ve gone and what you bothered to learn.
“Totally. Cohesive is a good word to use. With two more years under our belt, it felt fresh again. I wasn’t comfortable with my voice in the earlier albums, and though I’m grateful for that period, I don’t sound like that anymore. It’s hard to see when you’re growing as a band. I felt good about the old music but ten years went by and you change a lot as a person and a musician. I don’t want to make it sound like those guys, we, weren’t that good. It’s just the maturation process.”
Years ago, the basketball coach Rick Pitino left the college ranks to coach the Boston Celtics. When a reporter asked him why he once said he’d never be interested in coaching pro basketball, his answer was: “Well, that’s the way I thought about it back then. I don’t think about it that way anymore”. It’s called evolving as the years pass.
“I am glad you put it that way”, Tayloe offered. “From my perspective, I was wanting to be open and transparent and the only thing keeping me from that was feeling I wasn’t good enough like somebody who has a larger platform for their music. I’ve changed a lot and so has my songwriting, but I think that it seems easy to say, but it is so hard for us to take that approach of that was then and this is now”.
“Mountain Howdy” was an interesting title choice, a nod perhaps to authenticity in that the band comes from the mountains and “howdy” is a southernism. What was his reasoning for the title?
“I wanted the music to speak for itself”, was Tayloe’s answer. “I didn’t want the title to feel heavy. I was holding up the skull, like saying this is my life’s work, and I wanted to let the songs be jovial in the sense of, ‘Hey, welcome to these songs’, When you listen, they’re ultimately not funny, though there are some funny parts. But I didn’t want it to come off as pretentious. Maybe some of these lyrics are trying to say there’s a bigger picture and digging a little deeper came out. In short, I guess that “Mountain Howdy” was about not taking things too seriously.”
One line from ‘Lonely’s A Heartbreaker’s Dream’ you might take seriously: “I’ve always had a boat out on the need more river / That kind of living turns your coffee cold / It’s hard to peek through when the dark feels blinding / Shadow is just a ghost grown old”. Again, it goes back to appreciating and believing in your capacity to create something worthwhile. “That thing which makes us unique is something we’re all trying to find”, Tayloe commented. “Even the biggest bands in the world have got that one element that creates these different paths we’re able to get to. So, I think that I admire and enjoy the creativity that we’re all looking for and I think that line, I’m always looking for more of that”.
Time Sawyer’s newest record has the perfect title for its place and time in the band’s discography. “Honest Effort” came out last year (2024). Typically for the rebuilt band, it has fewer songs than most, seven with two of them instrumentals. The lead track is ‘Noah Got Nothing’ and they are not talking about the biblical character.
“I find myself writing songs about fictional folks”, Tayloe observed, “but while also saying, hey, this guy is like you or me or he may be unlike you in some ways, but Noah in this song is a fellow who just has never had the run of luck, the breaks that some of us get in life. Whether that means we were born into an easier run or we clawed our way to where we want to be, life is such a weird game of time. Being there at the right time. We all know friends or co-workers that nobody works harder than them but they never make it to the next level. What I’m trying to say is we write off folks like Noah. He didn’t do X, Y or Z and truthfully that might not be the case. We add one layer of separation to this guy, act like you don’t even know him and don’t care to understand him. It looks as if he’s had a shitty life or life’s been hard on him. You bet he brought it on himself”.
Tayloe has a certain compassion for people. That it’s not always their fault or a lacking of work ethic or intelligence or virtue that has derailed them. The line in the song about a couple of screws is meant to portray that Noah has worked hard but got screwed and wasn’t able to bounce back. It’s a “there but for the grace go I” way of getting his message across and to resist judging people by what can be seen on the surface.
‘Julie (Watching This World Go By)’ was written by Nick Lawrence, who has a beautiful guitar interlude in the song. It’s about losing something important to you and where do you go from that. ‘Boxer’ is Tayloe again trying to get out of his own head and understand his worries are brought on by himself. Just trying to take things in stride and know that what he’s feeling is far from uncommon. Two instrumentals with a gospel feel to them follow that relate to the vinyl format of the album. ‘Side A’ comes at the end of, well …. Side A, and ‘Back from Lunch’ is starting on side B after the break. They are definitely not throwaways, however, to boost the number of tracks.
Tayloe takes no credit for the instrumentals or instrumental as they are actually one track split in half. “Ryan Stigmon (from the band Zach Top) is our producer and played pedal steel on the record. He and our piano player, Phil Howe, came up with the music. It was all spontaneous as they had never met each other before. The moment live music occurs is my favorite thing. Live albums are harder to manipulate. The feelings that you’re getting from those performances are in the moment and real. There is also a hidden track, only on the vinyl, of those two guys playing the old standard, ‘Sunny Side of the Street.’ Just them jamming”.
Since Tayloe has a love of live music, I wondered how he felt about going out on tour. Most often artists relate the hellish experiences of bad food, fleabag motels, unscrupulous promoters, not much to recommend it except connecting with your audience and hopefully converting a few more patrons to your music. I learned more than expected. For example, Wendy’s is the compromise fast food eatery of choice.
“It is grueling,” Tayloe allowed. “You’ve got five people staying in a hotel room, driving around together in a car, playing a gig, driving eight hours to play another, and so on. But the experience of being out there and meeting a bunch of people, connecting with them over music, that outweighs all the negatives. I miss my wife and dog at home, but we usually don’t go out for more than two weeks at a time. I really enjoy the adventure of getting in the car and heading out to some new experiences”.
The band doesn’t book a room at the Marriott or eat at pricey steakhouses, and sometimes that leads to the “new experiences” Taylor spoke of. “We’ve stayed in cabins by the beach with sand in the sheets. One of the weirdest, in a good way, was an 1850’s barn in Galloway, New York. My buddy Rick is the proprietor of the Cock and Bull restaurant there. It’s a beautiful part of the country. We always plan an off day so we can stay for two days, hanging in this barn and playing music, staying up too late and having to blow up a bed to sleep on”.
“But you want weird”, he continued, “I’ll tell you about staying on the side of I-40 at a BP gas station. We had been going 85 miles an hour in the slow lane at like 1:00 AM coming home from a show in Wilmington and a deer comes out on the road. I don’t mean to be graphic, but I’m not sure if anything was left of that deer, and the front of our car also was non-existent. We coasted off the highway ramp and waited till the morning when AAA showed up. We were all sitting on the sidewalk of this station at 6 AM when we got picked up by our drummer’s mother”.
Curiosity prompted the question of what the band was listening to when their car and the deer had the unfortunate intersection of paths. It turns out they had bought a box of old cassettes during another trip and one of Jim Croce’s albums was the selection. He’s a favorite of Tayloe’s, who actually sports a moustache very similar to Croce’s. You don’t mess around with Jim or his facial hair.
When asked if there was anyone – other than Croce, living or dead – that he would like to open a show for, his answer was J.J. Cale. “His songs were just so down-to-earth but still resonated with many people. His 1972 album was fantastic. Any song on it was good and most have been covered by someone”.
Getting back to “Honest Effort,” one of the last two songs is ‘Person’s Just A Spine.’ The spine reference is to a backbone as in having a backbone. Again, it’s the question of not quite measuring up, to stand up for oneself. “It’s a different way of driving home the point that when we say we don’t like a person, we find that we have a family person who is just like the one we didn’t like. Now, this person is part of my family so I have no choice but to say they’re okay. It’s not an option for me to say that person is no longer a member of my family. We all have our own rules that fit an agenda, but to mean everyone else has to be wrong for your ideas to be right is an interesting path I think we need to examine better”.
“You could look at that from another side like politics”, he added. “If I’m forced, you’ll probably find out what side I’m on. I’ll talk to anybody about that. We’re talking about music today. I’m not afraid to tell you my opinions, but I’m also understanding that today people are saying, if you don’t agree with my opinions what side are you on? One sentence could tell somebody, you’re not on my side or you are. And I think that’s a weird place to be”.
The last song on the record – outside of the hidden track – is ‘The Parking Lot That the Dancehall Shares With the Wichita Auto Show’. It’s a witty tune. Listen to it and you’d swear Tayloe knows the guy, but you would be mistaken.
“I don’t know the individual, but I know this kind of individual exists”, Tayloe said, paraphrasing his patter at live shows. “He knows what he likes. My father-in-law is from Kansas and worked in Wichita for a long time. He is into the auto show and was talking about it at Christmas, and it hit me like an earworm. It just sounded like the premise for a song. So, I began thinking who this guy would be. It didn’t have any real point. He was at the Wichita Auto Show and rode his hog from Arkansas every year to go there. Only come to find out at the same time this auto show is occurring; it’s in the same parking lot that a local carnival pops up. And he goes by himself because he loves both the show and the carnival. The character is comfortable with himself. I bet he looks weird but he’s having the time of his life, drawing all sorts of attention to himself but not caring. It’s a call to enjoy the moment because it’s the only moment you’ve got. He’s not worried about a thing, and that’s something I struggle with at times”.
Time Sawyer’s “Honest Effort” is a collection of sharp, no-nonsense and feel-good roots rock built to last through the erosion that time brings to all things, even music. It’s full of unforgettable hooks and interesting tales of modern life, falling somewhere between Mumford & Sons’ rootsy, bluegrass-tinged rock and Uncle Tupelo’s alternative country guise. It’s as if time has caused young Tom Sawyer to grow up and leave behind some of the youthful indulgences.
“The element we really pull the most from would be time and it being an inescapable thing that can be good or bad,” mused Tayloe. “You’re either writing about how much you love this time you’re in or looking back and writing favorably about the time that you had. Time is a large piece of the puzzle that we aren’t necessarily in control of, and you can end up being stuck in a period of time that acts as your muse, whether it be a tough or joyous one.”
The author Kurt Vonnegut used to write about his famous character, Billy Pilgrim, becoming “unstuck in time”, jumping between different points in life in an unpredictable manner. This isn’t literal time travel but instead a character’s disrupted perception and experience. Maybe that’s a good way for a musician like Sam Tayloe to look at it. You might say Time Sawyer’s music is similar to a time capsule, but only full of the good stuff you want to be glad to hear when you dig into what’s been stored inside.
