We have something a little different for today’s daily video. In May 2022, filmmaker Marc Levy followed Jeffrey Martin and Willy Tea Taylor while they went on tour. He captured something of their lives on the road as they explored their experiences and motivations as performers. The resulting mini-documentary is beautifully shot and edited and in just 17 minutes manages to give a real insight into the life they chose, or chose them.
Taylor muses: “This is my life journey. It’s every hour, it’s every day and so the music heals me and it always has. I don’t feel right if I’m not meeting people I’ve never met and that sounds weird because I have kids and I’m missing out on their time, time with them but it’s something I’m still trying to figure out why – why is this something I do and why is it so perfect to me?”
It’s a privilege to ride alongside the troubadours as they make their way to a gig at The Birnamwood Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. At the show, we catch Taylor playing ‘Lullaby’ from his 2015 album ‘Knuckleball Prime’. Martin’s song ‘Coal Fire’ from 2014 album ‘Dogs in the Daylight’ soundtracks part of the video and we also see him perform a new song, ‘Sculptor’, which gives a taste of what we can expect from his long-awaited next record. Both artists are real storytellers and, if you like music with character, you should check them out. But stop here for a while first. This mini-documentary is worth watching just for Willy Tea Taylor’s heartfelt description of Jeffrey Taylor’s music. Beautiful stuff.
I saw Willy at the Dorothy Pax in Sheffield last year. He was great and spent a long time chatting to people after the gig. He might admit that that was the night he became a fan of Sheffield Wednesday…