On his third proper solo album, Alexis Taylor puts aside all semblance of pop affectations in favor of something totally sparse and infinitely more vulnerable: a record composed entirely of piano and voice. Recorded at Hackney Road Studios, the aptly-named Piano is not only the most straightforward thing the usually cheeky Hot Chip frontman has ever released, it’s also the most surprisingly personal. Taylor has always had a knack for embedding wistfulness and bittersweet melancholia into pristinely rendered pop songs. With Piano Taylor peels back any kind of artifice, offering a collection of songs that examine mortality, religion, and the creative impulse itself.
The album opens with “I’m Ready”—a song that correlates the creative process with a kind of expansive emotional openness. “Don’t you know I’m ready?” sings Taylor. “Don’t you know I’m healthy? Nowhere else I’d rather be/Nothing to protect me/No one to defend me.” The song, which is carried aloft by Taylor’s lovely but unfussy piano playing, speaks to vulnerability at the core of the record. The idea of emotional nakedness as reflected by this sort of stripped back, bare-bones performance style is certainly nothing new, but it’s a conceit that works nicely here, showcasing just how genuinely sweet Taylor’s voice actually is. This is particularly true on the record’s two standout covers—a take on Artie Glenn’s “Crying in the Chapel” (a song made famous by Elvis in 1965) and, even more odd and sublime, a gorgeous version of Crystal Gayle’s 1977 hit, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” Stripped of its more obvious gospel tropes, the former plays like a love song to serenity, a paean for the peace that comes with surrendering to a higher power or some great love. With his quietly non-ironic dissection of the latter, Taylor gets to the sticky emotional core of Gayle’s song—i.e. the pain of being tossed aside for someone else—and delivers it with devastating ease: “Tell me you love me and don’t let me cry/Say anything but don’t say goodbye.”
Of the original songs on Piano, the most interesting of the lot are oblique examinations of spirituality, all rendered from the stance of the unbeliever. “In the Light of the Room” and “I Never Lock That Door” each unspool with the rhythms of an old country song or a hymn, the divinity at their centers less about any specific god but rather sourced from a sense of love, goodness, and wholeness that exists only in the abstract. (“There’s one place that’s always open/And you’ll find me if you’re hoping/to be mine for all of time/I never lock that door.”) In the liner notes for Piano Taylor admits that many of these songs are meant to “celebrate lives of friends now passed, as well as love for those closest to us, and music itself.” On the elegiac “So Much Further to Go” Taylor balances the urge to bring something new into the world against the crushing brevity of human experience, describing life itself as “a miracle that's hard to bear,” while on album-closing “Don’t Worry” he intones, “If I’m gone away, don’t worry/It is only forever” as if to remind us that life is short, but also sometimes unbearably and stupidly long.
It would be easy to dismiss Piano as a slight addition to Taylor’s discography, but that would be wrong. The quiet humanity in these songs is disarmingly simple at first, but these sentiments creep up on you, giving credence to the notion that it’s in these private moments of contemplation where the narratives of our lives are ultimately assembled. “In the light of the room/Through a window dappled/I was dreaming of you/And of all that’s happened,” Taylor sings on “In the Light of the Room.” It’s the kind of simple moment of observation that Piano is full of. Taylor is no stranger to wearing his heart on his sleeve, Piano takes that notion one step further— it’s as if Taylor is taking his heart out for everyone to see, then discreetly leaving it on your coffee table.
