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Gentle, plaintive, and compelling, Fire and Rain was the hit that launched the career of James Taylor, one of the 1970's premier singer-songwriters. The song's mournful lyrics of loss and redemption were enigmatic to many listeners, prompting one of music's most enduring What is this song really about? urban legends: Some listeners tried to make sense of the words by reading literal meaning into them, and Taylor's audience collectively developed an autobiographical story line for his Fire and Rain lyrics: In this fan-based interpretation, Suzanne, the girl who was now gone, had been Taylor's girlfriend. They were frequently separated as he traveled on tour, but they kept in close touch, spending hours of time on the telephone line and talking about the good things to come when Taylor finally established himself as a musician. Seeing how disconsolate Taylor was at being away from his love, his friends arranged for Suzanne to fly out to meet him at his next tour stop. Suzanne joyfully accepted, but the flight carrying her to a reunion with her beloved crashed, and she was killed. Both the flying machine and Taylor's sweet dreams were now in pieces on the ground, and he had lost the woman he always thought he'd see again. Although James Taylor's song is indeed autobiographical, it doesn't match the heart-wrenching story line of popular legend. By the time Fire and Rain established Taylor as an international pop star at the tender age of twenty-two, he'd experienced plenty of psychological and physical pain upon which he could draw in crafting his lyrics. He already had a long history of depression and substance abuse for which he'd been hospitalized several times (his first hospital experience was the basis of one of his earliest songs, 'Knocking 'Round the Zoo'), and he'd spent quite a while recuperating from a near-fatal motorcycle accident which had broken both his hands and feet and prevented him from picking up a guitar for several months. All of this was fodder for his songwriting, as he explained in a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone: The Suzanne mentioned in the lyrics to Fire and Rain wasn't Taylor's girlfriend or fiancée, but rather an acquaintance (Suzanne Schnerr) whom he had met while he was a teenager in New York in 1966-67, performing with friends Danny Kortchmar and Joel O' Brien, as part of a group called The Flying Machine. As quoted in Timothy White's biography of him, Taylor said that I knew Suzanne well in New York, and we used to hang out together and we used to get high together; I think she came from Long Island. She was a kid, like all of us. A few years later, after Taylor had decamped to London and was finishing up his debut album for the Beatles' Apple Records label, he found out that Suzanne had committed suicide several months earlier, and that his friends had withheld the news from him so as not to let it distract him and derail his career: By the time Taylor left London for the United States at the end of 1968, he was battling a heroin addiction for which he was hospitalized in Manhattan shortly after his return; he then committed himself to Austen Riggs, a private psychiatric facility in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It was during his Manhattan hospital stay that he formed the song's second verse, with its pleas to Jesus to look down upon him and help him make a stand against the ravages of drug addiction. Earlier, during his senior year of high school, Taylor had entered McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he spent several months being treated for depression. After leaving that facility he traveled to New York and hooked up with childhood friend Danny Kortchmar, where they formed the aforementioned group The Flying Machine, a venture that ended badly for Taylor both professionally and personally: The third and fourth verses of Fire and Rain, finished off during Taylor's months at Austen Riggs, mustered his feelings about his life in and around his hospital stays, as he struggled with depression, strove against heroin addiction, and experienced the disappointment of a bad ending in his fledgling musical career. Thus the allusion in the song's final line about sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground is not merely an indirect reference to shattered ambitions and ruined lives, but a sly direct reference to a previous professional failure. Although James Taylor's eponymous debut album was not a tremendous commercial success, he sufficiently overcame the personal issues with which he had been grappling to leave Apple Records, sign with Warner Bros., and record an album (Sweet Baby James) that, propelled by the success of its second single, Fire and Rain, reached a lofty #3 position on the Billboard charts in 1970.
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