We recently connected with Ian Taylor and have shared our conversation below.

Ian, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I grew up in a working class family in South Portland, Maine. I am the youngest in a family of 6 and as a child I was highly influenced by the music my sibling were listening to. My oldest sister was really into Gun”s and Roses and hair metal of the late 80’s and my brothers seemed to idolize grunge and older music from the 60’s and 70’s… all rock. I remember when Oliver Stone released The Doors and we all practiced an abiding devotion to Jim Morrison and the music of The Doors. They were big for all of us. But, personally for me, The Beatles really struck me deeply… more deeply than the rest of my siblings. I remember one of my brothers got a hold of one of the neighbors disc 1 to the The White Album… the disc with Dear Prudence and While My Guitar Gently Weeps on it and oddly enough the song that really grabbed me and pulled me deep into my obsession with the Beatles for years to come was Obli-Di Obli-Da… I thought it was just such a goofy, fun song with a kind of creative abandon to it. Listening to the rest of disc 1, what struck me the most was the range of expression the Beatles possessed. They could write songs like The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill that appeared to be complete non-sense, hap-hazard, yet geniusly orchestrated to the beautiful face-melting, existential sensitivity, spirit-inspired passion of While My Guitar Gently Weeps… my burgeoning love affair with the Beatles seeded something inside of me. I started to reflect, listen, observe and analyze deeply what the Beatles were doing and from that what was born out of me was my own insatiable desire to create music and embody musical expression with the sense of freedom and expertise it appeared John, Paul, George and Ringo had achieved back in 1968… My brothers and I shared a room growing up. 3 boys in one room, so of course living so closely together, what they were listening to was what I was listening to… and, I idolized my brothers, so I would happily take interest in whatever they were into. They both were 90’s hippies… they followed Phish around the east coast and I believe my oldest brother even saw the Grateful Dead before Jerry passed away. So, a part of my youthful dreaming very much included the hippy fantasy of the 60’s. From the music I listened to from the 60’s and 70’s on the local radio station Oldies 100.9 and the media that depicted what that time was like, I adopted a vision of happiness inside of myself and it looked a lot like San Francisco in the late 60’s. Free love, oneness, colors, art, counter-culture, living in community, practicing brotherly love, caring for one another and creative expression. That’s what happiness looked like to me. There was even one summer that my brothers invited me to go to a big 3 day Phish show called the Great Went. I was 16 and I was very accustomed to my small town dwellings with my small group of friends and school. At that show I had an amazing expanded experience of feeling a great sense of freedom and liberation that was such a contrast to my small everyday life while dancing with my brothers and their grubby hippy friends that had been on Tour without showers and living in tents for most of the summer. I remember dancing and having a moment of feeling so exposed and awkward and then pausing to look around me only to realize that everyone was awkward and just letting themselves be awkward and doing their awkward dance… I felt a real sense of excited joy and freedom… who gave a fuck if i was awkward!… we were all awkward! I thought maybe this was the spirit of the 60’s and hippy culture? Maybe it is attainable for me in this lifetime? This sense of the world stayed with me and informed my music and my choices in life to come…
All while this was influencing me I was also really deeply in love with Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. This was the music that me and my closest friends were listening to. We spent a great amount of our time as teens chasing the party by trying to get beer and weed as often as possible. And when we did it was usually off to the beach for a night of intoxication and getting loose enough to sing Nirvana songs at the top of our lungs. I remember seeing Nirvana’s SNL performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit a few years back in 1992 and being kind of in shock with how edgy, raw and angry they seemed… it was simultaneously intriguing and scary for me at the time. But, by the time I reached adolescence it made complete sense to me… I became acquainted with angst, anger and feeling a deep sense of not belonging and being misunderstood by my school, my peers, my parents and really the world at large. The passion and creative expression of Kurt Cobain was nothing like anyone had seen and it spoke so deeply to me and my friends and obviously to the whole world. He almost gave us permission to sing and give voice to our emotions and the built up tension of feeling neglected by the world. Nirvana was deeply impactful on me. It was as if my friends and I were involved in some sort of unconscious prayer ritual nightly to let ourselves lose ourselves a bit in drink and smoke and follow the word of our trusted leader and role model… it’s as if he was saying to us through his songs, “Sing! Let it out! Scream it at the top of your lungs! You are allowed”…
At school I did not fare well with my obligations as a student… as a sensitive, empathic and deeply creative boy, school in South Portland, Maine was not a supportive and nurturing environment to really let my creativity unfurl in the way I would have liked… I would get very tied up in the drama of social relationships, making friends, losing friends and dealing with the first buddings of sexuality, desire, love, rejection, heartbreak, jealousy, betrayal, social persecution and finally falling from the graces of the “popular” crowd. All this was happening while my parents were gearing up for divorce, which happened when I was 14. The same year I fell in love for the first time, the same year I started having sex (too young, I now see) and the same year I experienced the most devastating breakup and experience of abandonment my little skinny, young, innocent and fragile heart had ever gone through. These experiences set me into a prolonged period of depression where I became extremely introverted and lost interest in school and found no desire to stay engaged with a system that did not support me, let alone listen to me and help me find a path in life that I would be lit up about… no, The Beatles, The Doors, Phish, Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins… they were my inadvertent teachers offering me a whisper of possibility to find a way to express my own creative musical expression the way they have. That maybe there was a place out there in the world waiting for me to belong to… beckoning me forward… calling me to learn how to play, to sing, to write my own songs and express my deepest most inner feelings in the most beautiful, uniquely “me” way…
At 16, learning to play the guitar became as important as breathing… after all I had went through in school and in my social life I had a deep tribal burning to express myself through music… it bubbled up from the very core of my existence and has stayed with me until this day. I joined music classes and took on a private guitar teacher… these activities were very helpful in establishing a rudimentary understanding of guitar and music, but I found that I didn’t do well with adapting to someones else’s form of how to learn to play, so I ended up going my own way and becoming self taught.. my grandmother had bought me The Beatles Complete Recordings which was the thickest music book on the planet. It had everything in it from Ringo’s drum patterns, to the sheet music for the orchestral arrangements that Phil Spector added to their songs. I ate that book up and learned as much as my novice mind could process. Ultimately, through digesting it on my own and following my own passion for Beatles songs, that’s how I learned how to play music… While learning how to play music in Maine, I longed for a lifestyle surrounded by other musicians to play with, to experiment with and to learn from that would nurture me into being a fully expressed artist. Maine is a place full of artists… especially now. But I found that I had to leave that state in order to discover myself. Sometimes it just happens like that… some of us are beckoned away from our home town roots in order to become who we are intended to be in life…
At 19 I moved to this asian healing arts, massage school, vegetarian, hippy community in Northern California called Heartwood Institute… it was a bit of a strange departure from small town hippy skater kid learning how to play music from the 60’s, but my sister had been traveling around the world living at ashrams and spiritual communities while I was living out my teen years in Maine and she landed in this place and my mother and I went to go visit her one Christmas and that visit changed my life… I knew I wanted to leave Maine, but was just unclear of where to go. Heartwood had a music room in the main lodge where everyone would eat their delicious organic vegetarian meals. The music room had a bunch of guitars laying around and numerous percussive instruments all the hippies would sit around and have drum circles and jam sessions. During that visit I spent hours in that music room playing guitar singing Beatles and Grateful Dead songs and I remember on the last day of our trip I was leading a full on Grateful Dead sing-along surrounded by people that knew and enjoyed the music as much as I did… this was quite a liberating experience for an incredibly shy, withdrawn and closed down teen from Maine. My Mother had come into the music room to tell me it was time to get on the road to catch our flight home… I got up and hugged every single person in that room as I departed. I felt a vast openness from that experience and I knew that I was meant to live there and be immersed in this community… I had learned that there were work-trade opportunities I could apply for, so I inquired about that and a few months later I said goodbye to Maine and moved to Northern California.
Heartwood had monthly open mics, so I started performing for the first time in my life while living there. Life was very simple in …those days. I worked essentially part-time and spent the rest of my days playing guitar and trying my hand at writing songs… all while making new friends and striking up romantic relationships that were seminal learning and growth experiences that informed who I developed into as an artist. Heartwood also opened me up to spiritual pursuits and the idea of striving for inner peace through yoga, meditation, healthy diet and viewing life as a process of awakening and a journey of healing… that we all possess the capacity to live into our heartfelt desires and to create a life full of purpose.
From Heartwood I did some traveling around the west coast with a girlfriend at the time. We spent time in Hawaii camping on the beach, visited intentional communities/healing resorts, attended dharma talks by numerous gurus, lived at a yoga retreat, hitchhiked from Mexico all the way up to Oregon with 2 other women from Alaska. In Oregon we decided to part ways and I moved back to Heartwood where I delved once again into a deep songwriting process. I decided to put on a performance where I would showcase all the songs I had written. It was the first performance where I sat in front of a room of people and shared myself, shared my songs and my story. In that performance I had a direct experience of expressing my authenticity and it being inspiring for others to hear and witness. It was the first time in my life I spoke openly to an audience about my struggles with shyness and depression and also publicly claimed and embodied my own victory over fear of ridicule and the tendency to withdraw the gifts I naturally possess. It was a beautiful first performance and it sits in my mind as a milestone moment in my life.

Ian, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

In my mid 20’s I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. After I had gone through a pretty bad breakup the year before. Moving to San Francisco was an attempt to reinvent myself and find my place in the world as an artist. There I explored many chapters of life starting with making my first foray into solo living in the big city by sub-leasing an apartment on Lower Haight Street in the summer of 2008. I worked at a record store in downtown and I started playing at a lot open mics for the first time in my life, thus beginning the journey of getting more comfortable with performing. It was an intimidating process at first, but I stuck with it and made some friends along the way. Eventually I moved to the East Bay on the Berkeley/Oakland line where I lived with my girlfriend. There, I worked at a vegan restaurant and started an electronic rock trio with good friends I met during my performing adventures in the Bay. I got deep into hipster musician culture there and tried my hand at creating deep, existential electro indie pop music fully equipped with loop pedals, synthesizers and performing to backing tracks playing out of computers. We played at a lot of dive bars in Oakland, we recorded an EP and traveled to Austin, TX to play at SXSW in 2012. I had my 30th birthday on that trip and I had a beautiful moment where I felt I had finally arrived to being that artist I set out to find when I initially moved to SF. After that trip personal differences between me and my bandmates started to boil over and couldn’t be avoided. The band broke up and I ended my collaboration with my closest creative partner in that project. I knew I wanted to find success as an artist, singer-songwriter, musician, but something was calling for me within myself at that time… I felt a great desire to go my own way and discover who I was as a person, as a solo artist and as someone connected deeply to a sense of purpose in my life. I could sense a great fear inside of me to stand up and claim my power as a solo artist and I knew I needed to take time to parse through where that fear was coming from and why it was holding me back. On top of that, I went through another breakup with the girl I was living with. I started seeing a therapist intermittently since I first moved to the Bay in 2008, but at this time, dealing with the breakup of my band and my primary relationship I was really in touch with my pain, my depression, my lack of feeling a sense of purpose and my extreme low self esteem that had been with me my whole life whether in the background, or right up in my face. I knew it was time to pay more close attention to these feelings inside. I started a very focused deep journey of healing and working on myself and making sense of all the emotions swirling inside of me, speaking loudly to the point where I could not ignore them anymore. My therapist at the time recommended I look into getting into men’s work to help get clear on my purpose in life and experience of being a man in this day, age and culture… especially as a sensitive, empathic man. I participated in a Men’s weekend retreat in the hills of central California. The purpose of the retreat was to attempt to recreate the experience of initiation that was a normal practice in ancient tribal cultures that young men would participate in as a symbolic act of moving out of childhood and into adulthood. It is believed in many many men’s work organizations that the seed of a great amount of issues in this western culture is because the practice of initiation for men has been forgotten about making generations of men truly uninitiated into adulthood and missing an important and primary piece of maturing and crossing that bridge from childhood into full adult responsibility. I could really relate to this philosophy and after that weekend I started participating in men’s groups regularly where we got together and spoke openly about our emotions, the trials and tribulations of everyday life, the struggles men face in this modern age as we attempted to support each other as best as we could.

Ever since I was a child I have been a hopeless romantic with a deep craving for feminine love and attention. Throughout my life I could track that the most trying times for me had to do with my relationship to women. What I learned in men’s work and therapy is that growing up with a father who worked full-time to keep the family afloat financially and used alcohol to cope with his own anger and rage left over from the abuse and trauma he endured in his childhood made it so I felt he couldn’t provide a safe and consistent loving presence in my life, leaving an over emphasis on my relationship to my mother as being my primary source of love, learning, growing, safety and adjusting to the world and life in a healthy and balanced way. I know my Dad did the best he could and he loved all of us with all his heart. He was a determined and loyal provider… much to the sacrifice of his own time, energy and life-force… my father holds a great amount of nobility, strength and loving service and I see that much clearer now that I am older. As a child, however, I was naturally drawn to what felt safer… and with my father going through his own inner struggles and bouts of rage, my mother just felt safer. And, she could only do the best she could while raising 3 other kids and managing a complicated relationship with my father, let alone trying to cope with her own personal issues. Her attention was understandably diverted while I was a child, which set me up to be inadvertently emotionally neglected and to crave feminine energy and attention, for my mother just could not supply me enough in my crucial developmental years. I’ve learned that that is the most important time for children to feel that their sources of love are solid… if they aren’t, if their caregivers are preoccupied, or inconsistent it can sort of setup a recording on the child’s psyche and consciousness that love is not constant and true support is hard to come by, leaving an almost insatiable craving for love and support that can haunt one for a lifetime. After my breakup when I was 30 I really took a sobering look at this dynamic for the first time in my life. I dated a lot and experienced rejection from women I really wanted and enticement towards women that were not the healthiest of choice for me. I went deep into heartbreak, longing, experiencing the addictive drug of love fantasy and learned how I would unconsciously give up my power and sense of inner sovereignty just for a taste of feminine loving. After a tumultuous 2 week trip of driving around a beautiful 20 year old Israeli woman (that in the end was not romantically interested in me) and following her up to Oregon in blind hope that she’ll fall in love with me for doting on her and offering my caring service I realized I was succumbed to an addictive love/fantasy trance and knew I had to part ways with her and get myself back down to the Bay and come back into reality. After parting with her, on that 15 hour drive from Portland, OR back down to Oakland I experienced some of the deepest emotional catharsis in letting go of that fantasy of being with her and potentially receiving her energy and loving. It brought up all the ways I was conditioned to live and survive off of the hopes and potential attainment of feminine loving. Like a carrot being dangled in front of my face, I realized that I learned how to starve for it by the fact that my mother could not provide it for me when I was a child, or could only provide it inconsistently and sporadically leaving me to long for it and chase it, trying whatever I could to attain it. When I got back home to the Bay I fell into a period of deep depression and isolation. I knew I had to do something with all the darkness and emotional turmoil I was feeling and somehow I had to transmute it into something positive. So, I made a choice to use all that was coming up for me and channel it into my music and my songwriting. A friend of mine that lived far up in the country and had a drum set setup in their cabin invited me to house-sit while they travelled that summer. I brought all my recording gear up there and secluded myself in the country to record my first self produced album all based on turning my trying experiences with women into beautiful works of art and expression, in the spirit of getting it out and letting it go. After I recorded that album in honor of healing my inner experience with women, I slowly started dating again… and through those experiences not working out I found I had 2 more albums in me that I recorded in my little studio I was living in all in the spirit of emotional honesty, catharsis, grief and healing.

In 2019 I moved to Los Angeles to further pursue my music career and attend a 2 year program in Spiritual Psychology at the University of Santa Monica. Throughout my life I had always felt very innately connected to spirituality but it wasn’t until I participated in that program that I really understood how my own healing journey and hardships applied to the spiritual context. Up until this point I had come to a deep understanding psychologically of myself and my struggles, but bridging it with spiritual meaning really clarified a lot for me. It helped me come to terms with the hardships I’ve gone through and to see a higher meaning in them and to really clarify my sense of purpose as being of service to others through sharing myself authentically, sharing my story and the wisdom I’ve attained through my experiences in my songs and also in helping others to get in touch and accept with their authentic emotional experience in life.
A year into making LA my home the pandemic hit. Fortunately I have family here that took me in as the world as I knew it fell apart around me. I lost my job and had to move out of the apartment I was living in. It was, of course, a challenging time for me as it was for everybody. And, I am forever grateful to my family that took me in. I was able to have a safe place to reorient myself, my plans and my life in general. It really was a blessing to have them in that moment. During that time I started a coaching practice that I now run part-time helping clients get in touch with their authentic, honest, inner emotional experience and self expression. I help them to step into confidence in themselves and who they truly are by providing a space of allowance for their feelings with care, support and non-judgement. I also wrote a group of songs during the pandemic I am now just about ready to release as an album. I was able to find a recording studio that manages crowdfunding campaigns for up and coming artists to record in a state of the art professional studio and I have just completed my first single with them to be released at the beginning of February 2024! The songs on this album reflect all of the learning, refinement and resolve I have come into throughout my life. The first single I am releasing is called “Just A Heartache”. It’s about accepting that heartache is a natural process of life and maturing. That in the moment of heartache and painful longing, or infatuation for someone unavailable to us in the way we want, it really is just a step in maturing and is actually helping us to refine and to handle the experience of rejection that is necessary to go through on the path of creating the lives we want to be living. This song, this album and the lyrics and expressions within it really is a culmination of all that I’ve gone through and learned in life. I’m very excited for what is to come as a result of these releases and to step more and more into my purpose in life. I have many performances in me and songs to be sung and people to inspire and care for along the way!

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Ever since I could remember as a child I’ve always been involved in some creative process whether it be drawing cartoon characters, creating imaginary worlds inside of myself or writing adventure stories. I used creativity as a way to connect with myself, with others and to make life more interesting. I think the overall dream of mine has been to experience my ability to manifest a creative expression that comes purely from me, that is uniquely me and is born out of my specific and singular essence. Really, it is almost an animalistic and innate motivation. It just needs to be done. I need to create. As I’ve grown older it’s taken on different meaning… growing up in an alcoholic family where I was inadvertently emotionally neglected by the circumstance of my family, the primary way I learned how to cope with this environment was to hide and stay invisible… preoccupied up in my creative world. As time went on a great yearning to be seen and emotionally accepted began to grow and build up inside of me. This informed a lot of my passion and drive to get into music and write songs. I always sang and loved expressing myself vocally, but as an adolescent it was almost as if I made a commitment to myself when I began playing and writing songs… “I am going to make all of these emotions inside into something beautiful. I am going to sing my feelings and my passion and touch the world with how I feel inside.” There is a kind of bleeding heart energy to this that I think an artist, especially a songwriter must possess. A deep burning desire to be seen and to set the tone for emotional expression in this world. We need more acceptance and safety in emotional expression… and I am proud to say that I am doing the best I can to lead by example by sharing my passion and my deep feelings through my songs, which I hope inspires others to do the same.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I’ve always carried a vision of being successful in my creative work, or to be famous as a singer-songwriter. Growing up I knew I possessed a kind of magic with creativity and that it came easy to me and that I had access to an inner world with unlimited creative potential. I grew up in the age of rock stars and television and the ever expanding media where celebrities are revered and idolized and compared against as what a “happy life” looks like, or how they live as the “happy” way to live… rich, famous and surrounded by beautiful things and beautiful people. I myself developed a healthy sense of “celebrity envy” or “fame lust” growing up by experiencing the likes of Kurt Cobain, all beautiful and iconic creating ripples across the world with his creative emotional expression. Because I Felt really connected to a creative gift when I was young it was easy for me to harbor inner fantasies of fame and wanting to be like Kurt Cobain. I wanted to be like him. In fact, for a long time I felt that it was also my destiny to be a successful musician, like him. And, the silly thing, I realize now about that vision, I thought it was just going to happen to me. That it was somehow just written in the stars and I would inevitably fall into it. I spent a lot of my younger years believing in that… as I grew older, I realized that, yes, while I do possess a kind of magic and talent in my creativity and expression, success is not going to be handed to me and it’s going to take a lot of hard work. I also realized that what was behind this whole attitude was a great fear to be seen as an amateur in the humble beginnings of a music career. The fear of humiliation is a powerful fear and I didn’t realize for a while that in order for success to even be possible I had to find who I was in the public eye and deal with all the unconscious fears of exposure and work slowly at building confidence while learning how to contain all the nervousness, critical thinking and low self esteem that inevitably comes up within when interfacing with the public and sharing my gifts. I see clearly now that working hard at attaining a dream is defining to my character and the struggle of doing so actually informs my songs and songwriting and makes them more relatable. Because we are all going through a struggle in life to create the lives we want to be living, to find happiness, a sense of belonging and a sense of home where we are seen for who we truly are by the people around us. That’s kind of the strange magic in this world. We are all connected through our struggles in life. And we actually come together through acknowledging that. I needed to to learn this as a songwriter. That my struggle, my hard work that I sometimes fight against and resist is actually the key to success and creating powerful, relatable, universal and moving songs… and, to me, living a happy life. This lesson is far more valuable than coming into a stroke of luck and being handed success.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/ianktay/
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/iantaylormusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@iantaylor1400
• Other: http://iantaylormusic.bandcamp.com/

Image Credits
Ian Taylor