Four days in a New York hotel room and Lewis Taylor hadn’t heard from a soul. He took the eight-hour flight from London at the behest of D’Angelo and his camp to work on the follow-up to Brown Sugar and now, no knock on the door, no phone call, nothing. Taylor, a self-described neurotic in his early 30s, could only sit and wait for a life-changing opportunity. In New York, no one had even heard of him; his album—a brooding, confounding R&B record that excited UK music journalists but left his label wondering where the hit was—hadn’t been released in the States.
As a child, he inherited his parents’ affection for the tendon-straining R&B shouters of the American South and the smooth, romantic crooners, especially Sam & Dave and Sam Cooke, and thanks to the trippy album artwork on display in a record shop in Hertfordshire, near where he grew up, he discovered prog and psychedelic rock acts like Edgar Broughton Band, Syd Barrett, and Yes. For his debut album, Lewis Taylor, he borrowed from both these fixations to create guitar-driven, structurally ornate tracks that he then blessed with his voice, a svelte tenor that sounded like it had been honed under the tutelage of Marvin Gaye. D’Angelo wanted some of that.
The promise of shaping the myriad ideas mentioned by D’Angelo’s people over the phone—it was difficult to tell which direction they wanted to go in after the success of Brown Sugar—must have felt far away in the hotel room, even though D’Angelo was supposedly somewhere in the vicinity. Taylor wasn’t in the studio, where he expected to be, where he felt comfortable. Frustration mounted. What was the point of enduring this treatment, such blatant disregard for his time and feelings? After four days, he checked out and returned home.
Taylor’s career is one of the most under-discussed in modern R&B history, and this anecdote, which the artist relayed to journalist and scholar Michael Anthony Neal in a 2006 Pop Matters interview, captures his frustrations and difficulties in microcosm. It’s fitting that the interview has been, for all intents and purposes, lost on the internet, only accessible if you excavate using the Wayback Machine or some other archiving project. Unlike white R&B artists like Jon B. or Rick Astley, who found new relevance in the digital cultural memory through Drake adoration and viral pranking, Taylor never found the means to keep his eclectic catalog alive for subsequent generations. It didn’t seem like he much cared to, either; he was content to have a crotchety underdog’s career releasing oblique R&B records that didn’t try to reenact note-for-note the styles of the past or embrace the genre’s meld with hip-hop. After all, this is a guy who, when asked about being a blue-eyed soul singer in a 1997 interview, responded, “Well I suppose the most unintelligent answer I could give to that is ‘fuck off.’” Eventually, the music industry responded in kind.