“Frozen Man,” James Taylor

“Frozen Man” tells a story of coming back from the dead. The narrator is William James McPhee, “born in 1843 / and raised in Liverpool by the Sea,” who dies at sea and whose preserved body is revived in 1991 or so. “It took a lot of money to start my heart,” McPhee explains, “to peg my leg / and to buy my eye.” He spends the song musing on his condition. Becoming a medical miracle is something he never wanted–there isn’t much for him to do except be interviewed by newspapers and visit the graves of his wife and daughter. His appearance makes children cry.

“Frozen Man” got a lot of play in my childhood, along with every other song on James Taylor’s New Moon Shine. It came out when I was 3, but I remember it being a fixture in the car for years after that. Certainly we kept listening to it until I was old enough for my mother to tell me that the lines “I know what it means / to freeze to death / To lose a little life with every breath / To say goodbye to life on earth / Then come around again / Lord have mercy, on the frozen man” arose from Taylor’s time getting clean from a heroin addiction. I don’t know if it’s true (the origin story, not the fact of the heroin addiction–that part is definitely true), but my mother’s telling it to me becomes about something else in my recollection: the acknowledgment that a song sung by a single artist in the first person can yet be narrated by multiple characters, by Taylor’s imagining of McPhee and by Taylor himself in direct confessional mode. It gives some shading to the moments when Taylor seems to quietly comment to himself throughout the song: “Shocked to my body as we tumbled in–merciful God.” Taylor closes by repeating “Lord have mercy on the frozen man,” and I don’t know if it’s deliberate or a felicitous coincidence that it sounds like he’s saying “Lord have mercy, I’m the frozen man.” He is the man shocked by an icy drowning, the man shocked by waking up, and the man trying to come to terms with his existence until a more peaceful end.

It’s how young I was, and how incongruous that is with the lyrics on this album, and how fitting it is with their lullaby sounds. I keep coming back to this. “Frozen Man” is not the song of a man in a midlife crisis–it’s the song of a man who has gone through one, who is looking both back at the time he has lost and forward at the time that remains. So is “Copperline,” New Moon Shine‘s opening track. The narrator remembers his father (himself under the spell of his own memory), his first kiss, and “wood smoke and moonshine,” before summing up “Tried to go back, as if I could / All spec house and plywood…  It doesn’t come as a surprise to me / It doesn’t touch my memory / Man I’m lifting up, rising free.” I get the sense that Taylor is surprised, and a touch grateful, to be as old as he is. He got through the young stuff and the hard stuff. He froze and came back. I’ve used songs and stories my whole life to get a sense of what was just ahead of me–to get a sense of what my teens might hold when I was a child, or what my 20s might hold when I was a teenager. But this was so far ahead I couldn’t even begin to absorb it as anything other than the life of an adult. And now I can locate it, start to see what it’s about. Maybe it isn’t how young I was at all. Maybe it’s that I haven’t even hit a midlife crisis, but I’m starting to recognize what the far side of one looks like–and that implies a treacherous middle, yet to be crossed.