Song 512: This week the playlist puts the spotlight on Traffic Jam by James Taylor, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. I had become a major JT fan during the summer of 1970 when I introduced my fellow camp counselors to Sweet Baby James, which fascinated them as much as me, to the point where that LP hit the turntable almost every day, in the months before Fire and Rain hit the charts. Seven years later, when Mr. Taylor released an album called JT, it had a few tracks that immediately grabbed my attention, including this one that appears just before the record's closer. Living in the Chicago area at the time, I all-too-often had also found myself in a situation where I could have given voice to the phrase Damn this traffic jam! Getting to know the cut, I felt most impressed with the couplet at the end, which expresses a perceptive view of the foundational dilemma on the road ahead: I used to think that I was cool running around on fossil fuel until I saw what I was doing was riding down the road to ruin. Now, a little over 4 decades later, a large proportion of our human comrades recognize what he, and I, did back then. Of course, with the current pandemic lockdowns, we have a lot fewer traffic jams, and a lot cleaner air across the globe, but as we gradually return to normalcy, our fossil fuel challenges will return as well. However, if you drive an EV, or a hybrid, getting stuck in a traffic jam won't hurt your motor, won't create any pollution, and usually won't waste any power, even if it takes fifteen minutes to go three blocks.
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