“You Can Close Your Eyes” (James Taylor cover) | duet with Sophie Schulman

James Taylor may have gotten bumped from the running order in Chicago last week, but we’re featuring him over here on the second installment of Duets to Go! This is a new, ongoing project where I hop around NYC, visiting friends and working up impromptu covers of songs we both love.

For episode two, I met up with my good buddy Sophie Schulman at her lovely apartment in Crown Heights. Sophie and I both originally come from the DC theatre world, where we performed in cabarets together. For our duet, we picked “You Can Close Your Eyes”, one of James Taylor’s most beautiful songs, written to Joni Mitchell and first recorded by Taylor’s sister, Kate. The song has been covered by countless artists, and we wanted to find our own way in, so we decided steer away from Taylor’s iconic and inimitable guitar picking patterns, and lean into the tune’s lullaby-like quality.

We received both encouragement and disruption from Sophie’s cat, Toby, who was insistent he be featured.