“Country Road” by James Taylor

"Country Road" rolls along on Sweet Baby James, James Taylor's second album, and Warner Bros. pulled it off the record as the third single in February 1971. Taylor wrote it alone and Peter Asher produced, with Randy Meisner, later of the Eagles, on bass.

The road in question has a real address: Somerset Street in Belmont, Massachusetts, a wooded lane skirting the grounds of McLean Hospital, where Taylor had checked himself in for depression in 1965. His friend Danny Kortchmar remembered him writing it on Martha's Vineyard, and music lecturer James Perrone hears it as a song about the joy and freedom of being on your own. Taylor has played it at most of his shows since 1970, and it later turned up on his 1976 Greatest Hits.

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