“You Can Close Your Eyes” by James Taylor

James Taylor wrote "You Can Close Your Eyes" roughly a year before he recorded it in early 1971, and it came out that year on Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, his third album, and on the flip side of "You've Got a Friend", his number-one single. His sister Kate Taylor actually beat him to it, putting her own recording on her 1971 album Sister Kate.

It's a song made for bedtime, soft as flannel and in no hurry at all, and Taylor, who plays the acoustic guitar on it, has called it "a secular hymn." Peter Asher produced and Richard Sanford Orshoff engineered. Critics keep reaching for the word lullaby: Rolling Stone's Ben Gerson heard "an exquisite lullaby" and Allmusic's Bill Janovitz a beautiful one, while rock writer Dave Thompson ranks it among the finest things Taylor had written up to then.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.