Taylor Barton’s new five-song album, called “Get Off My Ship,” could very well be the right music for this moment: a time of political discord, social change, and controversy lurking around seemingly every corner. If ever there was a time and place for a new action-inspiring album by a folk-rock singer-songwriter, it’s now and here.
This is not a new playbook she’s writing. Rather, Ms. Barton’s work is a contemporary continuation of the grand tradition started in the 1960s by artists like Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez.
“Bob Dylan taught me,” Ms. Barton said on a balmy summer afternoon in Amagansett Square, surrounded by hydrangeas in bloom.
She meant not literally, but figuratively. “Dylan taught me to write a good song, to pay attention to society, that a voice can matter. Even if it’s quiet, it can matter. If you say something and one person hears it, that’s enough.”
Past works include “Pedro ‘n’ Pip,” a rock-and-roll odyssey that addressed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil-spill disaster, a project that Ms. Barton told The Star in 2016 was the work she’s most proud of. (She hadn’t yet made “Get Off My Ship” or finished her novel, of course.)
On “Get Off My Ship,” where her voice sounds the way raw honey tastes — a combination of substance and sweetness, sunshine and grit — Ms. Barton sings about the isolation and pain caused by war and about standing up for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights and women’s reproductive rights.
“Can we talk about women for a minute?” she asks, interrupting her own train of thought. “I think women have really stepped up to the plate. The line in the sand is we are not giving over our reproductive rights. The government doesn’t have a license to practice, the doctors do. . . . That’s why I wrote this album. I thought I was done, but these issues really got me fired up and I had to say something. The way I say it is songs.”
But writing and singing songs, as it turns out, is only part of the creative force that Ms. Barton, who lives in Springs, has demonstrated. She likes to “cross pollinate” (her words), so in June, concurrently with the release of “Get Off My Ship,” she published a novel, “Condom Eddie.” It’s the latest in a body of work that has included an autobiography, “I Pitched a Tent in Hell,” a one-act stage show, “The Eric Clapton Breakfast Club,” and a film she wrote and directed, “50-Watt Fuse,” about her husband, the also-prolific musician G.E. Smith.
Without spoilers, “Condom Eddie” is about a guy “who is abhorrent. I wrote 40 pages of it and I put it away, and found it during Covid and went, ‘Oh my god.’ Then I added 23 and Me and brought in a character that discovers her biological brother. It’s nurture versus nature, innocence versus violence. She’s brought up with the great family, he’s brought up with the crack-addict mother, and they’re on a crash course.”
She’ll be reading at the Amagansett Library on Aug. 8 at 5:30 p.m., and on Aug. 10 she’ll be at the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night, signing copies of “Condom Eddie” and hosting a private dinner afterward. “My biggest dream is that a Netflix writer picks this book up, because it’s a series,” she said. “I don’t know how, but the universe might shift and make a connection.”
Why “Get Off My Ship” and “Condom Eddie,” and why now?
“I recently had a big, milestone birthday, and I decided to celebrate by really getting my artwork front and center,” she said. “These are very self-satisfying completions of long processes.”
Her work doesn’t stop there. She and her husband return to Guild Hall as producers for their successful Portraits series, this year highlighting many talented women. Tonight, Yola, a Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter and actress from England, will perform. On Aug. 15, the series will feature Valerie June and Lola Kirke.
“I feel fortunate that I could follow my art. I was willing to live in basements for it,” Ms. Barton said. “It was Roseanne Cash’s basement, but it was great. . . . There was music 24/7, and like-minded people, and all artists living on the street. This was in Chelsea,” from 2000 to about 2010.
She won 10 ASCAP awards early on, in her late 20s and early 30s. “I got compared to Bonnie Raitt, Tori Amos, Stevie Nicks, and Neko Case,” Ms. Barton recalled, “but I was always a very different kind of singer. I’m quieter. I had a producer who was Patti Smith’s sideman, and he helped me find that sweet spot in my voice. I used to sing in a higher register. He brought me down and said, ‘This is where you need to sing.’ He brought out the intimacy in my voice, and a wisdom and maturity that I wouldn’t have been aware of if he hadn’t gotten me to shift.”
At 13 years old, Ms. Barton found herself studying music at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where she had grown up. But she also began studying dance, acting, and opera — at places like Paris and in New York at the Stella Adler School of Acting — not with the intent of taking on the life of a triple-threat, but rather out of necessity. In the music industry, the singer-songwriter was becoming a thing.
A lot of people who were singers, she explained, “decided they were songwriters themselves, so the songwriters didn’t have any choice but to become singers, too.”
In Manhattan, she was a regular Monday night performer with Generic Blondes, a band consisting of three blond singers, at the Mercury Lounge. “I was a little more shy, so I would write for them and do the harmonies, and then I kind of had to step up.”
“I was always with very talented musicians, and was grateful for it,” she continued. “I knew how to write a song, I could own that, but I always felt it was a team effort and I had so much to learn from them. Some people go out onstage and don’t listen to the people they are with on the stage. They are missing so much because the beauty is in the meld. If you listen, you go collectively to a higher place.”
She isn’t the only blonde named Taylor making catchy music, but “I was the first ‘Tay Tay,’ “ she joked. “I have 12 records. Now Taylor Swift has 12, and she’s the tender age of 34. If I had had that kind of luck, maybe I would have had a bigger platform, but there was a beautiful arc for me, to have an entire lifetime as an artist.”
Everyone’s “embracing something” these days, it seems. Asked what that might be for herself, Ms. Barton said: “Being right-sized. Pursuing wonder every day wherever that might be. Stopping habitual patterns. Being happy with what I accomplished. Putting down ambition. I’m embracing giving back, and am just truly embracing being alive on the planet.”
