It lasts two minutes and thirty-one seconds, and for much of it there is nothing on the record but one acoustic guitar and one quiet voice. Yet “You Can Close Your Eyes” may be the most durable love song James Taylor ever wrote — a lullaby that has been sung by his sister, reinvented by Linda Ronstadt, recorded by his ex-wife with their children, performed at the 9/11 memorial, and carried into a new century as a duet between Taylor and his son. It began, as so many of his best songs did, with a woman he was about to lose.
A Hotel Room in Tucumcari
Taylor wrote the song around 1970, while he was in New Mexico filming Two-Lane Blacktop, the existential road movie in which he starred alongside Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Staying in the same hotel in Tucumcari was Joni Mitchell, then his girlfriend — one of the most incandescent songwriting talents on earth, in the middle of the run that produced Blue. Authors Dave Thompson and Sheila Weller both identified Mitchell as the song’s subject, and Taylor himself has confirmed it from the stage: the lullaby was written for her.
You can hear the circumstances in the song’s bones. It is a comfort offered by a man whose life is motion — a film set, a tour, a road that keeps calling — to a woman he cannot promise to stay with. The lyric’s great tenderness is shadowed by its escape clause: “I can sing this song, and you can sing this song when I’m gone.” As AllMusic’s Bill Janovitz noted, it is never specified whether “gone” means gone for a while or gone for good, and that ambiguity aches through every performance. Musicologist James Perone has pointed out the song’s unconventional, unpredictable phrasing, which gives it the feel of something improvised from the heart in a single sitting, and has even traced a kinship between its verse melody and the chorus of “Carolina in My Mind.” Perone also hears the song’s deepest theme as an autobiographical one: a singer who cannot say what he feels except by singing it. Taylor was already famous for guardedness — a man whose gentlest songs carried his hardest truths — and “You Can Close Your Eyes” practically announces the method. Everything he cannot promise in plain speech, he promises in the song, on the condition that the song is what survives.
The B-Side of a Number One
Taylor recorded the song in early 1971 for his third album, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, produced by Peter Asher. The arrangement could hardly be sparer: Taylor’s acoustic guitar is the only instrument, opening and closing with what Janovitz called an “exquisite” Renaissance-meets-country-folk riff, married to what he praised as Taylor’s vulnerable, quiet singing (in concert, that closing figure is quietly played by two guitars blending as one). Gerson, listening for influences in 1971, compared its melody to Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby” — a reminder that Taylor was writing at the very centre of a singer-songwriter moment whose leading figures were all, consciously or not, answering one another. Taylor has described the song as “a secular hymn,” and the critics reached for sacred language of their own. Rolling Stone‘s Ben Gerson called it “an exquisite lullaby” and, in a famous phrase, “the song which repudiates songs” — noting that themes of farewell, and of the last song a singer might sing, run through the whole of Mud Slide Slim. Al Rudis joked that it confirmed Taylor’s “hold on the world championship of lullaby composers.” AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann described it as a “moving” song that affirms romance, while the critic Martin Charles Strong went further than almost anyone, calling it “lovely” and more affecting than “You’ve Got a Friend” itself. Rock journalist Dave Thompson, meanwhile, has called it one of the finest songs Taylor had written up to that point in his career — high praise for a B-side.
Warner Bros. released it in May 1971 as the B-side of “You’ve Got a Friend,” which spent the summer at No. 1 — meaning that one of the best-selling singles of Taylor’s career carried this miniature masterpiece on its flip side, where millions of listeners discovered it simply by turning the record over. There is something fitting in the pairing: the A-side is Carole King’s song about a friend who will always show up, and the B-side is Taylor’s song about a lover who may not stay. Together they formed a kind of matched set for the summer of 1971 — devotion promised, devotion doubted — and buyers of the single got both for the price of one. In an odd family footnote, the song’s first album release was not by James at all: his sister Kate Taylor recorded it for her 1971 album Sister Kate, beginning the family tradition of passing the lullaby around that would still be continuing half a century later.
A Song That Belongs to Everyone
Because it is built from almost nothing, “You Can Close Your Eyes” invites other voices, and they have never stopped accepting the invitation. Linda Ronstadt made it the closing track of her landmark 1974 album Heart Like a Wheel; producer Peter Asher, who had made the original with Taylor, reinvented it for her, and Dave Thompson counts her version among that album’s highlights. Richie Havens recorded it in 1976, Maureen McGovern made it the closing track of her 1992 album Baby I’m Yours, Sheryl Crow included it on her 2003 collection Artist’s Choice, and the a cappella King’s Singers recorded it for their 2008 album Simple Gifts — a setting the song seems almost designed for. Sting sang it at the 2006 tribute concert honouring Taylor, Eddie Vedder performed it with Natalie Maines in 2010, British folk trio The Young’uns sang it a cappella in 2012, and in 2025 the prodigiously gifted Jacob Collier recorded it for The Light for Days, proof that the song now belongs as much to musicians born decades after it was written as to Taylor’s own generation.
The most poignant cover may be Carly Simon’s. Taylor’s ex-wife recorded the song for her 2007 album Into White, accompanied by their children, Sally and Ben Taylor. Sheila Weller called the result “slow, spectral” and “achingly beautiful” — a lullaby written for one great love, sung a lifetime later inside the family of another.
Taylor’s own performances trace his whole career. He sang it with Mitchell herself in the early 1970s; a duet from October 16, 1970 — the pair at the very start of their intertwined fame — surfaced on the live album Amchitka in 2009 and again, officially this time, in Mitchell’s Archives Vol. 2 in 2021, where Rolling Stone greeted it with the headline verdict that musically, at least, they were a great couple. He performed it with Carole King on Live at the Troubadour in 2010, opened his 1998 Beacon Theatre concert film with it, placed it second from the end of his 2002 concert video Pull Over, and closed his 2007 One Man Band album with the same performance that anchors The Essential James Taylor. The studio original, meanwhile, was the version chosen for The Best of James Taylor, and Japanese editions of Greatest Hits Volume 2 reached for the 1998 live performance instead — as if even the compilers could not decide whether the song belonged to the young man who wrote it or the elder statesman he became. For long stretches — 2004 to 2012, and again from 2017 to 2019 — it was his regular set closer, the last thing audiences heard. On September 11, 2011, he sang it in New York at the National September 11 Memorial, for the tenth anniversary of the attacks: the private lullaby, borrowed for public grief, and equal to it. And since 2021 he has sung it as a duet with his son Henry, who joined the band that year — the song about singing to someone as they fall asleep, passed from father to son on stage.
Why has this particular miniature outlasted so many grander statements? Partly because it asks for nothing. It does not plead, accuse or celebrate; it simply offers presence — the oldest comfort there is — while being honest that presence is temporary. Every parent who has sung a child to sleep, every partner who has watched someone drift off before a dawn departure, is inside its two and a half minutes. Taylor understood that a lullaby is a promise made by someone who cannot keep it forever, and he built that contradiction into the song’s refrain: you can sing this song when I’m gone. The song therefore carries its own afterlife inside it. Each new singer — Ronstadt, Simon, Sting, Collier, and eventually Henry Taylor standing beside his father — is not covering it so much as fulfilling it.
Few recordings prove less is more as completely as this one. No band, no chart run of its own, no production at all to speak of — just a guitar figure like a music box winding down, and a promise that the song will still be there when the singer is gone. He was right. It is.