Killing Me Softly: Ebo Taylor and "Love and Death"

Do you remember your first broken heart? It probably occurred sometime in school, I'm guessing. For me it was around 6th or 7th grade. There was a girl I really liked, and I dreamed about her a lot. I was an awkward, ungainly kid with unruly hair and large glasses, and I most likely didn't have a chance in a world with this girl or as I thought at the time, any girls. But that didn't stop me from dreaming and fantasizing about her. Dreaming and fantasizing are okay, because in those dreams and fantasies you create yourself in the image that you want - handsome, strong, someone who would be immensely attractive to the girl you want. And of course, she wants you. If your dreams stayed just that, dreams, then you'd be okay.

Unfortunately, dreams clash with reality because at some point, you realize that you can't stay in the dreams. You have to make contact with the object of your affection, and doing so means you find out whether there is anything possible. When there isn't, and for me that seemed to always be the case, your dreams crash about you. When my dreams came crashing down that first time, a tightness developed in my chest while the rest of my body felt a malaise. I felt like crying and probably did once or twice. A depression sank over me, and it was like I could only speak in monosyllables, walk with my head down and avoid the stares that I was certain others gave me, and resist the urge to crawl into some hole somewhere and die. In fact, I felt like I would die - the death of my dreams meant the death of me. Of course, that's not what happened, and after that grief period I was back to dreaming and fantasizing about some other girl, to repeat the cycle over again.

It is exactly that heartbreak and grief that Ebo Taylor references in his song Love and Death. At the bottom of this post you'll get a bonus...a little video documentary of Taylor explaining how he came up with some of his songs, and he states that love and death go together, that love often feels like a death especially when it goes wrong. A Ghanaian guitarist, composer, bandleader and producer, Taylor is one of the legendary figures of Ghana's highlife musical genre. Briefly, highlife is a style developed in 20th century Ghana featuring a jazzy horn section and multiple lead guitars. Taylor first broke into the Ghana's music scene in the late 1950s with the bands The Stargazers and Broadway Dance Band. In the early 1960s he lived for a while in London where he met Fela Kuti and other African musicians and collaborated with them. These influences eventually led him to experiment with fusing Ghanaian highlife with other forms of Afro-beat as well as jazz and funk, leading to his own recognizable style that culminated in the 70s. In the early 21st century, rapper and hip hop artists rediscovered Taylor's music and revived interest in his works. In 2010, Strut Records released the album Love and Death and followed that up in 2011 with Life Stories: The Best of Ebo Taylor 1973-1980. In 2012, Strut released Taylor's intensely personal Appia Kwa Bridge, an album where he combines traditional Fante songs and rhythms with children's rhymes and his own personal experiences to push the frontiers of Ghanaian music and highlife even further. This version of his song Love and Death can be found on Life Stories: The Best of Ebo Taylor 1973-1980.