When I first downloaded Christian Taylor’s new EP precious for our new music programming, I wasn’t really expecting to listen to an album recorded by someone living out of their car. Christian Taylor spent two years living in an LA studio parking lot to make this project happen. It’s that kind of backstory that gets romanticized in press releases like the one I read, but the reality of it is a lot more mundane with limited resources, trying to figure out how to make music when your living is confined to a car.
While I was sorting through music for our station a couple weeks ago I was searching for music that fits the raw, authentic appeal of college radio rather than the conventionally produced commercial tracks that flood our station’s inbox. Precious cut through that noise and stuck out to me immediately as something special. In college radio, you develop a radar for the difference between music made to satisfy a marketing goal, and music made because the former is suffocating and uninspired. Taylor’s sonics have the dirt, tape hiss, and spatial openness that signals the latter immediately, carrying a soundscape that’s aware of what came before it.
I sat down with Taylor on Zoom from his LA apartment this past week, starting our conversation in influences and inspirations, “My friends and I were just talking about this the other day… We feel being so referential to inspirations these days is counterproductive to moving music forward.” It’s a sharp, slightly spiky line (and a great opening quote for an interview piece) to draw in an era where alternative R&B and indie pop is practically running on nostalgia-fueled flames. If you look at the blurbs surrounding this release, the temptation is there to frame Taylor as a product of a very specific lineage of inspirations: experimental pop with Todd Rundgren, Neil Young’s vulnerable songwriting, or the avant-garde-esque sounds from Animal Collective. But talking to him, I quickly realized that these names are more so weather in the room, and there isn’t any blueprint or aesthetic he’s trying for. He wasn’t listening to A Wizard, a True Star by Rundgren trying to match out similar sounding swells, nor was he trying to recreate the heartbreak of The Beach Boys’ Surfs Up, both albums he directly mentioned as being most impactful to him recently. Taylor was chasing the spirit in these records in the permission they give an artist to be as he put it, an absolute “nut” abandoning a traditional grid entirely.
The reality of creating precious was a lot more nuanced, dictated by scarcity of resources and tools. “I had a lot more ideas for sounds,” he states, “but I was using this studio that didn’t have many things in it, so I had to work with what I had.” Taylor talked about the underappreciated grace and freedom in being backed into a corner like that. When you don’t have a wall of moogs from studios like Electric Lady or Abbey Road or plugins from five producers in the room, your relationship with the music seems to change. With precious, a lot less sound was produced digitally, and was mostly done with what was in the room. Although Taylor used this setup to the best of his ability, it didn’t help that he went through a pivot in making this project. He originally set out to make the typical full-length, cohesive debut album, only to watch it start to crumble when a major artist dropped a project with the exact same title. It’s the kind of freak coincidence that honestly could completely put the brakes on an emerging songwriter. With the inevitable comparisons, Taylor stripped the record back to its frame for this EP after talking to his label.
He took the skeletal remains of that project back to his parents’ house, tracking out the demos there. Filling in the gaps in production, he had friends like Aidan Spiro or mentor Buddy Ross. Whose fingerprints are on some of the most cohesive sounds this past decade with artists like Frank Ocean, Lorde and Vampire Weekend.
In this vein I want to highlight that mentorship in this specific pocket of the L.A. DIY scene isn’t about scrubbing the grit out of a track until it’s ready for Spotify’s Pollen or Lorem editorial playlists. The most telling moment of our conversation came when Taylor talked about “now I’m.” Buddy Ross took the song and gave it the full, polished producer treatment, turning it into a genuinely great, undeniable pop song. Taylor stuck to his soundscape in a spot where a younger, less secure artist would have taken that version and run straight to master if Buddy Ross finished their song.
“At the end of the day, it’s more informative for me to finish the song myself versus using what he’s done,” he says, with a light stubbornness that feels refreshing and confident. “Sometimes it will be like, ‘Wow, this is better than mine,’ but it’s a little too good. Next to everything else, Buddy would have had to produce every other song to make it fit in this world.” The word “world” is everything here. The mini-scene Taylor is in, alongside artists like Junior Mesa, is busy with a very specific kind of loose, raw, ambient, anti-algorithmic songwriting style and structure. To me, it feels like the needle moving forward from something Dijon started in the raw, ambient, and open live sound dominating contemporary indie – a rejection of the hyper-quantized, AI-assisted or adjacent perfection that makes so much modern music feel like muzak. We also talked about it being ridiculously difficult to market with oversaturation because this sound doesn’t function as passive music for dinner or studying, nor does it deliver the clean, predictable buildups of a standard indie pop song you’d hear at TJ Maxx.
Take a song like “you can,” the single that came first in this EP’s making and anchored together the song. The foundation of the whole song was built on a jam session recorded on a voice memo, and no matter how you try producing it in the studio, nothing beats that spark in a bottle of the original memo’s structure. The same goes for the closer, “the rain.” This project is built out of what Taylor calls “sacred moments,” snapshots of time that are closer to the result of a diary rather than a formal composition.
The visual framework matches this sense of being trapped inside your own tools. The cover for the EP features an image done by his friend Noah, of Taylor suspended inside a Triton keyboard, but was an idea from the direction of his friend Aaron, who told him his music sounded like he was living inside the circuits of the keyboard. It’s a liminal looking image that perfectly captures the isolation of his recording process for this project, but the title precious provides perfect counterweight. It came from his girlfriend, who pointed out during a creative block that the music is precious, and that maybe it’s the “sacred moments” that needed protection.
In a cultural landscape where music promotion feels, in which Taylor described best, completely “cooked,” dominated by Instagram and TikTok metrics and the relentless pressure to turn your personality and lifestyle into content, treating a smaller, tight-knit EP as something sacred feels like a refreshing contrast from the majority of promotion today. Taylor isn’t focusing on massive, generalized emotions that would do well with a synch publisher; he’s writing about tiny “micro-interactions” with those around him, telling these concrete stories of experience rather than singing about how those experiences felt.
With precious finally out into the void, Christian Taylor isn’t lingering on any reception to this album. The focus has already shifted to a new project that’s still on the blurry line between being another EP or a switch to a full-length debut. There is no sprawling tour for Taylor this time around as the realities of independent touring logistics today are what I’ll say is cooked, so he’s keeping things local with LA shows soon (Link to release show). Instead, he’s working on trying to find the bypass to the standard and exhausting social media pipelines for his brand, looking for other ways to build an audience organically that will hold his music sacredly. Now working out of his own apartment, Taylor is avoiding the typical marketing push and focusing purely on the creating the next “world” for his sound to come.
Christian recommends you check out his friend Aaron’s EP, Aiden Spiro releasing one soon.
