Some songs rear back around again. For Dulcie Taylor, the six songs on Rediscovered (Mesa/Bluemoon Recordings), out March 12, were parts of her past she was ready to revisit. Following up 2020’s Reimagined, Taylor continues a trip down memory lane and finds on Rediscovered that those recollections and stories, however fleeting or still present, are always part of one’s spirit.
“There are often different paths one can go down at different points in the process,” says Dulcie of recording Rediscovered with long-time collaborator, George Nauful. “It was so much fun to go back and revisit these tracks and make some new moves with the spirit of the songs in mind. It was like time travel. When we’d bring up a track, it put me right back in the studio where the song was cut with the musicians who played on it..”
Sifting through songs from several of her albums, all the way back to 2004’s Mirrors and Windows, six were ultimately remixed and remastered at the same studio where they were originally cut.
Spanning reflections of herself, past loves, endeavors, and the sting of loss, Rediscovered is six stitches seaming Dulcie’s musical soul over the past two decades, from the brooding blues of “Woman I Used To Be,” originally released on Mirrors and Windows, with its burning contemplation Can you help me / I’m looking for the woman I used to be.
“I meant that one,” says Taylor of the track. “It came out of the one who you forgave so easily. When you find its getting harder to forgive, you need to stop and try to fix it. I’m not saying I’m always going to be the most forgiving person in the world, but I’d certainly like to try to be up every day.”
Off of 2018’s Better Part of Me, “Watch Me Hurt” swells around the the heartache of a great love, while “Love Like Yours and Mine” is a song Dulcie admits is the “sweetest” song she’s ever written. Throughout Rediscovered, Taylor lays bare her love now and from the past on ballads, including Free of This Sorrow’s “First Kiss”—You had all of my heart, from the first kiss—closing around a more uptempo “Maybe” and “Better Part of Me.”
“These tracks were blooming for 20 years,” says Taylor. “I think the fact that they’re coming from the same person, there’s a cohesiveness to the voice. I write about things that are from life. I’m not much of an ambient writer.”
Everything Taylor writes is from a personal place, unless it’s a story she heard from a friend or a situation she observed. “I’m pretty much a personal writer,” she says. “I think I’m the same person I was when I was 16, just a little bit smarter, let’s hope, and maybe a little more cynical. Cynicism is okay, because a lot of boundaries come out of that. Your boundaries define who you are as a person. It takes a long time to learn how to say ‘no.’”
Still the same person and artist, Taylor admits that she’s still in love with all of the stories she’s told.
“I think the more you recall, the more you write, and the more you grow as an artist,” says Taylor. “I still like some of the things that I wrote when I was a kid as much as what I write now. When I was younger, I wrote more from instinct. Now, I’ve got more of an overview on it all. Who you were is still part of who you are as a person now.”
Taylor adds, “I don’t want to write something until I really want to say it, and I don’t say something until I think it needs to be said.”