Livingston Taylor – HuffPost 11.18.13

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Livingston Taylor: The advice I have for new artists is keep your head down, learn how to observe, stick your head above the trench, live to fight, the world will find you gatekeepers. Actually, you will probably be some of the new gatekeepers in the newly invented world. Stay tough, stay lean, work on your music and stay alive above all else as we wait for the world to reorder, which it will. But hold on.

MR: Thanks Livingston. Now, to play Devil’s Advocate, you have your nephew, young Ben Taylor, in your family’s mix. I’m very much a fan of his music, but do you think he would have another perspective from the one you just put out there?

LT: He’s certainly an artist that has emerged in the ruins of the old record companies. Ben has benefited from a very good gene pool, number one. Number two, his father is a great, great guitar player and his mother is a great pop songwriter. He’s been in the proximity of real accomplished gatekeepers. That’s been of huge value to him. The fact is that I believe that Ben is a wonderful artist and had he been able to be signed by a responsible record company that had the capacity to exploit him to their profit, his career would’ve been far improved from where it is now. Certainly what his father and mother had.