“Millworker” James Taylor

“Millworker” belongs to a later and subtler tradition of “labor music”. There is no strike, no marching line and scarcely a villain. Taylor locates the conflict inside the worker herself: her hands remain at the machine while her mind wanders backward through family, farm and memory.

The complaint is not simply that the work is hard. It is that a human life can disappear into work that asks too little of the human being.  Taylor tells us that millwork is not especially hard. That’s what separates this  song from so much earlier, angrier industrial laments. The injury is monotony, lost possibility and time for a ‘young girl who ought to stand a better chance’.