That’s why the ‘They let me know you were gone’ line came up. I didn’t find out until some six months after it happened.
But Richard and Joel and Margaret were excited for me having this record deal and making this album, and when Susie killed herself they decided not to tell me about it until later because they didn’t want to shake me up. At the time I was living with friends, and all three of them were really close to Susie Schnerr. In Taylors biography written by Tim White, Taylor discusses Schnerr’s tragic death: “ committed suicide sometime later while I was over in London. In terms of the “death of a friend” this verse of the track refers to Suzanne Schnerr – a friend Taylor met while he was performing with his old band “The Flying Machine” in New York in 1967. The third verse of that song refers to my recuperation in Austen Riggs which lasted about five months.” The second verse is about my arrival in this country with a monkey on my back, and Jesus is an expression of my desperation in trying to get through the time when my body was aching and the time was at hand when I had to do it. The first verse is about my reactions to the death of a friend. In an interview in 2007 with, Taylor spoke to David Mikkelson about “Fire and Rain” and the true meaning and story behind the track: “Fire and Rain” has three verses. However, despite the success of the track, the song is extremely emotional and very personal to Taylor. James Taylor, an iconic American folk-rock artist and five-time Grammy award winner, released emotional track “Fire and Rain” in 1970 from his second album “ Sweet Baby James”.