Jules Taylor writes songs like someone returning from a long war - clear-eyed, blunt, and unafraid to name the wreckage left behind.
Each lyric is whittled to its essential grain: a lover lost to cirrhosis, existential doubt and confrontation, and working people caught in larger machinery. His music reads like frontline dispatches on grief, love, and class struggle. His lyrics speak to those still willing to carry what can’t be fixed.
A South Texas songwriter shaped by hard-won clarity, Taylor brings the precision of a craftsman and the soul of a witness. There’s nothing ornamental in his writing, only the
weight of what’s real, delivered with the stripped-down honesty of someone who’s lost more than he lets on.
Behind the plainspoken delivery lies a writer deeply influenced by the heavyweights of moral and existential thought. His moral lens owes as much to Sartre, Marcuse, and Dante as it does to the dust-blown fatalism of Cormac McCarthy.
Where most Country Music keeps its gaze on back roads and broken hearts, Taylor zooms out to the scaffolding beneath them: ontology, ethics, power. The philosophical payoff is clarity without anesthesia. His lyrics do not comfort. They reveal.
Jules Taylor writes for the ones who stayed up late reading because the world didn’t make sense. For those who’ve stood at the edge of love or loss or belief and looked down. His songs and poems are for the listener who’s both surviving and reckoning.
His band, The String Breakers, are a collective of the finest Country and Bluegrass musicians in South Texas.
"Jules Taylor has made a record that may prove to be his defining work. These are songs of intense love, beauty, pain, and reverence, proving that while loss gets deep into our hearts and bones, it can also be a compass towards remembering what we loved so much about someone in sharp outline. Taylor has made a collection here which stands not on mere aesthetics (like so many modern country cosplayers), but alongside some of the all-time great folkies on merit of depth in songwriting and heart on the sleeve, black coffee boldness." - Morgan Ywain Evans, on The Siren and the Wordsmith
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The Siren and the Wordsmith is the most literary and emotionally punishing work of Taylor’s career, a concept album shaped like a descent and designed like a scripture. The Siren at the center of the record is a musical transfiguration of a real woman, Brewer, Taylor’s former partner, who died in 2024 of cirrhosis. Their relationship was volatile, tender, and unsalvageable. After her death, the songs Taylor had shelved—too painful, too raw—took on new meaning. He picked them back up not to rewrite them, but to recontextualize them. Like Dante writing Beatrice into the stars, Taylor elevates Brewer into something mythic: not a woman to be mourned, but a metaphysical force to be reckoned with.
"Taylor’s economy of melody and intuitive feel for the shape of verses and phrases recalls such heroes as Dylan and Van Zandt. Despair, dissolution, and an occluded sweetness are the very DNA of these dark-side Americana ballads… Whiskey Clear is whole-cloth and all-in conceptually… The cat really means it."— John Burdick, Hudson Valley One
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Whiskey Clear feels less like a performance and more like a long night’s talk when the bottle is low and the hour is late. The songs don’t aim to dress up loss or disguise regret.
Recorded with longtime collaborator Jon Light, the album keeps its frame simple and sturdy. Taylor’s voice carries the weight of someone who has seen more than he can fix, but keeps on anyway. The melodies are spare, the words pared down to the bone. What remains is durable, unpretentious, and honest — the kind of truth that doesn’t fade with time.
Whiskey Clear doesn’t reach for grandeur, and that’s its strength. It stands steady, like a fencepost on the back forty: weathered, scarred, but still holding.
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“Overall, the collection is the musical equivalent of the Great American Novel: a work that captures what it means to be human …”— Paula Cummings, NYS Music
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Mountain Time was recorded in the Catskills at Magnetic North Studio with Tod Levine at the board. Taylor played the strings and keys himself—dobro, lap steel, mandolin, piano, electric and acoustic guitars—then brought in a rhythm section to give the songs weight and motion. The record leans into Americana and Southern rock, but it does so with a craftsman’s ear: every part is there to serve the song, nothing extra, nothing wasted.
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Released in 2016, Alone and Solo, Volume 1 is exactly that: Taylor on his own, guitar in hand, working with a loop pedal to build the songs as he plays them. Everything you hear is live—parts stacking, falling away, shifting shape in real time.
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Recorded live at Rockwood Music Hall in NYC, there’s no band to lean on, no cover to hide behind. Just a man working inside the limits he set for himself, turning them into something that feels whole.
After returning to Texas in 2022, Jules partnered with acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Chisum Mills (fiddle, harmonica, & mandolin). They are pictured here at South Texas Icehouse. Together with Grammy Award-winning producer / engineer and pedal steel player John Macy, the three of them have released a collaboration record called The Siren and the Wordsmith (2025).
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As of 2025, Jules is 5 years sober and is performing his original material in South Texas.
He is an advocate for those around him who are newly committed to sobriety, and he is a contributing writer and photographer for various outlets, including In These Times Magazine, and The Real News Network. He has opened for Texas music acts such as Stoney LaRue, Jeff Plankenhorn, and Michael O'Connor, and he is media chair for the Corpus Christi Songwriters.
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He has produced a number of records on behalf of Texas Songwriters with the Rockport Songwriter Association and Coastal Bend Music.