Living Your Own Truth, with Machan Taylor

About This Episode

Machan Taylor never meant to write a book. She was born in Japan, uprooted to New Jersey as a child, and spent four decades as a professional singer, touring stadiums with Pink Floyd in the eighties and Sting on the Brand New Day tour in 1999 and 2000. Years of talk therapy for childhood trauma had taken her only so far. When COVID hit, she began psychedelic-assisted therapy with a trained psychologist, and the journaling that came out of that work grew, over about three years, into 60,000 words and her memoir, Naked Out Loud. Machan talks with Mike about what life on the road really looked like behind the private jets and five-star hotels, why holding the finished book finally let her let go of the embarrassment, and how a screen actors' strike pushed her into teaching, back to college in her fifties, and on to a job at NYU's Clive Davis Institute.

Key Takeaways

1. You don't have to set out to write a book to end up with one. Machan's memoir began as journaling during therapy, with no plan to publish. About three years in, she realized she had 60,000 words, and a friend connected her with a small publisher of music memoirs.
2. Putting your story on the page gives you distance from it. Once her words were outside her head and on the screen, Machan found she could look at them almost objectively. As she puts it, it's you, but it's not you, and that shift was part of her healing.
3. The vulnerability is scariest right before you let go. Handing the manuscript to her publisher left her asking whether she really wanted to do this. Holding the printed book changed that: she felt liberated, and the embarrassment she had carried for years simply loosened its grip.
4. Other people's judgment isn't yours to carry. With her 70th birthday a week away, Machan says she no longer cares how readers judge her stories. There will always be critics; that's on them. She wrote the book for herself, and hopes her honesty helps others tell their own stories.
5. A glamorous life can hide real struggle. On tour she played to crowds of 20,000 to 100,000 people, but underneath she was fighting imposter syndrome, insecurity and the feeling of not being good enough. After the show, you go back to a hotel room alone, and that loneliness is why so many musicians turn to drugs and alcohol.
6. Healing can come from places you didn't expect. Traditional talk therapy couldn't get Machan past her childhood trauma. Working with a trained professional, she found that psychedelic-assisted therapy quieted her ego enough to sit with old pain and work through it.
7. It's never too late to go back to school. Machan started working so young that she never finished college. She earned her bachelor's degree in her fifties, went on to a master's at NYU, and now teaches at the university's Clive Davis Institute.

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