Will Taylor

Will Taylor is a violinist and composer who has spent years doing something genuinely odd with Austin's music scene. He takes singer-songwriters, the kind you'd normally see at a honky-tonk or a festival stage, and pairs them with cello, violin, viola, trumpet, and hand drums. Then he puts the whole thing in a church, or on a cliff at sunset, and rewrites the arrangements so the songs sound like they belong there. It's a playful, dignified, off-kilter idea. It works.

Taylor founded Strings Attached, a group that sits at the intersection of chamber music and whatever else he feels like pulling in. Jazz, classical, rock, pop. The boundaries don't matter much to him. When Pearl Jam came to Austin in October 2009 to record their live Austin City Limits Studio show for national broadcast, they handed the strings portion to Taylor and Strings Attached. That's not a small vote of confidence. He's also performed with Shawn Colvin, Willie Nelson, P-Diddy, and Ronny Cox, which is a range that tells you something about how he operates.

He's a two-time Austin Music Award winner and took Best of Austin in 2024. The awards track with what people who've seen him play already know: he's good at this, and he's been good at it for a while. But the awards aren't really the point. The point is what happens in the room when a familiar song gets rebuilt from the inside out. Taylor talks about revealing new facets of songs people already love, and that's an accurate description of the experience. You hear something you've heard a hundred times, except now there's a cello doing something unexpected underneath it, and the whole thing opens up.

His events often happen in unusual locations. A recent listing was a secret sunset concert on a cliff over Memorial Day weekend. That's the general vibe: not a standard venue, not a standard setlist, not a standard night out. Taylor seems to like the friction between formal and informal, between the precision of composed arrangements and the looseness of a singer-songwriter letting a song breathe.

The meditation angle might seem like a stretch for a guy who played with Pearl Jam, but it makes sense if you've been to one of his shows. The church settings, the acoustic instruments, the way the arrangements slow things down and strip them back. There's a contemplative quality to it. Taylor himself describes reaching for something transcendent, and while that word gets thrown around a lot, he earns it by doing the actual musical work to get there rather than just setting out some candles and playing ambient loops.

You can find more about his work and upcoming events at StringsintheWoods.com. If you're in Austin and curious about what happens when someone takes the city's live music identity seriously enough to mess with it, Taylor is worth paying attention to.