Otis Taylor was born in the middle of the 20th century on the South Side of Chicago. singer, songwriter, guitarist, banjo man, you might say Taylor’s life started just right for a bluesman. But when he moved to Colorado at age four it all quickly veered off course and his musical influences have never followed the straight path ever since.

Taylor’s music is most easily categorized as blues, but that’s not the whole truth. It has an atmosphere, a funk that gets under your skin like a fever.  And it has been on heavy rotation in my home ever since I bought a pair of semi-decent speakers.

 On the surface, Taylor and I don’t have much in common, but in talking with him I found that he did pass through my hometown of Northbrook, Illinois, light years from the South Side—back in the late 60s.

“I was eighteen years old,” he remembers. “I got a job as a tree trimmer, but I showed up wearing penny loafers, and they fired me.” Soon after that he found a job washing dishes at the legendary Indian Trail restaurant in Winnetka.

The stories in his songs, like those in my conversations with him, come across smudged and worn. In “Three Stripes on a Cadillac,” Italian wedding music provides the unlikely backdrop to a tale about a deadly car race.

Taylor’s meandering reminiscences are almost as entertaining as his music. As a kid, he had a toy record player and only three records—one by Bo Diddley, one by the Searchers, and he forgets the third. He doesn’t listen to a lot of blues. In fact, he doesn’t listen to much music at all these days.

“It helps me be more original,” he explains.

Taylor is severely dyslexic and never enjoyed school, but he has always been intellectually curious about history, art, and design. After playing in various bands, he quit music around 1977 and devoted his time to painting, sculpture (e.g., inserting a car inside a van “like a ship in a bottle”) and antique dealing (among his acquisitions were Japanese pottery, a 1922 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and an abandoned missile silo). He and Carol, his wife of 34 years, live in a modernist landmark—a round glass house designed by Tician Papachristou. (Not exactly what you picture when you hear “house of blues,” is it?) He counts the novelist John Sandford among his friends.

Eventually, “luck and timing” conspired to bring him back to music. When Negroes Walked the Earth, the first album of the second, more productive phase of his career, came out in 2000, when he was 52.

 A dozen or more incredible, self-produced albums poured out one after another. Writing in AllMusic about Clovis People, Vol. 3 , Thom Jurek contends, “He is not a conventional bluesman, yet his diverse music, for all of its ambitious instrumentation, odd rhythmic meters, minor pentatonic scales, and textural strangeness embodies the spirit of the blues authentically and unmistakably.” I don’t know enough about music theory to verify this analysis, but I can add this: discovering Otis Taylor was, for me, like finding a trove of ancient and mysterious artifacts, and then gradually realizing they are radioactive.

Taylor has collaborated with bluegrass dobroist Jerry Douglas, Native American bluesman Mato Nanji, and his daughter Cassie Taylor, among others. Sometimes a djembe or a choir will creep into a song and vanish. He’s had an especially fruitful musical partnership with jazz cornetist Ron Miles. “He’s a genius, so I always make room for him,” Taylor says.

He compares recording music to assembling a puzzle. “Sometimes you add a cello or a mandolin,” he says. “Sometimes you take out the drums. I especially like taking out the drums.”

Taylor might be going through another dry spell, but he says he read that Billy Joel went six years without writing a song, so it’s okay to wait. (I didn’t ask why this particular artist was relevant to the discussion.) “When I do write a song, it’s a good song,” he promises.

Mark Swartz is the author of three novels and a whole bunch of other stuff. Find out more at www.swartzmark.com.