Love Quote by Paul Taylor

There is something quietly radical in a dancer treating “cover songs” as a matter of love, not strategy. Paul Taylor’s line reads like an artist’s shrug, but it draws a hard boundary: influence is welcome, imitation for its own sake is not. In a culture that often treats covers as content - a familiar hook, a guaranteed audience - Taylor insists on an emotional prerequisite. He won’t borrow a melody just to borrow it; he needs to feel it in his bones first.

That insistence matters in dance, where “covering” is never literal. A cover in choreography is translation: you take an existing score, a known atmosphere, and you rebuild it with bodies that can’t hide behind lyrics. Taylor’s condition - “I have to love the song first” - is a kind of ethics. Love becomes permission to intervene, to risk rewriting something beloved without reducing it to a gimmick. It also protects him from the deadening pressure of being “relevant.” The work starts from appetite, not obligation.

The subtext is craft disguised as taste. Taylor is telling you how he edits: by desire. Loving the song means he has already listened hard enough to hear structure, tension, release - the things a choreographer can latch onto. It’s also a defense against reverence. Only someone who truly loves a piece will dare to touch it, bend it, even contradict it. That’s not nostalgia; it’s ownership earned the honest way.