Eric Taylor thought a lot about time long before triple bypass heart surgery allowed him to keep writing and singing about it. His songs aren't necessarily about sands trickling from top to bottom of an hourglass, but they still reflect its forward push and sometimes an attempt to preserve something precious and passed.

He ambles through his home, just outside of Weimar, wearing a faded black shirt bearing Warren Zevon's famous quote about knowing his ride was here: "Enjoy every sandwich." He points proudly to his 1939 Remington typewriter, restored, functional and beautiful. He holds up a replica of a 1949 Mercury, the same car that Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady put on the road, inspiring Kerouac's famous novel which in turn inspired Taylor's song Dean Moriarty, released 15 years ago.

Last year, Taylor revisited the song adding to it a long story that spoke to its beginnings, a story of cars and youth and freedom. Taylor revisited many of his other songs during a two-day session, recording them in a live-in-the-studio setting at Rock Romano's Red Shack Studio in Houston.

Taylor no longer calls Houston home, but the album feels of Houston, built on songs and stories he wrote when he lived here. Several of his old friends, peers and fans show up to sing: Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, Denice Franke. Taylor provided the songs, the spirit, the stories and the sauce. "A few people probably had too good a time," he says. "And we had to say, 'No, it's time to go home, now."

Taylor emerged from the sweltering studio with something that preserves a piece of Houston music history that sprung up in Montrose in the 1970s. Live at the Red Shack runs about an hour, with an emphasis on the music. But cameras were also rolling and there are more than six hours of performances and exchanges and conversations captured, too.

"It's about as live as you can get as far as I'm concerned, but it's not a concert album," Taylor says, sipping a glass of wine and looking out the window at the secluded green expanse around his home. Hogs, deer and cattle can all be counted on to pass by at some point, unlike his time in Montrose about which Taylor says, "I didn't see any deer there unless they were drug induced."

The goal was to recall those sometimes-hazy days in and around Anderson Fair, give them context and update them. "We wanted to be able to catch conversations," says Taylor, who admits that one attendee didn't realize how close he was to a microphone when he criticized another singer for not knowing the words to a song. Media wasn't invited, Taylor says, "because I felt like it would change things too much."

"I don't think any of us went in with the idea of trying to recapture anything, I think that would be a really big mistake," he says. "I was trying to make something new. It wasn't exactly a reunion. I see these people all the time. But it was like, 'catch what we got now.' " He says his own health scare played some part in coming up with the idea, which he executed with his wife, Susan Lindfors Taylor, a singer-songwriter who produced the album. The only newcomer invited to the session was Dr. Bud Frazier, the heart surgeon who gave Taylor a second wind that Zevon never had.

A lucky landing

Taylor is 62 now, a little gruff but a venerable figure from a boom time for live music in Houston. His arrival was dumb luck. A Georgia native, he sold a guitar hoping the money would get him to California. Asked if he had any plans once he arrived on the west coast he replies, flatly, "No." He ended up in Houston and thought he'd spend the night in Hermann Park, only to get run off. He eventually found work at the Family Hand washing dishes and bought a cheap guitar, but says, "I had no idea what I was walking into."

His first week in Houston he took in shows by Lightnin' Hopkins and Townes Van Zandt. Eventually he'd play bass for Hopkins and open shows for Van Zandt. "I was such a rube," he says, laughing. He recalls the time he approached Guy Clark and congratulated him. Clark had been playing Fire and Rain at his shows, and Taylor had heard another version of the song on the radio. "I said, 'There's this cat doing a copy of your song and it's playing all over the place, it's a good version too,'" Taylor says. "And he said, 'What the (expletive) are you talking about?' He glared at me, said, 'You dumb (expletive)' and walked away.

"A guy told me it was a James Taylor song, and I said, 'Who's James Taylor?' "

With Clark, Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker as mentors, Taylor and a group of like-minded songwriters set about making their art, with periods of study and growing pains. He says he and singer-songwriter Vince Bell would get together and listen to music every morning and share some of their songs. "It'd be me saying, 'Does this sound too much like Townes?' And him saying, 'Of course.' ... 'Does this sound too much like Zevon?' "

Houston's booming music scene

But he likens the scene to Greenwich Village in New York in the '60s. "You could go see people like Big Mama Thornton or Lightnin' any night of the week. You could go to Irene's and listen to Johnny Winter until six in the morning." He and Griffith, whom he married in 1976 (they divorced six years later) would play their own sets and then go out and hear live music until sunrise. She covered his Dollar Matinee on her 1978 album, There's a Light Beyond These Woods, and added harmonies to his 1981 debut album, Shameless Love

Fourteen years passed before Taylor released another album, a period during which he struggled with some of the excesses common to his chosen line of work. He named that album Eric Taylor, fitting as it was a new start. And his skills as an observer and storyteller had grown in that time. He became a master of efficiency, using compact phrases and loaded words to put across fully realized stories on Dean Moriarty, Whooping Crane, Hemingway's Shotgun and Deadwood

Taking lessons from Taylor

Three years later one of Taylor's students, Lovett, included Taylor's Memphis Midnight/Memphis Morning on an album of songs written by his friends and heroes. Lovett remembers seeing Taylor play Anderson Fair as far back as 1977. "Eric was a real teacher for me," Lovett says. "He and a few other people like Vince Bell were the keepers of that flame in terms of Townes' and Guy's songwriting ethic. I learned so much from the way he structured a song, what to put in, what to leave out. I'd try to learn his songs within days of hearing them."

Two years ago, Lovett recorded Taylor's Whooping Crane and his upcoming album includes Taylor's Understand You

On Red Shack Lovett sings Memphis Midnight/Memphis Morning as a duet with Taylor and adds backing vocals to Tractor Song and Visitors From Indiana

The two work well together, though they're a study in contrasts. Taylor ragged and rough, Lovett more the perfectionist. With Red Shack Taylor suggests he sees songs as malleable. He mentions Whooping Crane, a song he wrote years ago only to change a line as he got older. "I felt silly being 62 years old and saying, 'They thought I was uptight, but I wasn't,' " he says. "Uptight, it's just a word that has moved on for me." When Lovett recorded the song he used the original line. "It fits him, that's him. Lyle is just so precise about how he does things. And he did it in a way that's fine with me."

Only one rule

But Taylor's voice has also changed due to intubation during his heart surgery. "Lyle would say, 'That's not how we did it on the last record,' " he says. "And I'd tell him that record was made in 1995; I sing a little different now. He said, 'Yes. I noticed that.' "

Taylor says he still abides by something Clark told him. "Guy Charles put it best: 'The only rule we had was there ain't no rules,' " he says. "In Houston, the writers didn't draw any lines in the sand."

The inspiration can come from travel, but just as easily it can come from one of the many books in his office with its antique typewriter, view of a green expanse or Zevon ephemera. "This is where you kind of come and sit and look at things and think," he says. "And go after it."

Nearly five years have passed since going after it resulted in a new set of songs. Taylor plans to play some shows for Red Shack - he'll be at 14 Pews on Saturday. And then he'll look ahead.

"I always wanted to wait till I had a big bag of songs and chose the ones I wanted on the record," he says. "But I don't think I'm going to do that this time. I haven't had a chance to think and rethink these songs so I think it'll be a little different. I want a little blood on the bone on this record."

andrew.dansby@chron.com