Machan Taylor – Singer, Songwriter, Teacher, And Author With A Four-Decade Career In Music

 

Four-decade music veteran Machan Taylor joins Dr. Timothy Hayes to share her personal journey through childhood trauma, high-stakes touring, and emotional recovery. Machan Taylor explains how early displacement and family dysfunction led her to search for deeper self-integration. She details her experience with psychedelic assisted therapy and how MDMA helped her process long-standing emotional wounds without re-traumatization. Dr. Timothy Hayes highlights the difference between traditional talk therapy and experiential healing modalities. You’ll learn why it’s never too late to take ownership of your past and rewrite your relationship with trauma. This conversation offers practical hope for anyone seeking authentic mental wellness and self-restoration.

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Machan Taylor – Singer, Songwriter, Teacher, And Author With A Four-Decade Career In Music

Machan Taylor is a singer, songwriter, teacher, and author with a four-decade career in music.

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Machan, thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Dr. Tim.

I’m hoping you can get us started by telling us a little bit about how you got into this work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it.

That’s another work. That’s personal work. It’s a very long story. Starting from very early on, I am a World War II baby. My mother was Japanese and my father was an American military man. He was of Irish-English background. Maybe a little Italian in there somewhere. My parents met post-World War II. Since my father was stationed during the occupation of Japan, at one point he decided to retire from active duty and became part of the Army Reserves.

Overcoming Early Identity Trauma And Cultural Displacement

He needed a real job and he had difficulty finding a job. He found work in New York City, which caused my family, my older sister, my mother, myself, and my father, to have to move. We left Japan when I was four and a half years old and got on a military ship. We cruised across the Pacific Ocean, and then boarded a train and arrived in New Jersey, where my father was from. I didn’t know this until much later in my own personal work, but that’s what I call the original sin in my life. That was a very traumatic event for me, leaving Japan, leaving my family, my grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

I only spoke Japanese. At the very beginning, everything I knew was of another world and, all of a sudden, we landed in this very strange place and in a very white middle-class neighborhood where, at that time in 1960, there were no other Asian families around. It was also a time in American history and American culture where Asian people were not part of the popular culture. You didn’t see Asian people on television. Except for the very few stereotypes.

Up Singh, on bonanza and things like that.

Exactly. Very caricaturized people.

One-dimensional people.

Leaving your early roots can create long-standing questions about identity and where you fit in. Share on X

Very much so. I grew up in this very white middle-class neighborhood not feeling like I fit in anywhere. I didn’t know whether I was American? Am I white? Am I Japanese? Where do I fit in? I carried with me that sense of awkwardness and not belonging anywhere and questioning my identity and where I belonged. That was very early emotional, psychological, and foundational stuff. From there, my father ended up being a raging alcoholic, womanizer, gambler, and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day.

He was very dysfunctional. Ultimately, creating a very dysfunctional family structure. A very typical alcoholic family. My mother, being Japanese, fit into that role of the martyr, the victim, the enabler very well. It was a perfect match for that setup. That caused a lot of heartache and difficulties during my childhood as well. There was a point when my father’s drinking and his gambling was so bad.

There was a lien on the mortgage of the house and we almost lost our home. My mother had to go and get a factory job, a nighttime job. For ten years or so, she worked in that job. I was young. I was eight years old or so. Since my mother had to sleep during the day, I had to take care of my younger brother and sister who were born in the United States after we came here.

How much younger?

My younger sister is five years younger than me. My brother is six years younger. They were like eighteen months apart. My older sister is nine years older. When I was little, I thought maybe I was adopted because I felt so out of place because my age was so in the middle of my siblings. What happened with the gap between my older sister and I was that my mother had five miscarriages between the two of us, and that was in Japan.

Finding Empowerment And Freedom Through Music

At that time in the ‘50s, they were giving women DES fertility drugs, which also had repercussions later on in my life and in the life of children that were born of mothers that took that drug. That’s another story. When I look back on my story, my love story, I carried with me such sadness, difficulty and confusion about who I was. Yet, at a young age, I discovered music. I discovered that I could sing. I discovered that it gave me a sense of identity. It gave me a sense of belonging. It empowered me to have a place in the world and that started in Catholic school.

I went to Catholic Grammar school and started singing in a church choir and then became a soloist. I started singing for weddings and funerals and discovered I could make money singing. That started very early for me. That was my ticket out. It literally was my ticket out because by the time I turned eighteen, I left home. I was already working as a full-time singer. That’s giving you some of the foundational background.

At eighteen, I’m assuming based on what I know from being a therapist for as long as I have. That having the music was good, wonderful, and yet it didn’t resolve all the effects of the traumas over the years. What’s the story of the recognition of some of the traumas? What have you’ve done to try and integrate them, heal them or move through them?

Moving Beyond Numbing Mechanisms In High Stress Careers

That’s a long story. The work, as you know, is a process. It’s a long process. The real healing doesn’t happen unless an individual is ready. For a good part of my early adulthood in my 20s into my 30s, because of the nature of my work and what I was doing and where I was. I was on big rock and roll tours in very high-profile situations. It was the 1980s into the ‘90s. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol and a lot of partying, in my twenties especially. The coping mechanism was to numb out. It’s a very easy way out whether it’s drugs and alcohol or whatever a person’s method of choices.

What you learn over time if you keep your eyes open is that it doesn’t change anything. It just makes it worse.

Exactly. I met my ex right around the time I was 29 or 30. That relationship was disastrous because that person was a rage-aholic. He was not an alcoholic. He was a rageaholic. He had other issues going on, but what happened for me was he became emotionally abusive, and then it was physical abuse. This is many years ago now but in hindsight, that was the turning point for me. That was the awakening time of my life.

 

Luckily, I got out of that situation. I was living in Los Angeles at the time with him and I came back to New York, and that’s when I started to do some serious therapeutic work like individual therapy and group therapy. I went to adult children with alcoholic meetings at that point, too. I went hot and heavy into doing a lot of personal work. That was the beginning of a very important beginning of my process of healing and unraveling a lot of the childhood stuff but it continued for a long time going forward.

Reintegrating Fragmented Parts Through Psychedelic Assisted Therapy

This is quite some time later but in 2020, I had been thinking about seeking someone that would help me with psychedelic assisted therapy. I found someone, a psychologist facilitator, and I did MDMA for my first journey. That was blowing the roof off the house. It’s incredibly transformative and healing. That process and the beginning of me doing that work has been incredible.

As you understand it, what’s the mechanism that allowed that to be so helpful for you?

The beauty of that work is. I take it very seriously. I want to say for your audience, this is not recreational.

It’s very different.

This is being with a professional. It’s a 6-7 hour long process. It’s a very long process. The setting is very important. The environment, preparation, having a very clear intention about why you are doing the work in that particular moment and also integration afterwards. Working on whatever came up during these sessions. For me, the magic happened because I was able to go back. My first session was so powerful because it took me back to Japan. It took me back to the little girl self that got left behind. I knew my story. I knew what my history was, but I had not realized that I had left a part of me behind.

That little girl part of me needed to be retrieved, assimilated and brought back into myself, into my heart, however you want to describe it. That was such an incredible moment for me to feel that I reintegrated and fragmented parts of myself. The thing about that medicine, with MDMA, which is not technically psychedelic. You don’t hallucinate. You’re very lucid. You can speak. You can communicate, which I did a lot of talking about.

My therapist facilitator took notes the whole time. I was very aware of what was happening. The beauty of that state of altered consciousness is that the whole default mode network of the brain is detached in a way. It’s like you can look at your trauma, you can hold your trauma in your psyche, in your hands and in space. I didn’t feel so triggered. I didn’t feel traumatized by looking at my trauma or going deep into the emotional fabric of what came up in that session. That’s the magic of that work. It’s being able to sit with the feelings and not be re-traumatized by them.

To understand and let yourself have access to the feelings, which are so intense that without this intervention for decades, you’d be walling it off in some part of your mind. As you sit with those feelings, then you get to understand, what did you make them mean? What did you download as a belief about yourself or your value or your safety in the world? You can’t get at that if you’re running from it or if you’re hiding it in the background someplace.

Exactly, because a trauma is painful. Even with so many years of talk therapy, there were layers and spaces that I wasn’t able to truly access in the way that I needed to access them.

There are very few people that resolve intense traumas with traditional talk therapy. If you’re not working into an experiential mode, whether it’s drug assisted or not, but if you’re not moving into a felt sense experiential mode, you probably will get very little benefit from talk therapy when you’re trying to address some path to resolve the effects of past trauma.

Numbing out temporary pain never solves the underlying trauma; it only delays true personal restoration. Share on X

It’s not to say that you can’t get there with talk therapy but I had done so many years of talk therapy with several different therapists. Somehow, there were blind spots. There were places that I couldn’t get to and that’s why I had pursued wanting to do that work because I felt I wanted to go deeper. I knew instinctively that I could go further, but I needed help. It was the help that I needed. It was incredible.

Over the course of this discussion, I want to make sure that you are invited to share what kinds of things you are hoping readers will take from your book.

I’m hoping that by myself very vulnerably revealing my story, my life story, the best that I could tell it and share it. First of all, people who may have their own traumas, their own difficulties will know that they’re not alone, number one. Number two, the fact that I have had a wonderful career, very successful career over the years. For some people to look at that part of my life, it would be very easy to make the judgment of, “How could that person on stage or with Pink Floyd or Sting or whoever, be in pain? How could that person possibly have the same life experience as me?”

I want people to know that even though on the surface, I had a lot of wonderful career experiences and life experiences. Underneath for a very long time, up until into my 40s, I was struggling. I was in pain. I was in pain with a lot of childhood stuff that needed to be resolved and needed to be healed. I’m about to turn 70, so this is a very different moment in my life. I feel that I am more comfortable in my skin than I’ve ever been in my life.

I know that I’ve done a lot of important good work personally and I feel the results of that now. That’s not to say it’s over. It’s not over till the fat lady sings, as they say, but I’m in a much better place, much healthier place, and a much more peaceful place. I feel like I’ve found authenticity within myself now than I’ve ever known before. That’s big. It’s huge.

Congratulations.

I’m still in therapy. I still have a therapist and I still am working on things. I don’t think that ever stops. Hopefully, it doesn’t stop.

To clarify for people. Are you still doing the drug assisted work or are you doing a different type of therapy?

I have a regular talk therapist. My therapist is coming from a traditional Freudian background, but he uses different modalities, but it’s talk therapy basically. I have continued doing psychedelic assisted therapeutic work as well. Since 2020, I’ve done about a dozen sessions.

That’s the thing I was looking for just to let the audience know that it’s not an every week thing or multiple times a week for 6 or 7 hours.

That would be very intense and also not recommended.

 

It’s counterproductive. You have to have time in between those sessions to integrate and to learn to live your life, integrating this and living my life can fit together.

I find that work is very helpful. I’m planning on doing a session before the end of 2026. Who knows, maybe by the end of 2026, this work will be legalized nationally, I’m hoping, for therapeutic use. It seems to be going in that direction. That’s my hope.

The growth, the idea that you’re not alone, the idea that you can grow even though you’ve had traumas and that you can integrate the parts of you that you might’ve left behind. These are all wonderful things. What’s another aspect of what you’re hoping people take from your work and the book?

This is something that I would like to work on and perhaps parlay off my book and perhaps develop a little bit of a speaking career and talk to other people, other women, men, or whoever, so that it’s never too late to do the work. It’s not easy all the time. It does take a sense of commitment to oneself and holding the space of therapeutic work and healing work into what I call a sacred space. It’s very sacred to embody and embrace the process and stay dedicated to it. There has to be a sense of dedication to it, which is why generally, you do talk therapy once a week because there is a sense of momentum that’s important. For myself, I tend to be a disciplined person.

Are you going to submit that for understatement of the year? “I tend to be a bit of a disciplined person?”

You already know me now.

A little of what you’ve already said would make that an enormous understatement.

Yet I feel like I haven’t done enough. Make sure your therapist hears that line from this interview. I’m definitely more of an A-type personality. What I’m coming to with that aspect of myself is trauma and growing up in a dysfunctional family, there are negative impacts and negative influences that come out of that background. However, there are some good things that have come out of it, too.

Let me highlight before you go on. They are coming out of it because of how you as an individual have chosen to interpret and respond to them. They’re not coming out of the trauma. They’re not coming out of the events. They’re coming out of what you have done with them.

Some people would say some of these aspects were coping mechanisms.

Adaptations.

When I look back, I feel like, “There are some positive things that came out of growing up in such a messed up background.”

Taking ownership of your story gives you the power to respond differently in the present moment. Share on X

I’m suggesting, and this is as much for the audience as you. That, instead of saying, “This came out of that.” We say, “I was able to build out of that.” You take the shards of broken glass and you build something useful.

Who knows why I am the way I am, that I became a survivor. It’s very typical in alcoholic families. I know from the work of John Bradshaw, who wrote some wonderful books back in the day that I read many years ago, that children in alcoholic families tend to take on a certain role. I became a caretaker. I became a doer. I became a little controlling, too. That comes out of it as well.

As you said, for whatever reason, that coping mechanism, that adaptation resulted in a lot of positive things in my life. I’m very grateful. I’m able to look at that now and thank my parents and thank my past. I’m grateful that I didn’t end up a drug addict or an alcoholic or in a gutter somewhere. For some other people, their traumas take them to very different places.

Most of us who’ve lived as long as you or a little longer, if we look honestly at it, we can see a number of places where things have gone just a little differently. We wouldn’t be here or we wouldn’t be here the way we are here now. There’s a lot to be grateful for and a lot to take responsibility for.

Shifting From Victimhood To Full Emotional Response-Ability

Yes. It’s interesting because that word responsibility can also mean, as it means to me now, ownership of the good and the bad, the positive and the negative and all the different aspects of myself.

There are many people in our culture who confuse or conflate the idea of guilt, shame, blame and responsibility all as one. Whereas it’s a much more useful way to conceptualize that responsibility is a tool I can use. If I’m willing to look at a pattern that’s happened, if it didn’t chapter one sort, but this pattern of interactions that led to something I don’t like.

If I’m willing to go back and look at what my part was in that and own it, that gives me the ability to respond differently the next time a similar situation arises. There’s nothing about blame or guilt or shame in that. Some people say it’s response-ability, but it’s the ability to respond differently, which I can only get if I own my part of any interactions that led to that.

Exactly, Dr. Tim.

Look at how good I am. The other thing I wanted to point out is that you say that you write this book with great vulnerability. What I encourage people to do is substitute the word openness for vulnerability because the word vulnerability in this English language in the Western Hemisphere, the way we use it, usually means that you can be hurt.

You aren’t going to be hurt when you’re open and you understand that your essence can’t be hurt and you can generate upset about different things. Openness is a better phrase to use just like when people say, “I was a victim of this or that.” I encourage them in my work to say, “Try the phrase, I experienced this or that. Notice how it feels differently in here to say, ‘I was a victim of the economic downturn or I was a victim of sexual abuse,’ versus ‘I experienced effects of the economic downturn or I experienced this beating or whatever.’”

It’s an enormous internal difference, which can be part of you teaching yourself that the past is in the past and you might be carrying some remnants of it in your belief system that you’d use to generate your feelings, but it’s accessible to you. It’s something you experienced, which now you can work with rather than when you say the word victim or talk in a frame that implies victimhood. In one way or another, you’re convincing yourself you don’t have an agency here to change it.

 

Exactly. It’s interesting because I can look back into my 20s and 30s. I hated my father and I was so angry. I blamed my parents for why I felt the way I did. I was in that victim mentality back then. This has been going on for quite a while for me, but what happened was that it shifted at a certain point when I understood how I reacted to the trauma, the pain and the things that I experienced in my childhood. I realized that it wasn’t about the story. It’s not about the story at all. It’s about what the experience did, how I reacted to it and how I took it on.

What you made it mean about you.

Exactly. That’s something that also came out of the psychedelic assisted work because of the ability to have a greater sense of objectivity with what comes up during those sessions. It helped me more and more to let go of my attachments to the story. Even though it’s my story and it’s what happened to me. It’s what made me who I am, what gave me my personality, my beliefs and characteristics. As adults, we have the ability to change.

You don’t change the history of what happened. You don’t necessarily change the story but you can change your relationship to the story. You can get in there and move these parts around a little bit and derive a different meaning from it then reinforce that belief and that meaning until that’s the thing that helps create your experience of life.

Exactly. I feel that’s where I’m at now. My relationship to my story and to my past is so completely different than what it was many years ago.

It comes to me to ask if there are some key shifts in your psyche, your breakthroughs or insightful moments that you’d care to share.

Using Intimate Relationships As Mirrors For Emotional Growth

There’s so many changes that have happened over the years. I’m definitely not the person I was 30 years ago. I’m happy to say that I’ve remarried and met my current husband. We’ve been together for a very long time. I’m sure this is a saying that happens in the therapeutic world, but in an intimate relationship, it’s there. We have the opportunity to dig into the work because all your stuff and all the other person’s stuff is on the table and then you have to deal with it.

It’s hard to try and compartmentalize that stuff when it’s coming right up in your face.

It’s uncanny. It’s so incredible to me and I talk about this in my own therapy all the time, how we pick people that will force us to deal with our stuff. If you’re willing to go there and willing to do the work as a couple, it’s incredible how it’s an opportunity to go deeper into personal growth. I’m happy to say that I’m married to someone that also wants to do the work and is very emotionally available, very committed, talkative and all the good things.

The good things for you. That wouldn’t be a good match for some other people but that’s a good match for you.

It is. That’s not to say that in some ways triggers stuff from my past. In little ways, it may remind me of things of my past and vice versa. It’s an opportunity to keep working on the issues. It’s astounding to me how this work is a continually unraveling story process and the peeling of the onion. That’s a metaphor that gets used all the time. It’s never ending. This onion is huge.

It’s a trap to think I’m going to be done.

It's never too late to invest in your education, change your direction, and embrace continuous growth. Share on X

I’m okay with that. I want to continue growing for as long as I’m alive, as long as I’m here. Hopefully, it’s for a good long time. I decided a long time ago that I don’t want to leave the planet being bitter or angry or unfinished with what I feel like I was put on this planet to do because we are here to grow. We’re here to learn. We’re here to experience and evolve. That’s a big part of what I want people to get from my book, too.

Embracing Lifelong Learning And Authenticity At Any Age

As I said, I want to encourage anyone, no matter what age they are, to not give up. It’s never too late. I didn’t go back to school until I was in my mid-50s. I got my bachelor’s and my master’s degree in my 50s, which allowed me to then get the university job that I have now. I’ve had it for thirteen years, along with continuing to sing and perform. I’m so happy that I did that.

Let me ask you to just get centered and take a breath. Think about everything we’ve talked about so far. Let me know if there’s something about it you want to go back and highlight or something we haven’t even touched on because there’s so much in the book we can’t get into one conversation.

Since you’re a therapist and you’re in that field and in that world, I hope that our conversation, my book, my willingness to talk about my story and my life and all of it. It will add to some positivity in the world at this moment in time because I see what’s going on. Not to get into politics, but what’s happening in our society, in our world, I see as a very challenging and very dark time.

I would like to be a voice of hope, encouragement, positivity and reaching out to other people to share my humanness with their humanness. We need that at this time to acknowledge our similarities as human creatures and try to connect on that level of our humanness. There are so many forces out there in the world that are trying to separate us, divide us, and tear us apart. The technology that’s at play now in our lives is coming to possibly try to substitute human beings in this world. It’s a very challenging time. These conversations, these messages are important to share.

Thank you. Certainly, something we try to do with this show is to give people opportunities to see new options and to choose hope if they desire it.

It’s there for all of us, if you’re willing to reach for it.

Give us the book title, would you please? How would you like people to contact you?

The title of the book is Naked Out Loud. I know it’s a little provocative but it does say what it needs to say. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. It’s mainly online but it’s available in various different book distributors. People can find me through my website, which is MachanTaylor.com. I’m on Instagram and Facebook just like everyone else, too. I would love to hear from people if they want to ask me anything about the book or have a conversation. I’m very open to that.

Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. I know we had to reschedule this, but I’m glad we could squeeze this in and congratulations. It’s a wonderful book and I look forward to finishing it. I’m grateful for people like you that are willing to share so openly and offer to others what might be very useful to them.

I hope so. Thank you so much and for the opportunity.

“Deserving,” as we like to say.

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Machan Taylor is a singer, songwriter, teacher, and author with a four-decade career in music. She has performed with artists including Sting, Pink Floyd, Pat Benatar, and George Benson, and was the lead vocalist for the Grammy-nominated group Hiroshima. She now teaches at NYU and is the author of Naked Out Loud: From Yokohama to Pink Floyd and Beyond.

 

Important Links

• Machan Taylor
• Machan Taylor on Instagram
• Machan Taylor on Facebook
• Machan Taylor on LinkedIn
• Naked Out Loud: From Yokohama to Pink Floyd and Beyond

 

About Machan Taylor

Machan Taylor is a singer, songwriter, teacher, and author with a four-decade career in music.

She has performed with artists including Sting, Pink Floyd, Pat Benatar, and George Benson, and was the lead vocalist for the Grammy-nominated group Hiroshima.

She now teaches at NYU and is the author of Naked Out Loud: From Yokohama to Pink Floyd and Beyond.