Florida Sen. Marco Rubio ’embarrassed’ for James Taylor after White House performance

Marco Rubio is weighing in on the Joe Biden administration’s latest foray into pop culture.

Rubio told a national audience Tuesday night that he didn’t know much about legendary singer/songwriter James Taylor, but he was nonetheless “embarrassed” for the 20th century troubadour who played his timeless “Fire and Rain” at the White House celebration of the Inflation Reduction Act earlier in the day.

“I’m going to be honest, I don’t know a lot about James Taylor. I guess he’s won some awards and sold a lot of records… But I’m actually embarrassed for the guy. They ask him to come and play his guitar on the day where they’re announcing this Inflation Reduction (Act) garbage,” Rubio told Fox News.

“In fact, it’s the day when we got this report that food prices, just food prices, are the highest they’ve been since 1979. Baby food is up. Everything is up. People living in the real world know it. I think they look at something like what happened (at the White House) today and you get angered by it, or you feel embarrassed for James Taylor playing the guitar on the lawn of the White House. I’m embarrassed for them.”

Taylor’s performance at the White House was widely noticed Tuesday as an interesting juxtaposition amid surging inflation and a stock selloff the same day. Fox News noted that Taylor had consistently supported Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

The choice of song was also remarkable due to its dark subject matter. National Public Radio noted that one verse of the song is about a friend’s death by suicide, another is about Taylor’s addiction to heroin, and the third verse deals with a mental hospital.

Taylor noted that the song was one he had a hard time listening to, but played due to the audience connection to the subject matter.

“But does it ever go flat for me? Yes. Yes, it has,” Taylor told NPR. “If I’m distracted or overwhelmed, I can forget where I am. I mean, there’s a song with three verses with the same form and three choruses following them. There’s no bridge, there’s no release, no break. So I can forget where I am. It’s a terrifying thing, and it doesn’t happen often, but it does, as they say, concentrate the mind.”

This article first appeared at Florida Politics.