Songfacts®:

• This is an autobiographical song about Taylor's battles with addictions (primarily heroin), the "monkey on his back."
  
  Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2015, Taylor explained: "This one's a warning not to think of a junkie as a complete functioning human being. Heroin should've killed me about five times, but it never did. My kids suffered from their father being an addict. I think there's no way they can't. People take drugs to be in control. They want to short-circuit any risk that they might take in life, any uncertainty, any anxiety. They just want to find the chemical route, to just push the button that gets the final result. So all of your relationships suffer, no question about it."
• You don't think of mellow singer-songwriters like James Taylor as junkies, which made this song rather surprising. But drug addicts come in many forms, which is his point: the guy you see dropping off his kids at school could be shooting heroin an hour later. The song led to a better understanding of addiction.
• "A Junkie's Lament" is the second track on Taylor's seventh album, In The Pocket, following "Shower The People." Taylor had taken some time off and wasn't the hit-maker he was in the early '70s, but his music didn't suffer. He survived the decade and sustained a long and fruitful career that found him performing well into his 70s.
• Art Garfunkel and Carly Simon (married to Taylor at the time), both sing on this track. Session legends Leland Sklar (bass) and Russ Kunkel (drums) played on it, along with some more unusual instrumentation:
  
  Milt Holland - chimes
  Clarence McDonald - Moog synthesizer and Fender Rhodes piano
  Gayle Levant - harp
  Nick DeCaro - organ