Matt Storin was editor of the Boston Globe when he interviewed a job candidate named Caroline Hessberg and decided not to hire her. He kept her resume anyway, for reasons he has said he still can’t fully explain. When the Boston Symphony Orchestra later asked him if he knew anyone who could run their communications, he thought of her and recommended her for the job, as Storin recounted years afterward in Notre Dame Magazine.
That’s how Caroline Smedvig became the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s director of public relations and marketing, a job she has held in one form or another for more than four decades.
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How James Taylor entered her world
Taylor arrived in that world in 1995, performing with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall in a concert led by John Williams. By then, Smedvig had already spent fifteen years running the orchestra’s public relations. She worked the event as part of her job, and the two grew closer over the next few years, as Taylor kept performing regularly at Tanglewood, the orchestra’s summer home, where Smedvig also worked.
Williams stayed close to both of them. Taylor has said Williams is the person who introduced him to Smedvig, whom friends and family call Kim. When the two married on February 18, 2001, at a small Boston church, Williams walked her down the aisle while Andre Previn and Yo-Yo Ma played the music for about fifty guests.
Taylor later named a song after her, “Caroline I See You,” on his 2002 album October Road.
Marriage, twins and a home in the Berkshires
Two months after the wedding, on April 5, 2001, Smedvig and Taylor had twin sons, Henry and Rufus, born through a surrogate. Henry became a musician like his father and now tours with him as a backing vocalist. Rufus graduated from Amherst College in 2024.
The family lives in Washington, Massachusetts, a small town in the Berkshires near Tanglewood. Smedvig sang backup vocals and occasional duets on Taylor’s 1997 album, Hourglass, and toured with him through the United States, Europe and Asia.
Her own career, from Smith College to the Berkshire stage
Smedvig studied English literature at Smith College, where she became interested in the novelist Edith Wharton, something she told the Berkshire Eagle in 2013. That interest resurfaced years later, when the Berkshire Theatre Group asked her to give a public reading of Wharton’s novella “Roman Fever.”
“I found myself, quite unbelievably, in Edith Wharton’s somewhat dilapidated drawing room,” Smedvig said, recalling a visit to Wharton’s Lenox home, The Mount, in 1980. She called the acting offer “wonderful news, if terrifying.”
The same theater company had cast her and her sons in a Berkshire production of “A Christmas Carol” a few years earlier. In an essay she later wrote for Berkshire Magazine, Smedvig recalled what the director said to her at the audition, and how she described her own reaction.
“At last, an age appropriate Mrs. Cratchit!!” he told her. “Still not sure how I should take that!” she wrote.
One of Smedvig’s closest working relationships at the BSO was with Seiji Ozawa, the orchestra’s longtime music director. Taylor confirmed as much in a 2020 social media post marking Ozawa’s birthday, writing that Smedvig had worked with him for 25 years. In 1998, she edited and wrote the preface for Seiji: An Intimate Portrait of Seiji Ozawa, a photography book on the conductor with an introduction by Williams.
Smedvig has also served on the board of MassGeneral Hospital for Children since around 2015. In March 2020, she and Taylor donated $1 million to Massachusetts General Hospital during the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. Seven months later, they made a virtual appearance at the hospital’s annual Storybook Ball gala for its children’s division, which raised more than $1.5 million for pediatric care that year.
Where things stand in 2026
The couple passed 25 years of marriage this February, marked with a short post on Facebook. Taylor is performing at Tanglewood for the 52nd consecutive year, according to the orchestra, a run dating back to 1974 that earned him the Tanglewood Medal in 2024. Smedvig is still connected to the orchestra where her own career began, now serving as a trustee.
In July, the BSO announced that Smedvig and Taylor’s combined giving to the orchestra and Tanglewood had reached $8 million, boosted that month by proceeds from Taylor’s Fourth of July concerts. BSO president and CEO Chad Smith said their support has strengthened the orchestra for generations of musicians and audiences.
