Songs for a Tailor is the 1969 debut solo album by the Scottish musician, composer and singer Jack Bruce, who was already famous at the time of its release for his work with the supergroup Cream.

[12] A majority of tracks on the album were centered around the trio of Jack Bruce, guitarist Chris Spedding, and drummer Jon Hiseman.

[14] The guitarist on "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune", George Harrison, had a great deal of difficulty learning his part, with the horn players having to wait until late at night for him to finish so that they could record their performance.

[25] However, reviews were not universally positive, with critical opinion particularly divided on the album's lyrics, penned by long-term Bruce collaborator Pete Brown.

Ed Leimbacher, reviewing the album in 1969 for Rolling Stone, called Songs for a Tailor a "disappointment", panning it overall as "a patchwork affair lacking in any unifying thread, a baggy misfit made up of a shopworn miscellany of jazz riffs, rock underpinnings, chamber music strings, boringly baroque lyrics and a Bruce bass that [leaves] ... everything distinctly bottom heavy.

"[27] In 1989, Rolling Stone writer David Fricke, though noting that Bruce could "flirt with self-indulgence in the pursuit of the unconventional", described the artist's solo output as "highly underrated".

Brown, a successful poet in the early 1960s,[29] had been collaborating with Bruce for some time, writing lyrics for such Cream hits as "White Room" and "Sunshine of Your Love".

The lyrics he wrote for Songs for a Tailor are typically poetic and heavily inspired by literary themes, with the Shakespearean "He the Richmond" and the horror-infused "Weird of Hermiston".

[26] The first Rolling Stone review judged the lyrics as unsuccessful, dismissing them as "silly" and primarily burdened by an overabundance of literary references.

According to Allmusic, "Theme" has a "fresh, rootsy sound" reminiscent of The Band's Music from Big Pink, derived from the combination of "Bruce's overdubbed piano and organ parts" and "the country-tinged lope of the rhythm section".

[5] Lyricist Pete Brown later explained that the song was about the members of Bruce's famously wild pre-Cream band, The Graham Bond Organisation: "I saw them as a bunch of cowboys and pioneers.

Colosseum (whose drummer Jon Hiseman played on Tailor's rendition of the song), and the progressive rock group Greenslade[11] also recorded cover versions.