Hiss Golden Messenger, Friday, Nov. 16, 8 p.m., $25, Carolina Theatre, Durham, www.carolinatheatre.com
The past decade has been an unusual ride for Hiss Golden Messenger. M.C. Taylor began it as a vehicle for electric-only songs, but quickly cracked open a new world of tunes that explored anxiety, spirituality, exhaustion, and joy—often all at the same time. With Scott Hirsch, who’s produced, engineered, mixed, and played bass and guitar throughout the band’s entire catalog, Taylor transformed into one of North Carolina’s biggest names in rootsy rock.
Earlier this month, Merge Records reissued some of Hiss Golden Messenger’s earliest work in a four-LP box set. We sat down with Taylor to venture through some of those songs (and other rarities) and reflect on the band’s winding history.
Country Hai East Cotton, 2009
On his first album as Hiss Golden Messenger, Taylor leaned into Jamaican dub-inspired arrangements with an all-electric band.
I had started this record, and then, right in the middle of all of that, I moved to North Carolina. I kind of threw my hands up and said, “I need a change that’s so drastic that I’m just going to leave.” And I moved to North Carolina. I started working on this record in 2006; it didn’t come out until 2009. I would say for probably two years of that gap of time, I didn’t do anything with it. I was in this whole new place and putting a life together. I have a personal connection to this record for all kinds of different reasons.
I’ve always loved Jamaican music. That goes back to when I was seventeen or eighteen years old. What is it that draws me to that stuff? I don’t know. It’s just a reimagining of what sound can do. People like King Tubby, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Scientist, Yabbi You, Nani the Observer, and all kinds of producers and engineers were so technologically advanced. Their imagination was driving it. It’s not like they had millions of dollars to make this stuff happen. It was pure ingenuity and genius.
Golden Gunn, 2013
The inspiration for this song’s title is Lal Waterson. With her brother, Mike, Waterson issued Bright Phoebus, a cult-hit folk LP that Taylor counts among his favorites. The track appears on Taylor and Hirsch’s 2013 album with guitarist Steve Gunn.
The Watersons, at the beginning, were purely a vocal-based group; they were a cappella. Their voices were very strong together. They weren’t beautiful in the way that most people think about beautiful, but there’s something very compelling about how they sounded. You listen to their singing, and it’s pretty clear that they never made any concessions to anything except for their own emotions and their own relationships.
Bright Phoebus is an incredible and deep record. It’s an ugly record. It’s not something that you can put on in the background, I don’t think. But the writing is so deep and incredible. The singing is so beautiful. They were working totally outside the mainstream. They put the record out, and it completely disappeared. People didn’t like it. It’s been reassessed in the past couple of years. It speaks to me on an emotional level.
Poor Moon, 2011
The opening track to the third Hiss Golden Messenger LP introduces the album with swelling strings.
This was one that I was not convinced of. I liked the emotional thing that it conveys, but I just didn’t know how to arrange it in a way that felt rhythmically interesting. Scott Hirsch kept saying, “I have a bass part that will make it work. Let’s just try it.” To me, the whole song is the bass.
There are a fair amount of tunes in the Hiss catalog that, maybe they don’t sound a lot like this, but they feel like this. I always refer to them as “the steppers.” It’s almost dancehall, kind of. For one thing, it’s syncopated in a way, against the drum groove. That was definitely another reminder out of many I’ve had in my life—listen to other people sometimes.
Lord I Love the Rain, 2012
This track, from a 2012 album of odds and ends, returns to Taylor’s early dub inspirations with a spiraling, groovy jam.
I like that music can put people in a trance. That’s something very powerful about music to me. Repetition is sort of like a meditation. I’m particular about the type of quote-unquote “jamming” that I like. The music that establishes kind of a reflective cycle in which the changes are subtle and small, and it takes a really long time for changes to happen—that does something to me. There’s something collective about it. It’s not that someone is trying to show how good they are. They’re being a collective goal that’s beyond technique.
I’m attracted to music that requires a bit of work from the listener. That’s why I love devotional or spiritual jazz. Bright Phoebus falls into that category, too. When you put something on, and you can’t even say whether or not you like it immediately, but there’s something emotionally compelling there that wants you to be with it for a certain amount of time. I have a deep well in my heart for that kind of stuff.
Bad Debt, 2010
Taylor recorded this album at his kitchen table in Pittsboro, unaware it would change his entire life.
[Bad Debt] was a paradigm shift in my life, completely. It was almost like a near-death experience, or something that didn’t change me briefly, but changed my life on a molecular level. I found a thing that I could do. Prior to this record, I had even already made Hiss Golden Messenger records. But before this record, I was kind of like everybody who wants to be a musician that’s writing songs, recording, playing shows, but the stakes are neutral. After I wrote these songs, I realized I have something here.
Haw, 2013
Nodding to North Carolina’s favorite specialty soda, “Cheerwine Easter” is a slow-blooming centerpiece to Haw that sparkles and soothes.
Bad Debt was a record about discovery. Poor Moon is kind of a wandering record. There’s maybe a little bit of desperation on Haw. There were some things that I was thinking about and dealing with on that record that didn’t exist on Poor Moon.
At a certain point with Hiss, I started writing songs that could be considered gospel songs, except for I’m not a churchgoing person. The greatest devotional music that I know is music that’s searching, or addressing the dark night of the soul. “Sufferer” is in that mode too, “Red Rose Nantahala” is in that vein. Since Bad Debt, I had been using specific Biblical imagery, which I continued to do on this album. There were some unresolved questions in my life that existed.
There is a Pharaoh Sanders record that is and was a big influence on me at that time, Deaf Dumb Blind. He does a version of the gospel song “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord.” All of the emotions are here: joy, sadness, everything in one place. That’s what “Cheerwine Easter” sounds like to me, too. I wasn’t trying to copy [Pharoah Sanders], I was trying to get at the emotional complexity. I felt like, if it can be done, I want to learn how to do it, too. I want to make a song that sounds happy and sad at the same time. That’s possible. Why do we have to choose?
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