photo by Graham Tolbert
Hiss Golden Messenger
Two new singles are out today from Hiss Golden Messenger, the rootsy rock outfit led by Durham's M.C. Taylor. Amelia Meath of Mountain Man and Sylvan Esso lends backing vocals. The songs come ahead of a new tour, which will begin Friday, March 1.
The tracks are the first new music out from Hiss Golden Messenger in 2019, but the band has had a busy past year: in November, Merge Records released "Devotion: Songs About Rivers and Spirits and Children" a 4-LP set which included both reissues and rarities, along with the carefully-rendered artwork and liner notes that have characterized Taylor's oeuvre.
It's easy to fantasize about summertime, deep in the bowels of winter as we now are, but doing so runs the risk of forgetting that there's a certain point in July or August in which the oppressive heat seems to reflect a deeper experiential misery. These two tracks capture the spirit of that moment: both the questioning and the reprieve that sometimes follows. In a statement about the new music, Taylor wrote:
"I wrote ‘Watching the Wires’ and ‘Everybody Needs Somebody’ in the basement of a house just outside of Portland, Maine, last summer. 2018 was a hard year — for myself and, as it turns out, most people that I know — and I was thinking a lot at that time about how to cope with what felt like an unnameable existential crisis: Run for the hills, or hug the nearest stranger? As it turns out, I’ve been doing a bit of both. Singing these songs has been helpful to me.”
"Everybody Needs Somebody"
"Watching The Wires"
