***It’s spring of 2023 in the North Carolina Piedmont, and songwriter and singer M.C. Taylor—leader of the band Hiss Golden Messenger—is feeling alive. Joyful. Eternal, he might say. For the Grammy-nominated musician, whose albums have traced an internal path through adulthood, fatherhood, spirituality, and depression for well over a decade, this is something new. “The tunes on Jump for Joy were composed in free moments throughout 2022, a year during which Hiss was on the road more or less constantly,” explains Taylor. “And perhaps because the post-pandemic energy out in the world felt so chaotic and uncertain, I found myself thinking a lot about the role that music has played in my life and how exactly I ended up in the rarefied position of leading a band and crew all over the globe through dingy graffiti-scrawled green rooms, venerated music halls, dust-blown roadside motels. Sometimes playing in front of 5,000; sometimes 200. Sleeping sitting up. Laughing until my stomach hurts. Not being able to fall asleep at 3 a.m. in some anonymous bed because my mind is spinning with anxiety or depression or adrenaline, or because my ears are still ringing. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul to pay Peter back. Over and over again. It’s an outlaw life but one, I’m coming to realize, that makes me happy.” The songs that make up Jump for Joy—the sharpest and most autobiographical that Taylor has written under the Hiss name—read as a sort of epistolary, postcards between the present-day...
LP $22.95
08/25/2023
***Conceptualized and written during the chaotic fall months of 2020, Hiss Golden Messenger’s O Come All Ye Faithful—recorded shortly after the widely hailed Quietly Blowing It—is a meditation on grace, loss, hope, and community. Explains songwriter M.C. Taylor, “Big, brash holiday music—the type that we hear in bigbox stores in the middle of December—has never resonated with me, and this past year it felt absolutely dissonant. I wanted to make a seasonal record that felt more in step with the way that I, and so many others, experience this time of year: quiet, contemplative, searching, and bittersweet.” Contributors to O Come All Ye Faithful include many members of Hiss Golden Messenger’s extended family, as well as special guests like GRAMMY Award winner Aoife O’Donovan, Nathaniel Rateliff, Erin Rae, and Buddy Miller. The tracklist includes new tunes written by Taylor, classic hymns, and renditions of songs by Spiritualized, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Woody Guthrie, all arranged in the inimitable Hiss Golden Messenger style.
LP $19.95
10/22/2021
***“I went looking for peace,” says songwriter M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger about his new album Quietly Blowing It. “It’s not exactly a record about the state of the world—or my world—in 2020, but more a retrospective of the past five years of my life, painted in sort of impressionistic hues. Maybe I had the presence of mind when I was writing Quietly Blowing It to know that this was the time to go as deep as I needed to in order to make a record like this. And I got the time required in order to do that.” Quietly Blowing It was written and arranged by Taylor in his home studio as he watched the chaotic world spin outside his window. Between March and June, Taylor wrote and recorded upwards of two dozen songs—in most cases playing all of the instruments himself— before winnowing the collection down and bringing them to the Hiss band. In July, the group of musicians, with Taylor in the production seat, went into Overdub Lane in Durham, NC, for a week, where they recorded Quietly Blowing It as an organic unit honed to a fine edge from their years together on the road.
LP $18.95
06/25/2021
CD $12.75
06/25/2021
***Songwriter and bandleader M.C. TAYLOR's music is at once familiar, yet impossible to categorize: Elements from the American songbook—the steady, churning acoustic guitar and mandolin, the gospel emotion, the eerie steel guitar tracings, the bobbing and weaving organ and electric piano—provide the bedrock for Taylor’s existential ruminations about parenthood, joy, hope, and loneliness—our delicate, tightrope balance of dark and light—that offer fully engaged contemporary commentary on the present. And then there’s an indescribable spirit and movement: Hiss Golden Messenger’s music grooves. There’s nothing else quite like it. Having written upwards of 40 songs—in motel rooms, his studio in North Carolina, and a secluded cottage outside of Charlottesville, Virginia—Taylor winnowed them down to the ten works that comprise Terms of Surrender. With regular collaborators—including PHIL and BRAD COOK, JOSH KAUFMAN and MATT MCCAUGHAN—and new friends like JENNY LEWIS and AARON DESSNER (of THE NATIONAL), the crew decamped to Dessner’s Long Pond studio in upstate New York, Sound City in Los Angeles, and producer ROGER MOUTENOT's Haptown studio in Nashville to create the most fully realized and genre-defying HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER album to date. LPs housed in gatefold jackets.
LP $18.85
09/20/2019
CD $13.75
09/20/2019
***Devotion: Songs About Rivers and Spirits and Children is a limited-edition deluxe box set which includes remastered reissues of the classic Hiss albums Bad Debt, Poor Moon, and Haw. as well as Virgo Fool, a rarities compilation that will only be available physically as part of this collection. Both the 4-CD and 4-LP sets are housed in a cloth-wrapped, foil-stamped slipcase and feature original iconographic artwork by SAM SMITH, an exclusive fold-out poster, full lyrics, and new liner notes by New Yorker writer AMANDA PETRUSICH and MOJO editor JOHN MULVEY. The vinyl set also includes a digital download of all tracks.
4XLP $100.85
11/16/2018
4XCD $50.35
11/16/2018
***M.C. TAYLOR recorded this spiritually devastating, austere antecedent to the widely celebrated Hiss Golden Messenger albums Haw (2013) and Poor Moon (2011) direct to a portable cassette recorder at the kitchen table of his pine-entwined home in rural Piedmont North Carolina in 2010. It was the dead of winter and the pit of the financial crisis, a moment when the dire ramifications of debt—in its economic, political, and personal senses—had assumed a rank immediacy and terror for many working people around the world, not least of all in the American South. Taylor, his one-year old boy Elijah sleeping in the next room, was compelled to chart the sacred valences of debt, doubt, and family in fresh ways, in the process stripping bare and reinventing his songwriting idiom. In his own words: "The record is about my God: that is, whether I have one, and whether there is a place for me in this world. I don’t go to church, and I am not saved. I can party too. I can do a saxophone now and again, bang the drum. Bad Debt was my revelation, and there are many for whom I’ll never make a record better than this one."
LP $18.50
11/02/2018
CD $13.75
11/02/2018
REISSUED!!! HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER's acclaimed Haw, a limited release in 2013, is available again on CD & LP! Remastered, the album now features re0imagined artwork by SAM SMITH. Haw is the name of a river, a modest tributary of the Cape Fear, flowing rocky and swift through 110 miles of Piedmont North Carolina, wending Southeasterly past abandoned and repurposed textile mills, rickety hippie homesteads, and red-clay farmland fringed pine forests. Haw is also one of a few names for a small Siouan tribe that once resided in the eponymous river’s valley and may have alternately known themselves as the Saxapahaw or Sissipahaw. M.C. TAYLOR, who wrote these songs, once lived hard by the Haw with his wife Abigail and their son Elijah—Well I come from the bottom of the river Haw, he sings—but he doesn’t live there anymore. On the album Haw, rhythm section stalwarts TERRY LONERGAN (drums) and SCOTT HIRSCH (bass, guitar, and production) are joined by PHIL COOK, BLACK TWIG PICKERS banjoist NATHAN BOWLES, and on Telecaster, WILLIAM TYLER, BOBBY CROW (saxophone), MATT CUNITZ (keys), GORDON HARTIN (steel guitar), JOSEPH DECOSIMO (fiddle), SONIA TURNER (vocals), and Mark PAULSON of the BOWERBIRDS (strings) also crew, navigating Haw’s shoals of trouble and delight.
LP $18.50
11/02/2018
CD $13.75
11/02/2018
***REISSUED!!! Composed and arranged by Head Messenger M.C. TAYLOR at his home in the rural Piedmont mill town of Pittsboro and recorded with longtime collaborator SCOTT HIRSCH in New York, California and North Carolina, Poor Moon offers a moving culmination of the spiritually-charged song cycle commenced on the critically acclaimed album Bad Debt. Treading a red-clay road between Bad Debt and Country Hai East Cotton in sound and sentiment, it is the first fully electric ensemble recording since the highly limited Hiss Golden Messenger live release Root Work in 2010. Featuring contributions from TERRY LONERGAN, NATHAN BOWLES (BLACK TWIG PICKERS, PELT), HANS CHEW (D. CHARLES SPEER & THE HELIX), MATT CUNITZ (BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT), TOM HEYMAN (THE COURT & SPARK), and others, Poor Moon represents both an elaboration and inversion of previous HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER efforts, proposing an America at perpetual sundown, wracked by devotion, wrecked by celebration. Named in homage to the Canned Heat track penned by the immortal Blind Owl, Poor Moon conjures the unsteady experience of soul at home in the wild, and it stands as a captivating document of Southern songcraft.
LP $18.50
11/02/2018
CD $13.75
11/02/2018
***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.9 rating from Pitchfork. Hallelujah Anyhow is the new studio album from HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER. Its ten new songs, penned by HGM principal M.C. TAYLOR, were recorded with BRAD COOK, PHIL COOK, JOSH KAUFMAN, DARREN JESSEE, MICHAEL LEWIS and EVAN RINGEL. ALEXANDRA SAUSER-MONNIG, TIFT MERRITT, SKYLAR GUDASZ, TAMISHA WADEN, MAC MCCAUGHAN and JOHN PAUL WHITE provided vocal harmonies. “I see the dark clouds. I was designed to see them. They’re the same clouds of fear and destruction that have darkened the world since Revelations, just different actors. But this music is for hope. That’s the only thing I want to say about it. Love is the only way out. I’ve never been afraid of the darkness; it’s just a different kind of light. And if some days that belief comes harder than others, hallelujah anyhow.”—M.C. Taylor. No Export outside North America.
LP $17.75
10/06/2017
CD $13.75
09/22/2017
***"The writing of the songs that became Heart Like a Levee started in a hotel room in Washington DC in January of 2015 during a powerful storm that darkened the East Coast. At that time I was feeling—more acutely than I had ever felt before—wrenched apart by my responsibilities to my family and to my music. Forgetting, momentarily, that for me, each exists only with the other. How could I forget? Though maybe my lapse was reasonable: I had just quit my job, the most recent and last, in a series of dead-end gigs stretching back 20 years, with the vow that my children would understand their father as a man in love with his world and the inventor of his own days. They would be rare in that regard. And then—driven by monthly bills and pure fear— I left for another tour, carrying a load of guilt that I could just barely lift. But in that snowy hotel room I found the refrain that became my compass: I was a dreamer, babe, when I set out on the road; but did I say I could find my way home?"—M.C. TAYLOR, Durham, NC. Features guest performances from TIFT MERRITT, PHIL & BRADLEY COOK(MEGAFAUN), MATT MCCAUGHAN (BON IVER), and ALEXANDRA SAUSER-MONNIG (MOUNTAIN MAN).
LP $18.50
10/07/2016
CD $13.75
10/07/2016
***"The writing of the songs that became Heart Like a Levee started in a hotel room in Washington DC in January of 2015 during a powerful storm that darkened the East Coast. At that time I was feeling—more acutely than I had ever felt before—wrenched apart by my responsibilities to my family and to my music. Forgetting, momentarily, that for me, each exists only with the other. How could I forget? Though maybe my lapse was reasonable: I had just quit my job, the most recent and last, in a series of dead-end gigs stretching back 20 years, with the vow that my children would understand their father as a man in love with his world and the inventor of his own days. They would be rare in that regard. And then—driven by monthly bills and pure fear— I left for another tour, carrying a load of guilt that I could just barely lift. But in that snowy hotel room I found the refrain that became my compass: I was a dreamer, babe, when I set out on the road; but did I say I could find my way home?"—M.C. TAYLOR, Durham, NC. Features guest performances from TIFT MERRITT, PHIL & BRADLEY COOK(MEGAFAUN), MATT MCCAUGHAN (BON IVER), and ALEXANDRA SAUSER-MONNIG (MOUNTAIN MAN). Deluxe version features a bonus disc with 8 previously unreleased tracks from the same timeframe along with a bonus poster.
2XLP $27.50
10/07/2016
2XCD $15.50
10/07/2016
***“This three-song collection that we’re calling Southern Grammar is good for a few good reasons. It gives the song ‘Brother, Do You Know the Road?’—formerly an orphan tune with no fixed address—a proper physical home. It also offers up a song called ‘He Wrote the Book’ that was a near-casualty from the Lateness of Dancers sessions. Incidentally—and this I didn’t realize until we had gathered the material for this record—’Brother, Do You Know the Road?’ and ‘He Wrote the Book’ share a lyric that goes: ‘And though the storm’s passed over / And the sun is in its place / It’s been a long time / And the rain, how I know it.’ Sometimes that feels just about as close to a summation of the HGM philosophy as I can get at. And this is the first and only time that I have ever shared words between two songs. Finally, this version of ‘Southern Grammar’ shows off the HGM road band, which includes SCOTT HIRSCH, PHIL COOK, MATT MCCAUGHAN, MATT DOUGLAS, and ALEXANDRA SAUSER-MONNIG, who are all friends and inspirations. The fine, fine crew at WXPN in Philadelphia engineered the recording of this song and graciously agreed to let us use it for this record.”—M.C. Taylor
12" $10.50
02/03/2015
***HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER is Durham, North Carolina-based songwriter M.C. TAYLOR. Lateness of Dancers is the fifth full-length from Hiss Golden Messenger. It’s an open, confident, immediate album, and it feels, at times, like a direct response to the darkness of Taylor’s last record, 2013’s Haw, or to the searching of 2010’s Bad Debt, the stunning acoustic LP he made at his kitchen table shortly after the birth of his son. Lateness of Dancers was recorded in a tin-roofed barn outside of Hillsborough, North Carolina, last fall and includes many of Taylor’s longtime collaborators, like PHIL and BRAD COOK of MEGAFAUN, the guitarist WILLIAM TYLER, and his erstwhile recording partner SCOTT HIRSCH. ALEXANDRA SAUSER-MONNIG of MOUNTAIN MAN contributes backing vocals; her tender, wooly voice both complements and challenges Taylor’s. The record takes its name from a Eudora Welty story, which is noteworthy not because of its origins—although there are hints of Welty in Taylor’s work, and not just Welty but Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner and Barry Hannah and Larry Brown and the whole pantheon of brutal and exquisite southern writers—but because Taylor is the type of person who recognizes the beauty in a phrase like that. It is a record about self-discovery and self-knowledge, and how impossible it is to outsmart yourself. I don’t know how you learn a lesson like that, except the hard way. (STREET DATE - 9/09/2014)
LP $17.50
09/09/2014
CD $13.50
09/09/2014