***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
***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
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
***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