Sometimes things begin with a phone call, or a name that you’ve heard on a few separate occasions, or something half-remembered you may have scribbled in a notebook. At least that's how it began for me with Hiss Golden Messenger, the project of one M.C. Taylor, whose tunes came to hypnotize me this past winter.
I didn’t know much about Taylor, and I’ve tried to keep it that way. His songs were so beautiful and mysterious I didn’t want to know anything else about them. Like John Fahey’s Blind Joe Death, they seemed to come from a different era, pulled out of the dust. As it turns out, Taylor is something of a folklorist, himself, and Fahey hovers over him just like he’s transfixed anyone who’s interested in the American musical past.
Taylor’s recordings from his 2009 album Bad Debt are dark and distant, like a ghost from Robert Johnson’s single microphone Dallas hotel room recording session in 1937. Just a voice and an acoustic guitar–his right strumming hand coming up hard on the offbeat like the snare drum in a country-rock song. Stories of sin and redemption–or, in Taylor’s own words, stories “about my God: That is, whether I have one, and whether there is a place for me in this world.”
Bad Debt was originally released on the tiny Black Maps label. The more-produced Poor Moon, featuring a few of the same songs with fuller arrangements, was issued last year on the equally obscure Bachelors of Paradise label. Poor Moon is set for a larger release by Tompkins Square on April 17th, a label that specializes mostly in archival recordings and instrumental music, though they too seem to have also fallen under the spell of Taylor’s songs.
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