Interview: Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor

Hiss Golden Messenger started out as a lo-fi outlet for MC Taylor’s solo recordings at a time when the songsmith was down on his luck. Whereas the earlier Messenger albums were clearly carried by a quest for spiritual catharsis, this element of emotional gravitas slowly made way for an empathic but almost light-hearted kind of anti-hedonist maturity: songs written and played by a grown man and father from Durham, North Carolina. In this interview excerpt from his recent Fireside Chat with RBMA Radio’s Frosty, Taylor talks about his career thus far.

What can you tell me about Bad Debt?

I recorded that in 2010, maybe, in my kitchen in Pittsboro, North Carolina. My son was about three-months old and my wife was working at the time. I was working from home – kind of, as a folklorist. My schedule was odd but it allowed me to stay home. I felt so detached from my routine, and physically removed from a lot of what I’d known up until then, so it created this weird record. This path that is one that I’ve followed since: when people heard those songs, they found them compelling in a way that I had not experienced before.

That record was ultimately put out by Paradise of Bachelors, which is a really great record label that is run by some friends of mine. I went to another place with Bad Debt record – an unknown place – and it came out good. I still like that record.

Is there a general kind of intention that you were following this?

The intention was purely emotional and artistic and that was a place that I had to get back to, in making Bad Debt. I have been playing music my entire life and had been traveling around in bands since I was 17 – and I’m going to be 40 this year. Saying that I lost emotional way sounds dramatic, but it’s easy to get jaded in the music business: to become cynical, or lose your emotional edge. Which is ironic because, at its best, music is just compelling emotion.

When I was making Bad Debt, there was no plan to put it out. I didn’t have a steady band at that point. I wasn’t working with any record labels. I was out in the wilderness – but not in a bad way, necessarily. I had a new baby, and it was a great time emotionally for me, but I didn’t have any interest in the music business then. It’s become a necessary thing for me and I’ve found a way to make it something that I love, because the people that are around Hiss Golden Messenger are so great.

So is this phase a kind of regeneration?

It did feel like a phase of regeneration because it was just songs. Later, I recorded a lot of those songs with a full band, but I still never think of Bad Debt as a record that is somehow “less than.” That record feels very complete to me. I think a lot of other people that listen to Hiss Golden Messenger feel like that’s a complete record, too, and there are some for whom I won’t make a record better than Bad Debt. It’s great to have that subsection of people.

Was there a song in the process of creating Bad Debt where you thought, “Oh, okay, I’m actually going to make an album out of this”?

No, that was not the intention. I went into this zone where I was just writing a song a day. I would get up and be with my son Elijah, who was so small then. I’d play with him. We’d be awake together. When he rested, I would start working on an idea. He’d get up two hours later and we would hang some more. That whole batch of songs was written in three weeks – which is crazy, because that feels like a short amount of time – but it wasn’t an entirely new direction. I found something during those three weeks that I have not strayed from since.

Was part of that having the presence of Elijah there?

Definitely. It sounds cliché, but having a child makes you take stock of what your priorities are. Part of that process was considering what it was that I was skilled at in the world of music, and what I didn’t need to be spending any time working on. My skill is as a songwriter: as a very particular kind of songwriter, one that is not totally narrative. It’s imagistic, but there’s an emotional through-line in the songs. At the same time, I’m a fine guitar player, but I’m never going to be a guy that’s doing solos. That was something I stopped thinking about. I practice guitar. I practice playing in the Hiss Golden Messenger Universe. But I’m not playing scales every day because that’s not going to be my thing. I don’t want it to be my thing.

Were you recording this within earshot of Elijah?

Yeah. The house that we were living in in Pittsboro was small, but there was enough separation. And that record is also very quiet. I think that’s why it was just acoustic guitar and my voice. If I had not had a little kid there, I probably would have had a bunch of gear out.

Is there a key song to Bad Debt that you’d like to specifically reflect on that might have come to you in an interesting way, or felt like a good reflection of the entire record?

In thinking about Bad Debt, I would be hard pressed to even list what songs are on there. While I was writing Bad Debt, I was also doing ethnographic fieldwork as a folklorist for the State of North Carolina. There are a few songs that I know were written in other places, that I then came home and finished. One of those is a song called “O Little Light,” which was written in this town called Burgaw (in Eastern North Carolina, Pender County). It was a place where I spent a lot of time when I was doing ethnography. I would stay in this little motel and play a lot of guitar in that room, and I know that I wrote “O Little Light” there.

What did that fieldwork consist of?

I was hired by the State of North Carolina – for a variety of cultural organizations – to basically document traditional musicians in the eastern part of the state. The western part of North Carolina has been very well documented in terms of its musical traditions, and rightfully so. There’s a long history of very important music that comes from the western part of the state, where the Blue Ridge Mountains are, and it’s beautiful. I think that the eastern part of North Carolina, the Piedmont, is equally as beautiful, but has more subtlety to it, maybe.

In any case, I was being sent out there to document traditional musicians. I ended up defining that very broadly. If someone told me that they were a “traditional musician,” then that’s what they were. That’s fine with me. The world of old-time music, which is basically pre-bluegrass string band music, is very broad in North Carolina, especially in the eastern part of the state. I recorded a lot of guitar and fiddle tunes.

What I always took away from the recording sessions and interviews that I did was just how personal everyone’s music was. Nobody was prepping for the big Friday night gig. That was really good for me to see at that point in my life: when I felt so lost with what my relationship with music actually was. Seeing the way that music brought the people that I was with so much happiness, and that it had nothing to do with how many people turn up to a show, made me think about how confused music had become for me. That was right at the time that I was making Bad Debt, and I feel like there’s some of that attitude in that record.

Did you move out to North Carolina specifically for the folklore studies? And was it this period where you took a break from making music? How did those coexist?

My wife Abby and I moved to North Carolina in 2007, and the main reason was that I was going to go to graduate school. The sort of bedrock of that reasoning was that we had lived in San Francisco for about 10 years, and it felt like we were moving through the city in our lives very laterally. Maybe we would move to another apartment, but we were not able to buy a house. We weren’t going to be able to have kids.

It was hard to imagine how we could ever achieve these things. Things that seemed very natural for our parents. In needing a change, a drastic change, we decided to move to North Carolina, and going to graduate school was a good reason to tell our families. It’s funny how little we thought about it when we moved. It was just the two of us, I guess.

What I dig the most about Hiss Golden Messenger is that some of the songs can feel stripped bare, where they’re vibrant in the kind of raw nature, but then they’re laden with certain touches. It fills it up, it illustrates. With pieces that have a little more embellishment to them, what are some of the pieces that you feel like are the most successful in that realm that you’ve created?

Bad Debt onwards is what people know of me. I’m totally cool with that. I sort of hit on a thing at Bad Debt that has carried through, and there’s a consistency there. I always feel like [Hiss Golden Messenger] make very sparse records (sparse not as a pejorative), but one thing I’ve learned from 20 years of making records is that, sometimes, the less sonic information there is on a record, the bigger it feels. Put four microphones in the drum kit, not 15.

The intention and aesthetic is always a case of: “how little can we get away with putting on this?” and not use sparseness for sparseness’ sake. You can accomplish a tremendous amount of musical information with four or five people. Occasionally, we have broader arrangements, but particularly with the band that is playing now, we can keep it small but people always mention to me that it feels big.

Lateness of Dancers is our most recent record. It’s very sparse instrumentally, and part of the narrative of it in the press has been that it’s broader, bigger record – more “professional.” The truth is we recorded that record in a barn. It has everything to do with the voicing of chords, and not using something until it’s absolutely necessary. If you introduce a piano part on the second chorus, it’s going to have a much better effect than if it was playing the whole time.

So was this record written prior to going into a barn and recording it, or were you writing and recording simultaneously?

No, the songs for Lateness of Dancers were pretty much all written before we went in and set up at this barn. It was in this little town called Hillsboro, North Carolina, which is just outside of Chapel Hill and Durham. We could get out there in 10 -15 minutes, but it felt very remote and beautiful.

It’s a barn that is owned by a friend of ours, Peter Kramer, who actually passed away a couple of months ago. I met him through a singer named Alice Gerrard, who I once produced a record for. She’s in her early 80s. He was a friend of hers, and he allowed us to record several records in his barn: Alice Gerrard’s record, Lateness of Dancers; and Phil Cook, who plays in Hiss, produced a record for Charlie Parr, which came out recently. It’s just a magical place. We were never looking at the clock. We’d just bring our gear and a mobile recording rig in, and and just go. Lateness of Dancers was made in maybe six days. We’d just record two songs a day.

It was a “finished barn.” It wasn’t like we were setting our stuff up on a straw floor. It was a really nice structure. We would all set up in the small room of the two rooms together, just because the sound was a little more controllable. It’s very romantic to think about – even for me, and I was there! We were making Lateness of Dancers in the fall: the barn is surrounding by horse pastures and Peter’s house was off in the distance, which was surrounded by trees. All the trees were exploding with color.

When you’re making a record like that, do you ever look back on years past and think, “I could be in this basement in the Mission District?”

It’s been a really interesting musical evolution, and not without its anxieties, but the things that I’ve experienced in the past couple of years have been the things that I have been striving for since I was 20-years old. I didn’t understand how to get to them. It wasn’t the way that I thought. What’s allowed me to do the stuff that I’ve done in the past couple of years has been connecting with the emotional aspect of the songs that I’m writing in a really important way.

If I died tomorrow, am I going to stand by my performances of the night before? Do I want to be singing these songs every night to people, and sing it like I mean it? It’s not like a judgment scale for other musicians, but I’m getting older and this is what I do for a living.

There is certain arcane knowledge that I feel very attached to – like how I feel attached to poetry, in the way a verse looks on a page. That’s the world that I want to exist and express myself emotionally in: allowing myself to be an emotional person when everything says, “Keep it down, keep that stuff hidden.” I’m not getting out there screaming and yelling. But I’m singing about stuff that’s important to me.

You mentioned that, in your folklore studies, you were talking to people who said “This is the music of this region, and I am a traditional musician.” Do you feel like you became part of that tradition when you migrated to North Carolina? Do you identify with a tradition?

I am inspired by a lot of musical traditions, and particularly American ones. But I would never describe myself as a “traditional musician” or any kind of scholar of that music, because the way that I did ethnographic work was not as a cataloger. I was a reluctant cataloger. I’m not a person that could sing you a fiddle tune from Surry County. Many folklorists could do that, but I just don’t have that kind of brain.

I guess you might not necessarily fitting into the mold of any of these cultures, but you’re creating your own tradition that comes through on these songs, no?

It’s my hope that the songs I’ve written over the years can be honest declarations of who I was for my kids. I hope that people like them, or feel like they echo a certain feeling that was happening to them, but that’s not for me to say. These songs could disappear completely, like so many records that we all love: that are so obscure, and are being rediscovered now. I don’t know what’s going to happen with these songs, but I’m going to keep writing them and I feel like I’m pretty serious about what I’m doing right now. I’m not wasting time.