HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER: (Singing) When it all feels fake, do the words have no meaning? They will if we let 'em. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT WILL IF WE LET IT") But yeah, for the most part, it was composed between March of 2020 and maybe July of 2020. There are a couple songs that probably predate 2020. So I did get some time off (laughter), but I had no idea that it would be as much time off as we all ended up getting.įADEL: Little did you know that the pandemic was coming and mandating some time off for you.įADEL: So you wrote this album during sort of the lockdown at the beginning of this pandemic? MC TAYLOR: I have two kids, 8 and 12 years old. MC TAYLOR: At the end of 2019, I was probably nearing five, six, seven consistent years on the road. ![]() So you wrote this album during the pandemic.įADEL: But it seems the mood predates the coronavirus? Can you talk about where you were in your life at the end of 2019? He wrote most of the album, and he joins us now. But I know how to sing about it.įADEL: That's a bit from the song "Sanctuary," from Hiss Golden Messenger's "Quietly Blowing It." MC Taylor is the one singing on it. HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER: (Singing) Feeling bad, feeling blue. Best enjoyed often and amongst friends.Hiss Golden Messenger's new album is reflective, ruminative and not without a decent beat. In its own way, Quietly Blowing It is great just like how the first few Paul McCartney solo records are great, or Tom Petty’s Wildflowers and Bob Dylan’s New Morning are great, or even albums by contemporaries like Laura Marling and Waxahatchee are great – it’s just pure, no bullshit emotional sincerity made for folks who need to feel a little connection to the wider world, to a greater consciousness. This is an honest, open and ultimately powerful collection of careworn and transformative rock tunes made to soothe the wounds of the past few years and prepare us for the bumps further on down the road. So it’s a great pleasure to find that Quietly Blowing It contains not one jot of irony, not one atom of insincerity. In 2021, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find music made in earnest and with love. Or maybe the true highlight of the album is “Angels in the Headlights”, or “Sanctuary”… Answers on a postcard. Gospel-era Dylan is evoked again in “Hardlytown”, which is a more muscular take on HGM’s regular sound, but the true highlight of the set is “Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner)”, with its soulful strut and blissed-out atmospherics. “Mighty Dollar” leans heavily into smoky, sweaty funk – which makes total sense, considering that Taylor gave a shout-out to Sly & the Family Stone in an essay he wrote and released in the period preceding the release of the record – while the title track, which follows, strips out the heat and muscle but fills the gap with ambience and jazz-inflected somnambulant keyboard washes. ![]() “The Great Mystifier”, which splits the difference between gospel Dylan and mid-70s Grateful Dead (check out the solo), is infectiously upbeat and gently groovy. Opener “Way Back in the Way Back” is charmingly simple and deceptively rich, with smooth soul keyboards and crisp percussion providing gentle propulsion to the brass and silky vocal arrangements. When the time came, however, he surrounded himself with collaborators and friends: “Songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov, songwriter and Tony Award–winning playwright Anaïs Mitchell, multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Dawes’ brothers Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith, and his oldest musical confidant Scott Hirsch.” ![]() ![]() Although the genre he pursues is old, his approach is completely fresh - including on his tenth outing, Quietly Blowing It.Īs it turns out, the album was inspired by Taylor’s decision to cancel an Australian tour in early 2020, and take some time to recover from the sheer exhaustion of being out on the road in the Trump era. Each of his studio albums, including 2019’s Grammy-nominated Terms of Surrender, has shown him to be a singular songwriter, cut from the same cloth as Springsteen and Petty and Dylan but unique and thrilling in his own way. It’s also ideally suited for this post-lockdown haze we’ve all been stumbling into this summer. Taylor’s is a spiritual music, a reflective and contemplative music. While his music is far from reggae – more of a feel-good, cosmic kind of Americana – it’s certainly imbued with the same narcotic, all-consuming sense of oneness with some kind of force larger than ourselves.
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