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Hiss golden messenger domino1/2/2024 While Taylor was writing Bad Debt, his day job was collecting folklore for the state of North Carolina. Soon he’s bounding downstairs to a basement full of toys for children of all ages-Legos, woodblocks, books, and stuffed toys-to find another LP. But flipping through his recent musical acquisitions and offering real-time annotations, Taylor is at his most animated. He has a steady gaze and sandy facial hair that varies in length from neat mustache to scruffy walrus. In contrast to his high, reedy singing voice, he retains the laid-back speaking cadence, and the ratty T-shirts, of a SoCal skater. Offstage, Taylor tends to convey a wary warmth, amiable but circumspect. There are new releases, yellowing classics, a Jackson Southernaires record he chased for years, two copies of the same semi-obscure Abdullah Ibrahim LP. At his cozy, eclectically decorated house on a quiet street in Durham, several rows of neatly arranged LPs are slowly conquering the living room. T aylor collects things: books of poetry, records, tattoos, phrases he mulls for months or years until they find a home in a lyric. Capping several years of fevered recording, frequent touring, and growing audiences, the release isn’t a capstone so much as a moment of reflection mid-journey. The collection, which pulls together the band’s first three records and adds a fourth disc of unreleased material, shows how Taylor has produced-quietly at first, and then more loudly-one of the most impressive bodies of songwriting of the past 10 years. In a cosmic irony that Bad Debt’s narrators, buffeted by forces beyond their control, would appreciate, the record now kicks off a forthcoming box set by Taylor’s band, Hiss Golden Messenger, called Devotion. I wasn’t even playing shows, or playing the songs for anybody.”īut when Taylor did cautiously share the music, people loved the songs. “It was like, I’m making music just for me,” he says. Taylor didn’t intend for anyone to hear the tapes. The prophetic images bore some resemblance to old, weird Americana, with the grim fatalism and religious fervor of British ballads refracted through Appalachia. The songs were not, abounding with gospel signifiers, road narratives, and impressionistic blues, all accompanied simply on acoustic guitar. He called the collection Bad Debt, which, given the reeling economy, was timely. Taylor had to sing softly-his baby son was asleep in the other room-and the audio quality was, in his words, “a joke.” Taylor had spent his youth dabbling in bands, skateboarding, and drugs in Southern California, but had given up on music and moved east to study folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A lmost a decade ago, a failed musician sat down at his kitchen table in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and began singing some new songs into a portable cassette player.
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