It's the only way I'm going to be able to communicate the vulnerability that is at the heart of everything that's meaningful to me. Not because I don't like that music, but because I need to be using a language that feels absolutely genuine to me. I guess what I'm saying is, it's unlikely that I'm gonna make a dance record. My reinventions from record to record, they're still re-combinations of the things that I know communicate my emotions the best. My records kind of unfurl like chapters of a really long book. Part of it has become, like, I like being the model of an artist that is a lifer, first of all. I'd been making music for many, many years before I made Bad Debt. People hear all kinds of different stuff in my music, all kinds of influences, but when you put it all together, it feels unique to me. The biggest piece of that for me was finding a voice and vernacular that felt genuine to me. It's particularly valuable to have art that reminds us that it's an ongoing thing, instead of something you have to find or achieve. Sometimes we gotta just let 'em hang out there in the atmosphere. And it's okay for them to not be answered. It reminds you that we're all struggling with a lot of these big, existential questions. And also, over time, it's been-and this is not something I could've anticipated when I made Bad Debt-but having people come back to me and say, "I have these questions, too, and I also don't have the answers." There's something empowering about that for everybody. They were about putting the questions out there and, first of all, realizing it was okay for the questions to live in the air without answers. But asking the questions, even at the outset, even with Bad Debt, the questions were not about finding the answers. I've drawn a clear bead on my own emotions about things. Do you feel now like you've got more answers? You've been asking yourself these questions for a long time. And that's a struggle, I think, with anybody who's creating stuff.
MC Taylor: "Why am I here? How much time do I have, and what bearing does that have on how I conduct myself? How do I be present? What are my responsibilities as an adult? How do I be the best model for my kids and the people in my community? How do I maintain-and even offer up to people-my vulnerability?" Vulnerability is the most compelling quality of any art, to me.
Noisey: Can you think of a specific question you're asking yourself more than others lately? “The most powerful thing I witnessed was love-this spiritual devotion to a practice, whatever it might be, for no other reward than personal satisfaction.” “It opens your world up to understand that love drives the universe,” Taylor says about that time in his life. And it was Taylor’s work as a folklorist in the eastern parts of North Carolina, observing low-rider car clubs and musicians working in remote reaches of the state, that granted him a glimpse into different incarnations of devotion and solidified it as a central element to his story. The rivers and spirits and children bit nods to a number of motifs that Taylor frequently returns to in the Hiss universe-a place both mystically arcane and very grounded in stark reality-communicated through whispered folk tunes, rollicking country-funk, and deep, heavy grooves that run simmering hot. This past Friday, Merge re-released all of them in remastered versions (plus Virgo Fool, a rarities collection) for a box set named Devotion: Songs About Rivers and Spirits and Children. “They haven't actually heard how the book started, you know?” “So if people haven't heard these records,” Taylor says over the phone from his home in overcast Durham, North Carolina. Since he found his voice and established that language, Taylor has written many more chapters to the story, but the first three Hiss records, rounded out by Poor Moon and Haw, remain its foundational introduction. It was with Bad Debt that Taylor found the voice he’s refined over the ensuing near-decade: one timeless and dusty (in a good way), in which he sings just like a songbird about, among many other things: losing his mind, sallying forth, bombed-out witches, super blue crescent moons, rivers, glorious rivers, the unbearable burden of living with one’s sin-whatever that might be-and more than anything, love. His newborn son, Elijah, slept as he recorded Bad Debt in the kitchen of the family’s home near a creek in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
In 2009, Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor started writing the first chapter in the book of his life.
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