Hiss Golden Messenger – Heart Like A Levee (CD)
Product Details
M.C. Taylor has spent years building Hiss Golden Messenger into one of the most emotionally honest projects in American roots music, drawing on country, gospel, and folk in ways that feel lived-in rather than studied. "Heart Like A Levee" arrived at a moment when Taylor was finding his footing as a full-time musician, and that tension between duty and devotion runs through every track. Durham, North Carolina rarely sounds this wide open.
The writing of the songs that became Heart Like a Levee started in a hotel room in Washington DC in January of 2015 during a powerful storm that darkened the East Coast. At that time I was feeling—more acutely than I had ever felt before—wrenched apart by my responsibilities to my family and to my music. Forgetting, momentarily, that for me, each exists only with the other. How could I forget? Though maybe my lapse was reasonable: I had just quit my job, the most recent and last, in a series of dead-end gigs stretching back 20 years, with the vow that my children would understand their father as a man in love with his world and the inventor of his own days. They would be rare in that regard. And then—driven by monthly bills and pure fear— I left for another tour, carrying a load of guilt that I could just barely lift. But in that snowy hotel room I found the refrain that became my compass: I was a dreamer, babe, when I set out on the road; but did I say I could find my way home? --M.C. Taylor
Tracklist
UPC: 673855057521
Label: Merge Records
Release Date: 10.7.16
Format: CD