Hiss Golden Messenger

 

In 2010, M.C. Taylor—leader, songwriter and singer of Hiss Golden Messenger—sat down at his kitchen table and started writing and recording the songs that would eventually become his beloved album Bad Debt. At the time, the songwriter was living in a drafty cedar cabin in the woods outside of Pittsboro, North Carolina with his wife and three-month old son Elijah, having recently moved across the country from California. Taylor was, for all intents and purposes, out of the music game. While his child slept, Taylor wrote and sang his finished compositions into a cassette tape recorder, voice and guitar in the same intimate moment. As songs began to coalesce—intimate meditations on labor and joy and love and the heartbreaking, confounding fullness of life—Taylor shared them with his closest friends, feeling as though he had found something special. He had 200 copies of the album pressed on vinyl, created the artwork himself, and sold them out of the trunk of his car. When those copies sold, he pressed and sold another 200. These early, hand-wrought versions have become sought-after relics.