God is good and it’s understood
M.C. Taylor
he moves in mysterious ways.
Back in late 2012, as the leaves shed their false selves, I traveled along the dusty and unpoliced blogosphere, finding a song on my feed with an album cover featuring a red handprint, no artist named, and the lyrical couplet
No more rolling down that wicked track
I’m going to see the king
suddenly becoming the only refrain that felt familiar. Anyone who’s found themselves in a state of searching – especially those of us raised to believe in something specific and unknowable – it becomes an easy to thing to slide into the pursuit of meaning, of a familiar brand of acceptance.
It was the seeking that entranced me. The mournful acceptance that followed, the yearning in his voice, and the melody that felt like fractured faith mended with gold.
I followed the lyrics to a repeated and frantic search, which led me to nyctaper (an incredible live music archivist who you should all follow and adore). I remember downloading the Hopscotch set from September 2012, listening loudly in my headphones, and then searching online for the music. I couldn’t find Bad Debt (the redhanded album recorded at his kitchen table), but I found a copy of Poor Moon. It arrived in the mail a week or so later, I burnt it to my computer and iPod, and then the cd never left my car until it cracked in a crash with a dump truck.
Poor Moon is a different kind of magic than anything else that has come out in my adult life. The music that Hiss Golden Messenger made after Poor Moon follows it sonically and branches from its trunk – and may, in its way, hold something deeper and truer – but it is the tree of Hiss.
Poor Moon took American folk music with its classic country-meets-the-highlands-and-lowlands-of-appalachia, melded it with something like funk and reggae rhythms, and raised it all a little higher with gospel soul. It followed Bad Debt – ironically, an album accepting music as personal grace more than professional success, and yet it set the stage for the latter – and became something almost its opposite. He recorded Bad Debt at his kitchen table to tape, quietly so as not to wake his newborn son. He and his wife had upended their lives, switching coasts from California to the edges of the river Haw in North Carolina, trading one beauty for another.
I think he worked as a musical folklorist and archivist then, but I’m not so sure. It’s a thing I didn’t know still existed, but if any so-called typical job matches Taylor, it has to be this one.
The first copies of Bad Debt burned in a warehouse fire in London some couple years before Paradise of Bachelors rereleased it. It nearly never made it to the wider world, briefly confined to The Old Straight Track.
Isn’t it strange how life and luck work?
Poor Moon featured at least 16 musicians, as far as the liner notes suggest (special shoutout to Terry Lonergan behind the kit and Nathan Bowles, who I discovered around this time), though it was and essentially remains an album made by Taylor collaborating with Scott Hirsch, his longtime friend and musical partner.
For years, my mind has tossed around ideas for what a poor moon might be, might represent. And all I can think is that maybe it’s a half-lament for the moon that isn’t a sunset and a half-celebration for the devotions she’s earned. It is honest, cheeky, and mystical.
Taylor tells stories that travel thoughts down long roads without much end, exploring the surreality of feeling and being human, confined to the context of songs built into a place of and for revelation. He has an aged sweet-tea voice, left sitting on the counter just long enough that the bitterness swirls with the sugar, the darkness isn’t lost in a saccharine fog. Paired with those steady rhythms and a beautiful band, Hiss’s themes – of redemption gained and lost, of hope in the darkness, of faith without religion, of loving despite it all – are what soundtrack the last decade of my listening life.
The songs of Poor Moon have featured in Hiss sets ever since, with a few more frequently than others: “Blue Country Mystic” with its jaunty hooks and sudden twists, “Jesus Shot Me in the Head” with its band-defining groove, and “Call Him Daylight” with its fire and brimstone beauty, heavy solos, and the little explosions of hope in the darkness. But every song on the album is worth every second you sit with it. My favorite might be the record-ending “Balthazar’s Song”, its swelling violins and the steady “La la las” and the soft “eventually I’ll be set free / and that will be fine”, but I have love for it all. I couldn’t have made it no way without Poor Moon and the music that came after it.
I hope you join me on this road, listen to all of the records, and come see Taylor and his band. Their shows are incense and pews, bonfires and starlight, frenzied and gentle.
They’ll be closing out the incredible Charm City Bluegrass Festival next Saturday. They follow The Lil Smokies, AJ Lee and The Blue Summit, The Hackensaw Boys, Armchair Boogie, and more.
I hope I see you dancing on Druid Hill.
