Hiss Golden Messenger, led by singer, songwriter and guitarist MC Taylor, released last August its 15th album, Jump For Joy. Catch the band’s set at the Pour House Dec. 30 and Dec. 31.
The Durham, N.C., band most often gets lumped into the “folk” genre, but a deep dive into Jump For Joy will disprove that simple word almost immediately.
The gentle-but-insistent pulse of the opening track, “20 Years and a Nickel,” sets the tone perfectly. A slippery mid-tempo groove serves as the foundation for glowing guitars, subtle keyboard shading and a dynamic bassline from Alex Bingham.
“I saw the new day in the world,” Taylor sings on the next song, buoyed by a deceptively funky backing track and a wave of oddly ominous sax, courtesy of Matt Douglas. There are some traces of acoustic folk on Jump For Joy,” most notably the nostalgic, reflective “My Old Friends,” but even that song ends with a refrain in which the singer says he’s found “something to believe in.”
It’s a sound that feels like the polar opposite of Hiss Golden Messenger’s previous album, the more muted, introspective Quietly Blowing It, released in 2021.
“I think my mindset was to make a record that felt more outward facing,” Taylor said. “I think I needed to recalibrate the way that I have my emotions on display publicly. I think part of what an artist does is hold a certain type of emotional vulnerability up to the light for people to see. Quietly Blowing It did that in one type of way in a way, and I felt like I needed to go in the other direction because if I continued in the way that I was going, it was going to be diminishing returns.”
Changing course
For Taylor, “diminishing returns” doesn’t have anything to do with how well Hiss Golden Messenger’s albums sell. He’s referring more to the experience of making a stripped-down, intimate record just as we began to emerge from a pandemic.
“I think that Quietly Blowing It has a very solitary internalness that I didn’t think I wanted to go through again, put it that way,” Taylor said. “From the moment of conception, the moment when I started writing the songs, before I even knew what songs would be on the record — I just knew that whatever I was going to do was going to be more effusive. It was going to be wearing joyfulness and hopefulness on its sleeve.”
Jump For Joy was recorded over a couple weeks at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, with Taylor’s road band, which includes Bingham on bass, guitarist Chris Boerner, keyboard player Sam Fribush and drummer Nick Falk, with assists from Douglas on sax and a host of backing singers, including Meg Duffy and Aoife O’Donovan.
The band members came in ready to record because they’d already played much of Jump For Joy onstage every night.
“I think being able to play the music with the people that are going to be on the record lets you wring out the songs,” Taylor said. “There are countless examples of stuff that I thought might be an obvious choice that actually didn’t land the way I thought it would once it was in front of an audience. And there was other stuff that I hadn’t even thought of as being something that would work for an audience that became much clearer to me once it was brought to the stage.”
Taylor was the producer of the album as well, a role he’s played often in the band’s history.
“I’m not against producer-artist relationships at all,” he said. “But I think that anyone that is going to step into a producer role with me has to know at least as much as I do about my music and about music in general, which is kind of a tall order. That’s the reason why I often end up in the producer’s chair because it’s a role that feels natural to me. Making a record is really just a series of problem-solving exercises.”
As for that pesky “folk” tag people often apply to the band, Taylor looks at that genre as part of a larger sound.
“I would say that folk and traditional music are very important parts of the DNA of the music that I make,” he said, “and I will never disavow that because I love that type of music. But there are also a million other things that go into my music. It’s a complex stew of different kinds of music that go into it, and I’m fine with that.”
Hiss Golden Messenger performs at the Pour House Dec. 30 and 31. For tickets, visit charlestonpourhouse.com.
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