Hiss Golden Messenger Hits A Sweet Spot With Highly Textured ‘I’m People’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People is the aural equivalent of comfort food. It’s warm, goes down easy, is simple at the core, and hits many of the right spots. The title alone suggests a universality, the common rhythms of life, the pendulum of emotions, and connection. As you likely know, Hiss Golden Messenger is the moniker for North Carolina singer-songwriter MC Taylor. Taylor penned these songs in a farmhouse on the edge of a bay in California, at his home in the North Carolina Piedmont, and in a motel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Taylor was searching for inspiration, an elusive kind of magic, but instead found himself writing about running toward and away from things, about realistic expectations and slivers of hope in these trying times, about fatherhood, aging, love, lust, and luck. The natural outgrowth of those subjects and his writing locales are solitude and heartbreak, but the overriding takeaways are “I’m one of you,” and “together we’ll get through this.”

The album was co-produced by Taylor and the multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman at Dreamland, a decommissioned church in Hurley, New York, just outside of Woodstock, in the Catskills. Dreamland is emerging as a popular studio, with a new Blue Note jazz album recorded there. Taylor said, “I wanted the record to feel the way that upstate place feels, deep in the pocket, a place of poetry, earth and sky, and mountains.” He accomplishes just that.

The album began with just a core of Taylor and Kaufman on various stringed instruments, JT Bates on drums and percussion, and Cameron Ralston on upright and electric bass. They played and sang in a loose circle, watching each other: Gillian Pelkonen, one of the two engineers, often sang harmony. Later, as so often happens with many recent albums, they layered a stacked list of guests, both instrumental and for background vocals, who appear on almost every track. This luminous list includes: Bruce Hornsby, Sam Beam, Marcus King, Sara Watkins, Amy Helm, Matt Douglas, Eric D. Johnson, and Griff and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes. There are even more in the credits.  So, the initial stripped-down effort blossomed into a communal gathering, as evidenced by the many sing-along choruses that populate these songs. Instrumental additions flesh out the textures, including Kaufman’s array of keys, rooted mostly in folk-rock.

The lead single, “In the Middle of It,” is a driving, desert-tinged folk-rocker, written in that motel room in Santa Fe. Taylor cites Highway 10, which runs through the desert towns, midnight lightning fields, echoes of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast, ghosts, UFOs, and vagabonds. Here, as a kind of blueprint for what follows, one confronts the balance between hope and melancholy, vulnerability and a sense of community. Taylor sounds ebullient in another gentle rocker, “Who You Gonna Run To,” with dreamy textures from the saxophone and B3. “Shaky Eyes,” the second single, is a snappy rocker that was apparently written in California as Taylor explores a range of emotions from solitude to empathy and a few in between. This verse is especially striking – “When they call the dance, dance like fire/They’ve been looking at you through a two–way mirror/Nobody tells you joy can kill you/Coming in the front door like a river.”

The softer, folk-like “Mercy Avenue” plies Dylanesque imagery and character sketches, again imbued by Douglas’s sax and flute. The title track is an informal, joyous sing-along, with five singers supporting Taylor on the choruses.  “Seneca” thrives on Rich Hinman’s pedal steel and Sara Watkins’ fiddle, the only track where those two appear. The galloping “Last Orders’ is mostly a yearning, nostalgic look at past times, while the gentle love song, “Gabriel,” with only Amy Helm on harmony, returns to straight-out folk. Bates sets an infectious groove on“Heavy World,, Duncan Wickel adds fiddle to the dreamy “Alright and Then Some,” and the relatively stripped-down (no harmonies) “Spirit Cat” finds a rocking vibe. Whether intentionally or not, the closer, “Depends on the River,” with Hornsby on piano and Beam on harmonies, evokes a Band-like sound.

“I’m People” is honest and so accessible that it seems as if the storytelling MC Taylor is engaging a single listener, both seated in a cozy room.