I recently celebrated my third decade of being a loud, unrelenting, obsessive zealot.
You know how it is. You fall in love with the best {thing} ever, and then want all of your friends who like {things} to join you to celebrate that your new favorite {thing}, is indeed the best {thing}.
For me, the {thing} is pretty much always music.
Convinced that my new favorite band is in fact the greatest band of all time—for today, anyway—I’ve undoubtedly been a steady presence in your ear, probably since the day we met, waxing semi-poetically about a few too many artists and albums. (Quite possible the waxing has been semi-annoying, too.)
Still, and even after all of those years of best-ever best-evers, I’ve never stopped listening for something to top them all.
The pursuit of what resonates most deeply, most precisely, most creatively, most soulfully, here, in this moment: the neverending now.
For the last half-decade or so, there’s been a single artist who has steadily held my gaze as my latest-favoritest-and-best-ever.
And so here I am, if you’ll allow me, knocking on your earbuds yet again, to tell you all about ’em.
They’re a band from Durham, North Carolina, called Hiss Golden Messenger.
I’ll make this recommendation through five songs.
(NB: The songs are linked in a playlist at the end of this essay.)
Day O Day (A Love So Free)
In 2015—those halcyon pre-Sonos days—we were spinning a lot of vinyl records at the office. Eight, nine, ten a day. I’d picked up Hiss Golden Messenger’s Lateness of Dancers via some long-lost tip, and it quickly found its way to the top of the “recent purchases / recent spins” stack.
At work, the records we played were almost always on in the background, but their highlights would reach through the noise and activity, calling out to be heard. The Hiss record in particular just refused to not be listened to.
We played it over and over.
It was the song “Day O Day (A Love So Free)” that ultimately stopped me in my tracks.
When the song finished, I’d get up from my desk, go over to the record player, and move the needle back: “The sky was a braid of many colors.”
Play it again.
These were the early days of my friends and I getting our own “Americana” band back together. There was something in the spirit of these Hiss songs that took that well-trod musical format to a stirring new place for me.
A maturity to the writing, I suppose.
Hiss Golden Messenger is singer and songwriter M.C. Taylor, along with a rotating cast of friends and collaborators, each coming in and out of the Hiss orbit for various records and tours.
Turns out Taylor and I are about the same age, and both parents.
What I found in Taylor’s songs was a person writing about the things that were most on my mind, the things I most cared about. Asking, and sometimes answering, the questions I pondered most deeply, but almost never spoke out loud.
The songs had presence and awareness, intimacy and candor.
Taylor’s songs were singular and poetic; they didn’t hide the fallible beneath the idyllic, they were sometimes dark and yet somehow also almost always uplifting, with themes of love, children, perseverance, obligation and rivers, themes of anxiety, spirituality, restlessness and doubt, themes of sorrow, faith and our American frailty.
In “Day O Day (A Love So Free),” before a big, everybody-join-in chorus, Taylor sings,
“I'm gonna put all my pain in a bottle /
and throw it all the way deep down into the East River /
then walk that way with my head up like the poet /
with a rose in my jaw.
O day, o day…”
Mahogany Dread
“Mahogany Dread,” from the same record, is the archetypal Hiss song; it cooks, it’s sometimes difficult to make out exactly what Taylor is singing in his lyrics, and it’s memorable in a stuck-in-your-head-for-days way, despite eschewing a conventional verse-chorus structure or hook.
It shouldn’t work, yet it does. And not only does it, but it’s their best song.
“Mahogany Dread” captures the feeling of a life pierced midstream, seizes it in a way that is somehow both universal and specific. Unwaveringly so.
“It’s getting hard to be easy now.”
I don’t know exactly what Taylor means to say with the title “Mahogany Dread.” And I purposefully haven’t really tried to figure it out.
Because since first truly hearing the song, those two words have become my shorthand for every shortcoming and failure, every dream and summit, every rite and responsibility that I’ve felt—personally and professionally—in my 40s.
Shorthand for suffering those things—“Mahogany Dread.”
Shorthand for chasing and coveting and reaching and overcoming those things—“Mahogany Dread.”
Biloxi
“Biloxi” was the opening sound of Heart Like a Levee—the first record HGM released after I’d become captivated by the band.
In July of 2016, I was living alone, separated, in a small apartment at 1005 Columbia Avenue.
I was living across the street from the half-of-a-duplex where I’d stared One Lucky Guitar, fifteen years earlier.
Seasons and cycles; the sun rises, the river flows.
“Biloxi” is the lead-off track on Heart Like a Levee, and was released as a single in advance of the full album.
It’s a breezy song—a strummer.
Taylor seems to be singing to his child on a birthday.
It’s a celebration, and it’s also a moment of reflection; Taylor jumps between recognizing the moment at hand, and musing about hard-won wisdom from his own life.
In sharing his story, he deepens his son’s.
We’re here, yes—in this moment, in this place, in the neverending now—but “Biloxi” reminds us that those things that happened way on up the river…those things that happened way on up the river are what made the eddys that we’re swimming in today as strong as they are. And as dangerous as they are.
“All around my old hometown I was known as a loner /
you know I wasn’t lonely, I just liked being alone.”
Cracked Windshield
Heart Like a Levee is an album about art and vocation; sacrifice and disappointment; resilience and water; providing and protecting.
It’s an album about communication, and the failure of communication.
No doubt the record is deeply personal to Taylor, and at its emotional center is “Cracked Windshield.”
To ready the listener, “Cracked Windshield” is presented with an introductory track—a quiet and necessary reverie of strings, called “Smoky’s Song.”
I saw two Hiss concerts soon after the album was released, in Detroit MI and Bloomington IN. At each, near the middle of the set, the band eased into this song—still in its earliest live performances—with a deafening quietude.
And at each concert, Taylor, deep in his lyrics, tersely stopped the concert mid-song, reprimanding the few in the audience who chose to carry their conversation over performance. It was awkward and difficult to watch and experience. Raw-nerved. Painful, frankly.
The silence that followed was stunning.
There are a lot of Hiss songs that are fun to listen to.
This isn’t really one of them.
But it does do the thing that I most ask from art, which is to inform and illuminate and enlighten and color and shade and deepen my own life, its relationships, its struggles and its purpose.
Lucia (live)
My first Hiss concert was a solo acoustic set in 2016, when Taylor opened for Jason Isbell at Fort Wayne’s own Embassy Theatre. I’ve seen the band ten times since then, including a memorable trip with my daughter to the band’s hometown of Durham, NC in late-2018.
My life has changed so much over that time. As has yours, as have all of ours.
Thankfully, Hiss Golden Messenger is almost always on tour.
In times when I’ve felt especially pulled by the undertow, one counterbalance for me has been having a Hiss show to look forward to. The same is true when I’m in need of a celebration; I say to myself, “Buy the Hiss tickets.” And then I draw a Hiss lantern on my calendar.
It’s a little thing, I know. But it’s also sanctuary.
And in that way, in the rawest sense, this band’s repertoire has become gospel music to me.
Hiss shows range from quiet and intimate, to raucous and jam-driven.
The current touring lineup is a freewheeling bunch, and there’s a joyful, homespun and loose exploration in their performances.
You can feel the way the band loves playing together, the way their musical language is woven with fellowship and compassion.
You can feel, in your bones and in your heart, the way they surrender to some kind of communal notion. The belief that we’re actually part of something bigger, and that together, we can all rise in the morning.
We can take the good news, and carry it away.
We can spirit it away.
That’s Hiss for You
I focused this essay on the Hiss Golden Messenger songs that speak most directly to me. I do want to be clear that the band’s catalog is wide-ranging in the topics its songs tackle, and in the sounds and vibes those songs explore. I recommend each and every album they’ve released.
A terrific entry point is 2021’s excellent Quietly Blowing It, probably the most immediately approachable record the band has produced. I might say it’s “the most Hiss Hiss record.”
That same year, the band released a “seasonal record with vibe”—O Come All Ye Faithful—and it’s actually probably my favorite record they’ve made. Just outstanding.
If you’re a ’Head, though, I easily most recommend the half-dozen or so live concerts the band has released on Bandcamp, recorded on the road by the Hiss Mobile Recording Unit (HMRU). They’re all fantastic.
Hiss is signed to the greatest record label on the planet, Merge Records—home of Destroyer, Lambchop, Dawn Richard, Teenage Fanclub and dozens more. Buy Hiss vinyl from your local, or online from Merge. And pick up some swag from the Hiss store.
Here’s the Spotify Playlist for this essay:
What Do You Think?
Thank you for reading this essay.
I sincerely appreciate your time, and for the comments and feedback that has been sent my way. It means an awful lot to me. MLNP has been a real positive and productive force in my life over the last nine months.
I follow a few writers on Substack who engage in pretty robust discussion with those who read their stuff. I won’t pretend belong in the same lecture hall as those writers, but as I gear up for Spring Semester, I welcome any questions, requests or feedback you have.
You can email me at mkelleyolg@gmail.com, or leave a comment below. I’ll respond to anything.
Thanks again for your time. X, MK
Appendix: Hiss Shows I’ve Attended
Embassy Theatre, Fort Wayne, May 31 2016
Loving Touch, Detroit, November 7 2016
The Bishop, Bloomington, January 26 2017
Hi-Fi, Indianapolis, October 22 2017
Carolina Theatre, Durham, November 16 2018
Lo-Fi, Indianapolis, February 15 2019
Indianapolis Zoo, Indianapolis, March 30 2019
The Ark, Ann Arbor, November 20 2019
Thalia Hall, Chicago, March 11 2022
Hi-Fi Annex, Indianapolis, August 16 2022
Red Rocks, Denver, September 15 2022
Here's the promised piece from my book:
Another Jesse
I was looking for a bargain, I was always looking for a bargain. So it was no surprise to find me at the Salvation Army Thrift shop, a resale store where poor folks donated things for other poor folks to buy. But, it was a surprise to find me at the record bin. Although there seemed to be no such things as a stack of records I would not peruse, the bins at the Salvation Army were an exception. The records were hopelessly dated, loose without jackets, badly scratched or a combo of all three.
But today, some records wrapped in plastic caught my eye. I was just a few albums in when I realized the two bins were filled with deejay promotional copies that had been donated by a local radio station. It was a potential audio goldmine.
At the time, music was marketed in a way that a child of the digital age could not wrap their head around. The music industry exploded and vinyl albums were king. Albums were sold in graphic cardboard sleeves, or jackets, and sealed in plastic. There was no sampling, and absolutely no returns unless damaged. One relied on the radio and suggestions of friends. In our town, radio was a sorry source. At a time that FM stereo, album-oriented rock was well entrenched on the coasts, there were no FM radio stations in Fort Wayne, only mono AM stations with a Top 40 rotation that had a remarkable sameness in sound.
Another source for a clue to the music inside that sealed album was what was printed on the jacket itself. As album sales soared more and more went into the packaging in hopes that colorful, artistic jackets would sell what was inside. It really exploded after the Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s. Record jackets were not just record jackets any longer.
And if the design didn’t give you an idea of the contents, then the copy on the back, the lyrics, or the name of a familiar musician, songwriter, or producer possibly could. In my mind it was a skillful combination of all these things. Finding good music was an art.
I was halfway through the second bin thinking my skill was escaping me when the eyes hit me. The jacket was printed with a sienna-tinted, close-up portrait of a shaggy-haired guy with a beard and moustache, an intense stare, and a background that suggested the walls of a mountain cabin. Printed across the hairline was a name, “Jesse Winchester”. It was released by “Bearsville” a record company unknown to me but with an intriguing logo. On the back were unfamiliar song titles but two familiar names: Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm. They were both members of The Band whose LP Music from Big Pink had found a great deal of playing time on my turntable.
I loved that Jesse Winchester album, still do, not just because of the awesome music that still resonates with me today. It is my poster child for the thrill of discovery, the thrill of something new, the thrill of bringing something or someone new into your life. Six years later Jesse released another album during the summer I met and fell in love with Connie. A radio release from that album, “Nothing but a Breeze” became the signature song for our summer spent in the desert and mountains of Colorado. In early 2014, after losing track of his career, I discovered his release Love Filling Station. That same week I read he was fighting cancer. I had never met him, and failed to even see him in concert but that first album was in my life since its discovery in the Salvation Army bin back in 1971. In the ‘80s I bought it on CD. In the oughts, I downloaded it from Google Music. When I read later that he had passed away I deeply felt I had lost a friend.
But I didn’t lose Jesse because it’s his music that was and still is my dear friend. It’s that album of his with the remembrance of that moment of discovery that is so like finding a new friend, a kindred soul who’ll always be there when needed, always intent on making you feel good, embracing you to the very end.
So I continue to stand before the music, now flipping through racks of CDs or scrolling through the pages of the iTunes store in a continuing quest for new music, for new friends. Because, after all, is there really such a thing as having too many friends?
Yikes, it was 2016 when Hiss opened for Jason Isbell!?! Feels like just a few months back. That Embassy concert was the second time I saw him within a few weeks. He opened for Dawes at the Bluebird in Bloomington. The brothers played back up for him. A fan ever since...
You did him right with yet another fine post, but what stood out most in this post for me was:
"Still, and even after all of those years of best-ever best-evers, I’ve never stopped listening for something to top them all."
Like you, finding the next tune, the next artist is a constant drive. Searching for that next song that knocks me out is a daily passion I've had since the first time I flipped through the album bins at Ruby's Red Hot Records.
A piece from my book addresses that search that started years ago. I thought you'd might enjoy (even though it is the weakest vignette in the book...). I am a bit electronically challenged. I will have to send it in another comment.