There is a drive in the world of festivals to make more noise than one person alone can deliver,” Hiss Golden Messenger mouthpiece M.C. Taylor says of the big, outdoor gatherings he’s played with increased regularity in recent years. “Sometimes you will see bands that are tailor-made to play festivals and musicians who construct their bands to play on an outdoor stage in front of a ton of people. It is an interesting phenomenon—it’s hard to convey intimacy at a festival, so bands go for maximum impact. We get a lot of festival offers for a full band, but I don’t think playing alone
is a lesser version of Hiss Golden Messenger.”

Hiss Golden Messenger actually began as a solo project based around Taylor’s guitar, voice and tape recorder. Though currently based in Durham, N.C., where he balances his musical endeavors with equally heady work in the academic world, he first started playing music in the noisy SoCal hardcore outfit Ex-Ignota in the ‘90s. After moving to San Francisco and developing a keen interest in traditional American roots music, he switched gears and channeled those influences into the ambient, alt-country project The Court & Spark, whom he toured with for 10 years.

“There are some ways that both punk music and roots music felt outside the mainstream, which was attractive to me as a young person and continues to be interesting to me,” admits Taylor, who is now in his late 30s. “I was also drawn toward traditional American roots music because I am interested in things that are durable like folk, blues, bluegrass, gospel, country-and-western. You can do a lot with the raw ingredients that go into the music.”

In 2007, he moved across the country to enter a graduate program in folklore at the University of North at Carolina Chapel Hill and started working on music under the Hiss Golden Messenger moniker. Taylor built off his work with The Court & Spark, settling on an open Americana blueprint that mixed his interest in American roots music with the loose swagger of modern indie and the DIY intimacy of Will Oldham. Hiss Golden Messenger’s songs can convey both the beauty of a front-porch picking session and the expansive groove of an indie-rock festival set.

“By the time my old band came to rest, I was pretty blown out and not sure what I was going to do with music,” Taylor says. “We had no real connection or experience to the area, but it made it easier because so much American music I love has roots in the South. I started playing by myself purely for financial and logistical reasons. I felt like I had come to a dead end, and I was still not quite sure what I was supposed to be doing.”

While living with his wife and infant son near a hippie settlement in Pittsboro, N.C, Taylor recorded Hiss Golden Messenger’s true blueprint, Bad Debt, by himself. The independent release achieved something of a mythical status, and in 2009, he issued Country Hai East Cotton, which was fleshed out with the help of his closest recording companion, Ex-Ignota/The Court & Spark
pal Scott Hirsch, and friends like The Mother Hips’ Tim Bluhm. Taylor and Hirsch started playing more often with a full, live band and, with each record, inched toward the more polished and melodic sound heard on the 2014 Merge debut, Lateness Of Dancers. Recorded in a tin-roofed barn near Hillsborough, N.C., Taylor and Hirsch used the sessions as a community gathering, recruiting the likes of Megafaun’s Phil and Brad Cook, guitarist William Tyler and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig of Mountain Man. They also nodded to their surroundings by naming the album after a
short story by Eudora Welty, whose prose is often set in the American South.

“By making my first record alone, I realized a good song is a powerful thing,” Taylor says. “But using a full band now is great, as long as we keep delivering the melodies.”