I don’t know that the world reserves a great deal of sympathy for touring musicians. The reigning narratives of life on the night-club circuit tend to be proud tales of debauchery, prurience, and the gleeful shirking of grown-person responsibility. Even in its less glamorous iterations, the road has an odd allure, a goony romance. Who wouldn’t rather be smoking endless cigarettes by a dumpster in some colorless parking lot than vacuuming the bath mat again?
Still, by all accounts, it’s hard out there, passed out in the back of the van. An existence that once contained multitudes becomes compartmentalized and re-routed, made insular, small. This might seem counterintuitive—the open road is supposed to facilitate spiritual expansion, after all—but the logistical demands of getting a bunch of people and their ill-shapen sacks of stuff from one place to another are psychologically depleting, and require a tense narrowing of focus. This is to say nothing of the aches for what has been left behind.
The consoling idea, I think, is that the glory and catharsis of performance eventually tip the scales, neutralizing the poison of what is basically constant business travel. On “Heart Like a Levee,” M. C. Taylor, the vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter behind the country-rock band Hiss Golden Messenger, is preoccupied by taking some measure of the road—its travails, its possibilities. The record, which is Taylor’s seventh as part of Hiss Golden Messenger, is ostensibly about trying to achieve a satisfying balance between art-making and everything it requires—time, space, deep self-involvement—and a more traditional domestic routine, in which children, marriages, and lawns are nurtured and sustained.
Obviously, grousing about touring has a limited or self-reflexive appeal. What’s striking about “Heart Like a Levee” is that, while Taylor’s particular predicament is rarified, his songs are smart and complex enough to betray a bigger and more insane question: What makes a person happy?
I first met Taylor in early 2014. I’d flown to his home, in Durham, North Carolina, to talk to him about “Haw,” his beautiful fifth LP, which was named after a river that snakes through the Piedmont Triad, a chunk of land in the north-central part of the state. I had heard something in Taylor’s songs—something cracked and yearning—that reminded me, in intense but unspecified ways, of the early photographs of Robert Frank; “Veedon Fleece,” by Van Morrison; and “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” a short story by George Saunders that appeared in this magazine, in 2012. I’ll venture that listeners who routinely grapple with some degree of existential anxiety—if, say, your friends have started texting you pictures of Eeyore in lieu of actually responding to your mopey queries—will find Taylor’s songs to be a particular kind of balm. If there’s a void, it is almost certain that he has locked eyes with it.
Taylor was born and raised in California. He came of age musically in a hardcore band called Ex-Ignota, in which he played alongside the multi-instrumentalist Scott Hirsch, now his longest-running collaborator. Hiss Golden Messenger was conceived as an extension of Taylor and Hirsch’s partnership; it began after the folk-rock band they had joined together, the Court and Spark, dissolved, in 2007. Since then, the project has taken several forms. In 2009, Taylor, who is a trained folklorist, recorded a series of bony, acoustic songs at his kitchen table, singing directly into a tape recorder, trying his best not to wake his newborn son. “Bad Debt,” which had a limited release (it was reissued by Paradise of Bachelors, in 2014), is spare but hardly scant; it is a richly composed and heavily felt collection of songs about abiding acute internal duress. I return to it often during times of severe befuddlement, whenever I’m looking around and thinking, “What is happening here?” For me, at least, that’s usually the right moment to settle in with “Bad Debt.”
“I am not a protest singer, not in any obvious way,” Taylor told me recently. “But those who do not understand how the personal and political are deeply interconnected do not understand art.” The morning after Election Day, he and his band drove from Detroit into Canada; they had shows scheduled in Montreal and Toronto. “All that day on the drive up, I thought about my songs, which are so often about family and faith and adult obligations, and many of them felt very true and timely. Troublingly so, almost,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “As a white man, I am among those most protected from what Donald Trump threatens. But I align with those on the margins—people of color, the LGBT community, people who cannot speak as loudly. I sing for my kids, who have no say in what is happening to our country right now, but will inherit a world that is in danger of being badly maimed by current events. I am taking my work very seriously.”
“Heart Like a Levee,” Taylor’s second release for Merge Records, is less beholden to a singer-songwriter or folk tradition than to blistered southern soul—Wilson Pickett, Muscle Shoals, Capricorn Records, “Dusty in Memphis.” It has a propulsive, rolling quality, and expresses at least as much pleasure as pain. To back him, Taylor gathered a loose, good-natured crew that includes the brothers Phil and Bradley Cook, of Megafaun; the drummer Matt McCaughan, of Bon Iver; and the singers Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, of Mountain Man, and Tift Merritt, among others. They sound, alternately, like a practiced bunch of session musicians and a tangled pickup band at a late-summer barbecue. Sometimes there’s a tightness to Taylor’s singing, as if his voice is a bud that hasn’t quite opened yet. That closeness serves his narratives—especially a line like, “Go easy on me, I’m not doing too well / Do you hate me, honey? As much as I hate myself?” His confessions never sound desperate or fussy.
The idea of the road—both the literal road and the road as a metaphor for wherever the mind goes when it’s failing to be present in a moment—is a recurring lyrical motif for Taylor. Another line on the album’s title track—“Oh, that Cincinnati moon, like a wheel in the sky, shows two roads, honey / Tell me which one leads to mine?”—feels emblematic of the record’s big, searching questions. Anyone who has become stuck between poles (two people, two cities, two jobs, two choices, two oppositional lives) will instinctively understand the futility of trying to do this math, of reasoning out which option might yield spiritual returns. There are never any good answers. Nonetheless, a person keeps asking.
When Taylor and I spoke on the telephone a few weeks ago, he said he had been reading T. H. White’s “The Once and Future King”—“I cycle in and out of King Arthur vibes,” he admitted, laughing—and a book of Chekhov’s short stories. Taylor frequently evokes river imagery in his work; the river, of course, can be understood as its own kind of road, a direct line to somewhere else, far away. In her song “River,” from 1971, Joni Mitchell figures it as a kind of escape hatch: “Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on,” she sings. Prewar American blues performers often thought of the river as a metaphysical gateway—a vein separating here from something beyond. “The Mississippi River, you know it’s steep and wide, I just stand right there, meet my babe on the other side,” Geeshie Wiley offered in “Last Kind Word Blues,” from 1929. (Is it a song about dying? About a bond so incorruptible it follows us into the hereafter?) In Hermann Hesse’s book “Siddhartha,” from 1922, the river is a mirror that reflects or reveals challenging truths—a numinous and unflinching soothsayer. “The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its voice sang,” Hesse wrote. “I want a new, new river every time I look down,” Taylor announces in “Say It Like You Mean It.”
“The river is a really good device, in the same way that talking about what the heart does or is, is—it contains so much,” Taylor said. “The components it’s made up of work in opposition to each other. A river is peaceful and also deadly. It feels permanent, yet it’s always changing. You can put it into a line or a stanza and have it mean exactly what you need it to mean. Sometimes I need to suggest something very dire; sometimes I need to suggest something very soothing.”
On the album’s title track, there’s a brief scene in which two people are lying in bed with nothing much to say to each other. “We’ll pretend all we wanna, yeah, tomorrow I’ll be on my way,” Taylor sings. There’s a frankness and a lonesomeness to the lyric that’s heartbreaking. Then: “Sing me a river.” Sometimes you know in an instinctive way that something has gone bad, but you don’t have the emotional stamina to contend with it. You fake it, and then you invent a way out.
“The record is definitely about leaving, and especially about coming home and trying to find your place when things at home have continued to change and develop and evolve, and you haven’t been on that same evolutionary track,” he said. “This is a theme that has been in my music for a while, even if I haven’t articulated it quite like this. But this also feels like a record about communication—about trying to be present and in the moment, even when I’m not on the road. And I think that’s why people see some of themselves in these songs,” he continued. “We all struggle with mindfulness on an everyday basis. That theme resonates with people. It’s so easy to take the things that we hold so dear totally for granted, and, in those moments, we talk past or around each other.”
In all the great American road jaunts—from “On the Road” to “Two-Lane Blacktop” to “Badlands” to “Blue Highways” to “Wild”—the road is presented as a means of transformation, a way of forcing a new beginning of one sort or another, of escaping a situation that has grown uncomfortable if not untenable. Sometimes, it is a brave and nutritive choice. Other times, it seems cowardly, childish. On “Heart Like a Levee,” Taylor is still figuring out which way to feel about it. He seems optimistic that it can all be sorted—or, at least, that the trying will generate new stories. “Heart like a levee,” he sings. “Swing for the mountains, in double time.”
