MC Taylor’s last album as Hiss Golden Messenger was 2023’s Jump For Joy. That’s about to change. The North Carolina singer-songwriter will return on May Day with new album I’m People. He’s kindly offered up a summary of the album that suggests it aims to capture the vastness of human experience:
The songs on I’m People are about running towards and away from things, about reasonable and realistic hope and expectations, about having babies, getting older, love and lust and luck and music. They are songs about solitude and heartbreak and poverty of the spirit, and maybe community as some kind of antidote for these particular types of sicknesses. Shedding old skin. Mystery as a beautiful necessity. My grandmother Lucy’s Cadillac, filled with cigarette smoke, Conway Twitty singing “Slow Hand.” The lightning fields outside Santa Rosa, NM, midnight. Late nights drinking wine, running wild, bondage, fealty, devotion, seeing and being seen, owning and being owned. My wife, my children, summertime in the mountains, wild roses climbing the fence, a peaceful mind, rummaging through scrap heaps of the heart, breaking and making and breaking again. To dust. Truth, lies, magic, faith.
Our first preview of I’m People arrives today in the form of album opener “In The Middle Of It.” The genial folk-rock track has just a pinch of War On Drugs dreaminess, but clarity, not blurriness, is what really comes through here. Taylor calls it a “Santa Fe song.” He wrote it at the El Rey Court hotel with these subjects coursing through his imagination: “Highway 10 through the desert towns, Los Angeles to El Paso … Art Bell’s Coast To Coast droning from a bunker in the middle of Nevada. Ghosts and UFOs and vagabonds. The engine sings out over the long lightning fields. In the middle of it: the country, the story, the relationships.”
Hear “In The Middle Of It” below.
TRACKLIST:
01 “In The Middle Of It”
02 “Who You Gonna Run To?”
03 “Shaky Eyes”
04 “Mercy Ave”
05 “I’m People”
06 “Seneca (Time Is A Mother, Baby)”
07 “Last Orders”
08 “Gabriel”
09 “Heavy World”
10 “Alright”
11 “Spirit Cat”
12 “Depends On The River”
I’m People is out 5/1 via Chrysalis. Pre-order it here.
