Taylor chose to avoid music for his academic thesis – he focused instead on a low-rider car club in Alamance County. He did, though, find himself drawn into the area’s musical traditions while working as a folklorist for the state of North Carolina. “They would send me out to do what they called ‘cultural surveys’,” Taylor explains, driving now to a small town called Hillsborough and the romantically-named Down Yonder Farm, where Hiss recorded Lateness Of Dancers in a barn tricked out as a music room. “I’d go out to Warren County, or Nash County, say, for two months to gather and record as much traditional music as I could. In the process, it’s not that I necessarily learned anything more about the canon of vernacular music in the North Carolina Piedmont. What I learned is how to listen really well. The people wanted to tell me things above and beyond the provenance of a fiddle tune they were playing.
“I don’t really care about where the fiddle tune came from, but what I do care about is the apparent emotion in it. There was certainly a turning point with Hiss Golden Messenger when the music took on an entirely different emotional hue.”
Around the same time, Taylor and his wife Abby had started a family and moved out to Saralyn. “I had low-level failed in the music business,” he continues, “and I needed some kind of positive model of the way music could function in a person’s life and in a community. I didn’t want something that makes me happy all the time – that’s not what art should do – but I felt like it should be productive. That’s what I was witnessing. People would put together these fish fries or they would just be hanging out with friends and playing through songs. They weren’t preparing for a big gig or anything. It felt pretty profound at that point in my life.”
In that spirit, with no concrete expectation of ever releasing music again, he recorded the home demos that became Bad Debt (2010), an album that ushered in the last and most unexpectedly acclaimed phase of Taylor’s 20-year career. A corpus of new songs rapidly accumulated, many of which would be redeployed with richer band settings on two more exceptional albums, Poor Moon and Haw.
Brendan Greaves had first met Taylor in UNC’s folklore department, and had started a label, Paradise Of Bachelors, with Smith. When Taylor approached them about releasing Poor Moon in 2011 it was, Greaves admits, “A fairly drastic departure from our only release up to that point – a comp of obscure North and South Carolinian soul and gospel 45s. But it made perfect sense to me in the context of Carolina musicians striking their own paths through the thicket of vernacular songcraft and music industry bullshit. For me, that album, like the best of Mike’s music, is a gospel record, albeit an ambivalent, conflicted, and sometimes irreverent one. Like the greatest southern soul artists, he interpolates sacred and secular vernacular song forms and subjects with deeply personal, but immediate results.”
When he talks about the American south, Taylor does so with profound affection, for its musical wealth and the impact it has made on him personally and creatively. As ever, though, he can mediate his emotional responses with intelligence and sensitivity. While Greaves can compare him to a southern soul singer, Taylor is careful to avoid appropriating the culture as his own. “I love living here,” he says, “but I’m definitely not pretending that I’m from here. I would never call myself a southerner.”
Arriving in North Carolina, there were two musical heroes in the area that he wanted to meet. One was Ash Bowie, from ‘90s math-rockers Polvo, who ended up rigging all the lighting and electrical work in Taylor’s house. Another was the pioneering bluegrass singer Alice Gerrard, for whom he has just produced an uncannily lovely album, Follow The Music.
The friendship with Gerrard was what brought Taylor, Hirsch and their revolving collective of musicians to the rustic idyll of Down Yonder Farm. Inside the barn, there is an extensive library of music biographies, an old Allman Brothers poster, and a picture of another local hero; James ‘Bubba’ Norwood, longtime drummer in Ike & Tina Turner’s band.
Hiss Golden Messenger turned up here in September 2013 with cables, microphones and recording equipment, to start work on what would surface, a year later, as Lateness Of Dancers. If Haw was a spiritually troubled album – “I was fighting against this idea that we have much less control than we think we do. But that sort of fighting is an untenable position really” – Lateness Of Dancers feels a little more contented. Taylor’s recurring preoccupations remain: a vivid, questing engagement with religion; the forensic emotional investigation of what it means to be a 39-year-old father of two. Now, though, Taylor seems more reconciled to the fact that the questions he poses himself are mostly unanswerable ones.
“There aren’t many people addressing what it means to be settled down, but not necessarily settled,” as Brad Cook neatly puts it. “He’s constantly working on growing as a father and an artist, and that can be a pretty unglamorous struggle, but one that’s very real.”
“Spirituality is something that’s basically frowned upon in music, unless it’s some sort of archival gospel recording,” adds the guitarist William Tyler, who played on the last two Hiss albums in between his commitments to Lambchop and his own solo career. “Singing about God and the Bible in an earnest and intellectual way, with all the fear and doubt that creep in when trying to talk about faith, is really valuable, I think, and Mike does it in a completely honest manner.”
“I’m a little hesitant to talk about this being a happier record,” Taylor cautions, “but it’s definitely more open, there is some peace in the record. I feel like the Hiss Golden Messenger records are addressing the anxieties of what it means to be grown up and have these obligations to others that are very, very serious, while struggling with not losing yourself completely. It’s like we, as grown-up humans, tell ourselves a lot of lies in order to feel like there is some use in our existence. Part of Lateness is acknowledging that, and being OK with it.
“Have you ever heard that old country song, ‘She Thinks I Still Care’? George Jones did an incredible version of it. That song to me is one of the genius songs in country music. The singer is saying, ‘Just because I ask my friend about her/Just because I speak her name somewhere/Just because I called her number by mistake today/She thinks I still care.’
“This is the singer lying to himself. Of course he still cares. And I feel like there’s a little of that in ‘Mahogany Dread’ on Lateness Of Dancers. There’s this tension, this pull, this desire to be somewhere else, to be in a different situation, and one way that we get through that is to tell ourselves stories.”
Hiss Golden Messenger’s work is littered with reference points, both erudite and rootsy. The album’s title track, for instance, takes its name from a line in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and at least some of its sound from the work of Van Morrison circa Veedon Fleece. But one of Taylor’s great gifts is how, through assiduous and passionate study, he has found a way to transcend his influences. “Mike’s a deep scholar,” says William Tyler, “but in a way that never feels academic, that always feels soulful and deeply original.”
The air of “Lateness Of Dancers” is at once serene and edgy, and deep in the mix you can hear the dense chatter of cicadas and some psychedelic, dub-style edits. Again, there’s that potent combination of musical confidence and spiritual uncertainty. This time, though, there’s a quiet revelation, too; a sense that the journey through “unfamiliar country,” as he describes raising a family in another song, might be heading in a satisfying direction. When Taylor sings, “It’s easy now,” it’s not entirely clear he’s being truthful with himself. When he sings, “I’m learning now,” it seems a real breakthrough.