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In the title track, Taylor traces missteps over Miller’s undeniable guitar riffs. Through his paternal lens, Taylor considers how much we owe one another, hoping the lessons he shares with his children of being a good neighbor are not lost on the self-serving nature of modernity. Weary listeners might hear echoes of debilitating uncertainty in “If It Comes in the Morning” while the harmonica-driven “Hardlytown” pulls a page from Bob Dylan’s book. It’s hard to deny that the album is steeped in political overtones, but this blended perspective may be the source of its resonance-a unifying alchemy that can be found only when the personal is applied to the whole. Climate change.”Īlso, the positive inverse of all that, too: “Locating hope and inspiration in small moments and movements. Alienation, disorientation, miscommunication, and self-hatred. “And so the joyful moments feel like they’re just flying by-there’s no thinking involved.”Īs to what was going on outside that one rather small studio window, he cites the broad strokes in an essay, “ Mourning in America,” that he wrote about the album: “Class and money and work. “Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the moments of work and creation are so joyful, and the moments of anxiety and depression feel sticky, like moving in slow motion,” he says.
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Though he’s accrued plenty of evidence of the hours spent in his home studio-an 8’ x10’ cinder block basement enclosure-Taylor still wonders where the time went. “But I’ve been dealing with more anxiety, depression, listlessness, feeling more adrift than at any time in my life. By “a lot,” he glosses over a bounty of unannounced recording projects and songwriting unfathomable to even a considerably productive person. Burned out on road life, he canceled the remaining Australian tour dates and headed back to North Carolina to “find peace.” He had sidelined himself, months earlier, while touring his Grammy-nominated album Terms of Surrenderin the UK. When the pandemic swept the nation in mid-March, last year, Taylor was already home. His rocker stylings are also threatened by the fluorescent bike helmet at his feet on the patio, graffitied with weather-worn chalk etchings, and as he reflects on the context of the album creation, Taylor further softens. At a closer glance, though, some of the tattoos read more like badges of honor, spelling out names-”Abby,” “Elijah,” and “Ione,” the names of his wife, son, and daughter. Leaning back in a wrought-iron chair, he extends his arm, revealing a canvas of eclectic ink indicative of a true road warrior. Like who doesn’t occasionally consider whether they might have spent the last five years doing something else?” “This record-like all of my records-is a charting of experiences that are both intensely personal, but in some ways, universal. “This isn’t the beginning or the end of an experience,” Taylor continues. Miscellaneous toys are strewn about the backyard, dusted by late spring’s yellow haze. Sitting on his back patio in Durham, Taylor looks out at the lush treeline. The release, his tenth, is another entry in an unrelenting pursuit of answers to existential questions. He’s talking about Quietly Blowing It, his new album due June 25 via Merge Records.
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“Making this record didn’t heal me or cure me,” Hiss Golden Messenger’s M. Hiss Golden Messenger: Quietly Blowing It | Hiss Golden Messenger | Photo by Brett Villena