

“Everybody in the whole damn place has gotta have a good time,” he sings - which can be a challenge when you’re of a solitary disposition, as he is: “All around my old hometown I was known as a loner/ You know I wasn’t lonely, I just liked being alone.” Yet Taylor’s band - Megafaun’s Phil and Brad Cook, and Matt McCaughan - counterbalance his existential queries with joyful music, a soft, rollicking crest that shimmies like a field of corn stalks in the breeze.

“It’s hard, Lord/ Lord it’s hard,” runs the refrain, less of a lament than a collective sigh over the reality of balancing everyone’s individual needs. On Heart Like A Levee’s opening song, “Biloxi,” Taylor writes from the hubbub of his oldest kid’s sixth birthday party.
#Hiss golden messenger cracked windshield lyrics full#
I’m sort of an internal person and can get lost inside myself, even in a room full of people.” “I think traveling brought it on a little bit,” he says of his fleeting crisis, “but I’m also the kind of person that can get lost in his own mind. It wouldn’t be in his nature to make a straightforward record about the difficulties of life on tour, even though it’s a common concern for him and his bandmates, all of them fathers. He establishes the difficulties of domesticity without denying the enduring love that makes these things worth fighting for, and respects the transcendent possibilities of music-making while remaining steadfastly grounded. “And it’s easy to go out and get lost, and having a hard time getting back to where you were.”Īs Hiss Golden Messenger, Taylor strikes a rare equilibrium in his songwriting. “There can be a little bit of collateral damage when you’re trying to chase your dreams, even if you’re trying for there not to be,” Taylor says, calling from his Durham, North Carolina home a couple days before his 41st birthday.

To stave off the spiral, he started to write, and would later come up with the line that would light the path to his next record: “I was a dreamer, babe, when I set out on the road/ But did I say I could find my way home?” Heart Like A Levee, Hiss’ second album for Merge Records, is partially about the push and pull between home and tour.
