The Folk Alchemy of Hiss Golden Messenger

Almost a decade ago, a failed musician sat down at his kitchen table in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and began singing some new songs into a portable cassette player. M. C. Taylor had spent his youth dabbling in bands, skateboarding, and drugs in Southern California, but had given up on music and moved east to study folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Taylor had to sing softly—his baby son was asleep in the other room—and the audio quality was, in his words, “a joke.”

He called the collection Bad Debt, which, given the reeling economy, was timely. The songs were not, abounding with gospel signifiers, road narratives, and impressionistic blues, all accompanied simply on acoustic guitar. The prophetic images bore some resemblance to old, weird Americana, with the grim fatalism and religious fervor of British ballads refracted through Appalachia.

Taylor didn’t intend for anyone to hear the tapes. “It was like, I’m making music just for me,” he says. “I wasn’t even trying to get a gig. I wasn’t even playing shows, or playing the songs for anybody.”

But when Taylor did cautiously share the music, people loved the songs. In a cosmic irony that ’s narrators, buffeted by forces beyond their control, would appreciate, the record now , called . The collection, which pulls together the band’s first three records and adds a fourth disc of unreleased material, shows how