About Hiss Golden Messenger
Songwriter and bandleader M.C. Taylor’s music is at once familiar, yet impossible to categorize. Elements from the American songbook—the steady, churning acoustic guitar and mandolin, the gospel emotion, the steel guitar tracings, the bobbing and weaving organ and electric piano—provide the bedrock for Taylor’s existential ruminations about parenthood, joy, hope, and loneliness—our delicate, tightrope balance of dark and light—that offer fully engaged contemporary commentary on the present.
In his latest album, Quietly Blowing It, Taylor went looking for peace. “It’s not exactly a record about the state of the world—or my world—in 2020, but more a retrospective of the past five years of my life, painted in sort of impressionistic hues,” Taylor says. “Maybe I had the presence of mind when I was writing Quietly Blowing It to know that this was the time to go as deep as I needed to in order to make a record like this. And I got the time required in order to do that.”
About Aoife O’Donovan
Grammy award-winning artist Aoife O’Donovan has a powerful presence in the world of American folk but operates in a musical world that transcends genres. Deemed “a vocalist of unerring instinct” by The New York Times, she has released critically acclaimed and boundary-blurring solo albums including In the Magic Hour, which Rolling Stone hailed for its “impressionistic, atmospheric songs [that] relay their narratives against gorgeous pastoral backdrops.” Her new album, Age of Apathy is an album that traces a journey through grown-up life and ponders the question facing both singer and listener alike: What do you want from yourself?
A savvy and generous collaborator, Aoife is one third of the group I’m With Her with bandmates Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz. The trio’s debut album See You Around was hailed as “willfully open-hearted” by NPR Music. I’m With Her earned an Americana Music Association Award in 2019 for Duo/Group of the Year, and a Grammy-award in 2020 for Best American Roots Song.