‘I have a lot of records. It’s hard to write a setlist,” says MC Taylor with a good-natured grimace, fielding another request for another obscure extract from his back pages. “I hope I play the songs you came to hear … A lot of sad folk songs.”
Sad folk songs, however, are just one note in the celestial chord that is Hiss Golden Messenger. The North Carolinian’s catalogue is grounded in rootsy, heartlands songcraft, but also connects with the grand lineage of cosmic Americana; it’s all grit and rainbows.
Alone beside a vase of flowers, looking like Ethan Hawke playing an artfully dishevelled literature professor, Taylor is drily avuncular, a natural between-song raconteur. He reveals that his new album was recorded under the spell of psychedelics, recommends the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain and says his six-year-old daughter didn’t like the song he wrote for her, Happy Birthday, Baby. (Perhaps she’ll appreciate its resonant, thoroughly unmawkish treatise on the redemptive powers of parenthood when she’s older.)
Played solo and acoustic tonight, his songs are deceptively effortless, whether tracing fractured emotional faultlines (Lost Out in the Darkness, where he warns: “If I see the black dog it’ll kill me”), toying with Springsteen-esque visions of escape to the highway (Jenny of the Roses) or searching for “beauty in the broken American moment” (I Need a Teacher, his “anthem for public education”). As deep into the inky darkness as his lyrics might delve, his luminous melodies are redemptive, every warmly familiar strum a healing salve for the abrasions his introspection risks. Taylor is a steadying, comforting presence in a rudderless world, and 90 minutes in his company pass very quickly – even if he only scratches the surface of his voluminous songbook.
• Touring the UK until 14 December.
