"HELP yourself to scotch," says MC Taylor, motioning at an unopened bottle of Whyte & Mackay.
Most of the backstage rider looks untouched, truth be told, and just as well - Taylor and his entourage are about to drive from Edinburgh to Dublin with a five-hour pause for sleep and a shower in East Kilbride. Hard work, touring.
The American, who ladles out his stew of country soul, haunted porch songs and southern rock under the alias Hiss Golden Messenger, is sitting in a dressing room at the Usher Hall, where he and three colleagues have just met blanket indifference from the twentysomething crowd gathered to swoon at Devon singer-songwriter and double Brit award-winner Ben Howard. After more than two decades in music, Taylor is unfazed by the response to his band. "It's cool," he says. After all, he adds, "The shows are huge."
It's a miracle Taylor is here at all. After years of toil in hardcore punks Ex-Ignota then indie-rock outfit The Court & Spark, he admits matter-of-factly, he "didn't want to be in a band any more". So he relocated from San Francisco to the musically fertile environment of North Carolina, where he earned a Masters degree in folklore and made a living cataloguing customs and stories. He and his wife Abby also had a son, Elijah, during whose infancy Taylor crafted what would become the debut HGM album proper -- Bad Debt, a snapshot of one man and his guitar playing quietly into a tape recorder so as not to wake his dormant baby.
"It came after a long string of making records on which I was trying to maintain my personal relationship with music but making concessions I was told I had to make in order to succeed, whatever that meant," he says. "Ultimately I was at the end of the road. None of that stuff worked, none of the people who gave me that advice is even in the music business any more. They weren't even musicians." He smiles wryly. "So I had to figure out a new compass."
Cut off from his past contacts, the new father simply pleased himself. "And it's ironic that it's the record where I feel I found myself musically in a very profound way and the record everybody connected with in a way they did not with other records I've made."
Five years and three long-players on, the live iteration of Hiss Golden Messenger numbers between one and five, depending on the continent. Search on YouTube for their rollicking appearance last year on Late Night With David Letterman and you'll be treated to a brass section and backing singers swelling the ranks to nine. There's more than a flavour of Little Feat to the rendition of Southern Grammar from Taylor's latest album Lateness of Dancers, a live radio version of which was released last week and brings the band to Glasgow on Monday [FEB 9], though there's more to Lateness of Dancers than lissom boogie.
The album is both rootsy and voluptuous, half of it scratching forlornly at the soul while the other half coasts along on a sea of fluid grooves. It's a record of heft and poetry, verging sporadically on the gothic, yet one striped by sunlight and optimism. "I'm glad you feel that way," he says. "There's not much to the record but it's good that it comes off as lush."
The record was made at a friend's barn in rural North Carolina and in Taylor's mind will forever be hitched to the season in which it was created. "For me, it echoes the reds and golds of the fall," he says. "We were very conscious of where we were - the barn is surrounded by pasture and chickens and big trees, and they were all turning colour. It felt good. The music felt like it was in its natural habitat."
There are palpable similarities to the Caledonian soul of 1970s Van Morrison, which kidnapped American roots music and fused it with many of the tributaries that fed it via the Scottish and Irish diaspora. "There's definitely a connection to Scots-Irish fiddle music," says Taylor animatedly, "and stuff that would've travelled over into the Blue Ridge mountains and would've taken on a vague new shape. That's in our neck of the woods.
"Maybe that's why I have such an affinity for the music from the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia. I love it and feel connected to it, and that's maybe why when I come to Scotland and Ireland I'm excited. It's like all the stuff I'm interested in - the way a vocal melody sits against a chord progression, the way harmonies work in Scots-Irish music, the unaccompanied singing tradition - that's all stuff I feel close to at home."
It's a home young Elijah Taylor now shares with his little sister Naomi. The two children and their parents feature in a touching video for the ravishing southern pop of Mahogany Dread, a song in which MC Taylor mulls over his dual roles as father and musician. "I had some misgivings about that," he says. "I didn't just say, 'Yep, go and get the kids.' But that song is so connected to my life at home. I felt it was going to be a cool thing to have in 20 years when I can show Elijah and Naomi themselves as tiny people."
To cap off a period in which his group released a slow-burning classic album and enlivened living rooms throughout the USA thanks to the endorsement of David Letterman, the MC Taylor-produced Follow the Music by 80-year-old bluegrass singer and banjo player Alice Gerrard is up for the Best Folk Album Grammy on Sunday night. "The heat has been turned up," says Taylor, "but I'm realistic about it." No pressure, then? "I don't feel pressure," he says. "I'm almost 40 years old. I do what I do and I do it well. [Music] is such a personal thing for me that if people like it, great. If they don't like, they don't have to listen to it."
In other words: it's cool.
Southern Grammar EP by Hiss Golden Messenger is out now. They play Stereo, Glasgow on Monday.
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