Hiss Golden Messenger - Terms of Surrender LP

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 eerie 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. And then there's an indescribable spirit and movement: Hiss Golden Messenger's music grooves. There's nothing else quite like it. Taylor says that he wanted to make Terms of Surrender "a wandering record. I wanted where we recorded it to mirror the searching spirit of the music." Having written upwards of 40 songs-in motel rooms, his studio in North Carolina, and a secluded cottage outside of Charlottesville, Virginia-Taylor winnowed them down to the ten works that comprise Terms of Surrender.