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THE KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER

35 Railroad Avenue, Westerly, RI 02891 (Misquamicut) | (401) 315-5070

Closed Today

03 September

Hiss Golden Messenger

9pm

Friday, September 3, 2021 at 9:00pm

The Knickerbocker Music Center. 35 Railroad Avenue, Westerly, RI 02891

knickmusic.com/events/2021/9/3/hiss-golden-messenger

Live Music

“I went looking for peace,” says songwriter M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger about his new album Quietly Blowing It, out June 25, 2021, on Merge Records. “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. Maybe I had the presence of mind when I was writingQuietly 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.” He pauses and laughs ruefully. “I got way more time than I needed, actually.”

Quietly Blowing It was written and arranged by Taylor in his home studio—his 8’ × 10’ sanctuary packed floor to ceiling with books, records, and old guitars—as he watched the chaotic world spin outside his window. “Writing became a daily routine,” he explains, “and that was a ballast for me.Having spent so much time on the road over the past ten years, where writing consistently with any kind of fl ow can be tricky, it felt refreshing. And being in my studio, which is both isolated from and totally connected to the life of my family, felt appropriate for these songs.” Between March andJune, Taylor wrote and recorded upwards of two dozen songs—in most cases playing all of the instruments himself—before winnowing the collection down and bringing them to the Hiss band. In July, the group of musicians, with Taylor in the production seat, went into Overdub Lane in Durham, NC, for a week, where they recordedQuietly Blowing It as an organic unit honed to a fine edge from their years together on the road. “We all needed to be making that music together,”he recalls. “We’ve all spent so many years traveling all over the world, but in that moment, it felt cathartic to be recording those particular songs with each other in our own small hometown.”

ThroughoutQuietly Blowing It, Taylor brings his keen eye to our“broken American moment”—as he fi rst sang on Hiss GoldenMessenger’s critically acclaimed, GRAMMY®-nominatedTerms of Surrender—in ways that feel devastatingly intimate and human. Beginning with the wanderer’s lament of “WayBack in the Way Back,” with its rallying cry of “Up with the mountains, down with the system,” Taylor carries the listener on a musical journey that continually returns to themes of growing up, loss, obligation, and labor with piercing clarity, and his musical influences—including classic Southern soul and gospel, renegade country, and spiritual jazz—have never felt more genuine. Indeed,Quietly Blowing It is a distillation of the rolling Hiss Golden Messenger groove, from the rollicking, Allman-esque “The Great Mystifier” to the chiming falsetto soul of “It Will If We Let It,” to the smoky, shuffling title track with its bittersweet guitar assist fromNashville legend Buddy Miller. The album ends with soulful lead single “Sanctuary,” a song about trying to reconcile tragedy and joy, with references to John Prine (“Handsome Johnny had to go, child...”), economic disparity, and the redemptive quality of hope. Indeed, when he sings, “Feeling bad, feeling blue, can’t get out of my own mind; but I knowhow to sing about it,” it feels like the album’s spiritual thesis.ThroughoutQuietly Blowing It, Taylor reckons with the tumultuous present in wholly personal terms, encouraging listeners to do the same. “These songs always circle back to the things that I feel like I have a handle on and the things thatI’m not proud of about myself. When I think of the phrase ‘quietly blowing it,’ I think of all the ways that I’ve misstepped, misused my gifts, miscommunicated. ‘Born on the level, quietly blowing it.’ That’s what’s on my mind there. Always fuckin’ up in little ways.”

Surrounding himself with a trusted cast of collaborators that includes Miller, songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov, song writer and Tony Award–winning playwright Anaïs Mitchell, multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Dawes’ brothers Taylor andGriffin Goldsmith, and his oldest musical confidant Scott Hirsch, Taylor has made his most audacious and hopeful work yet withQuietly Blowing It; it’s an album that speaks personal truth to this moment in which the old models of being feel broken and everything feels at stake. “I don’t know that the peace that I crave when I’m far from home exists, actually,” says Taylor. “It’s more complicated. I still don’t know what peace means for me, because I can be sitting on the couch watching a movie with my family and be completely tangled up in my head. But if I keep on doing my own personal work on myself—writing records like Quietly Blowing It—I have to think that I’m getting closer.

Proof of vaccination or a negative covid test 72 hours prior to entry will be required for this show.

Show: 9p | Doors: 8p

Tickets: $25 advance / $30 door

($2 Service Charge Included With Online Tickets. All sales are final, no ticket refunds or exchanges. Seats are on a first-come, first-serve basis, and seats are not guaranteed with ticket purchase.)

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