Hiss Golden Messenger - Bad Debt (CD)

M.C. Taylor recorded this spiritually devastating, austere antecedent to the widely celebrated Hiss Golden Messenger albums Haw (2013) and Poor Moon (2011) direct to a portable cassette recorder at the kitchen table of his pine-entwined home in rural Piedmont, NC in 2010. It was the dead of winter and the pit of the financial crisis, a moment when the dire ramifications of debt - in it's economic, political, and personal senses - had assumed a rank immediacy and terror for many working people around the world, not least of all in the American South. Taylor, his one-year old boy Elijah sleeping in the next room, was compelled to chart the sacred valences of debt, doubt, and family in fresh ways, in the process stripping bare and reinventing his songwriting idiom.

Track List:

Disc: 1

1. Bad Debt
2. Balthazar's Song
3. No Lord Is Free
4. Bad Debt
5. O Little Light
6. Straw Man Red Sun River Gold
7. Far Bright Star
8. The Serpent Is Kind (Compared to Man)
9. Call Him Daylight
10. Jesus Shot Me in the Head
11. Super Blue (Two Days Clean)
12. Roll River Roll
13. Drum
14. Poor Moon
15. Blue Country Mystic
16. Call Him Daylight
17. Drummer Down
18. Under All the Land
19. Westering
20. Pittsboro Farewell (Two Monarchs)
21. Super Blue (Two Days Clean)
22. Jesus Shot Me in the Head
23. O Little Light
24. A Working Man Can't Make It No Way
25. Dreamwood
26. Balthazar's Song
27. Haw
28. Red Rose Nantahala
29. Sufferer (Love My Conqueror)
30. I've Got a Name for the Newborn Child
31. Hat of Rain
32. Devotion
33. The Serpent Is Kind (Compared to Man)
34. Sweet As John Hurt
35. Cheerwine Easter
36. Hark Maker (Glory Rag)
37. Busted Note
38. What Shall Be (Shall Be Enough)
39. Virgo Fool
40. Rock Holy
41. Black Country Woman
42. Joyce ; Joel
43. Lion/Lamb
44. Father Sky
45. Issa
46. Back to the River Again
47. Tell Everyone
48. Karen's Blues
49. The Revenant
50. Hard Promises