Songs of the Week 2026: Take 3
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Mercy Avenue: Hiss Golden Messenger
No matter how trying times are, there is always hope. And hope in the new collection of songs by Hiss Golden Messenger, the band project of North Carolina-based musician MC Taylor, is life-affirming. Mercy Avenue, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, sounds like a place down on its luck but Taylor manages to extract the joy.
Taylor’s honey-dipped vocal brings instant warmth to a track evocative of Van Morrison and Ry Cooder at their most mellow and misty-eyed. It is a standout cut from Hiss Golden Messenger’s 11th album, I’m People. Laurel Canyon meets Muscle Shoals.
The boys on the corner been knowing
Better than them with the PhDs
Sometimes you do right for nothing
On Mercy Avenue, baby
If I’m too high to mess with, I’m alright, Mama
Did you find another man? I’m alright, Mama
You know where I am
I’m alright, Mama
Lucy’s living in her Cadillac
It smells like Slow Hand
Doc says she ain’t coming back
Oh, Mercy Avenue’s savage
When I’m happy as a dog swimming
When I’m lonely as an orphan
There’s nowhere that I’d rather be
Than Mercy Avenue, baby
Mercy Avenue is a nostalgic delight, fragments of disparate memories strung together : ‘Mystery as a beautiful necessity. My grandmother Lucy’s Cadillac, filled with cigarette smoke, Conway Twitty singing Slow Hand… a peaceful mind, rummaging through scrapheaps of the heart, breaking and making and breaking again. To dust. Truth, lies, magic, faith.’
In a Substack essay Taylor declares: ‘I don’t consider myself a fountain of hope. I’ve had many, many days over the last few years that have felt hopeless, so the hope that appears on I’m People is hard won. Hope is an imagining of a future that doesn’t yet exist, a future that may never exist. And yet hope is this radiant guiding light that helps draw us through dark days with a sense of purpose.’
The 50-year-old American is grateful to his friend and collaborator Josh Kaufman, with whom he has worked regularly since 2016’s Heart Like A Levee, for his imprint on the latest record. The producer and multi-instrumentalist ‘treated me and my songs with such love and care and enthusiasm that I think he helped me understand something about creative trust. He’s very sensitive. He’s quick to cry, which is a really beautiful quality. He’s also a mind-blowing guitar player, on a level that very few will ever reach.’
I’m People was recorded at Dreamland, a decommissioned church near Woodstock, New York State, by Taylor and his band of impeccable players: Bonny Light Horseman’s Kaufman on guitar and various string instruments, Cameron Ralston on bass and drummer JT Bates. Guest musicians and singers include Hornsby, whose piano contribution to the gorgeous, gospel-tinged Depends On The River is unmistakable, Sam Beam (Iron & Wine), Marcus King, Sara Watkins, Amy Helm, Matt Douglas, Eric D Johnson, Annie Nero, Sonyia Turner, Rich Hinman, Sam Fribush, Duncan Wickel and Dawes’ Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith.
Much of the writing was crafted in solitary: at a farmhouse beside a bay in Bolinas, California, at his home studio in Piedmont or at a motel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. ‘There was a lot of false starting, self-doubt, writing and re-writing and re-writing again, endless editing to make the chords and words make sense to me. I’m intensely lucky to make music for a living, but in the wake of my last album Jump for Joy, I was so fried that I didn’t even understand how far I had drifted from dry land. So I’ve spent the last few years paddling back, recalibrating, remeasuring.’
He describes I’m People as ‘an album of conversations that I’m currently having with myself… they’re full of questions without answers. This is an intensely human record, something you could touch, sing along to, dance with, know about, recognise, relate. The heartbreak and exhilaration, the absolute black comedy of being a person on this razor’s edge, this lion’s jaw, that is America today. What other choice do we have than to be hopeful?’
In The Middle Of It, the opening track and first single, has an irresistible country-rock feel and it is worth spending time with the anthemic title track, the album’s central message about the need for connection and community in a volatile world. Seneca (Time Is A Mother, Baby) is another standout, inspired by the work of Vietnamese-American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong. ‘He does something with vulnerability that I’ve never seen any other writer do,’ he said.
In song Taylor achieves that quality too. One of the many life skills he needed to navigate Mercy Avenue.
Taking flight: Rodney Crowell (featuring Ashley McBryde)
I don’t need an algorithm to remind me of the enduring quality of Rodney Crowell’s music. My vinyl collection contains a sizeable wedge of his work with admiring sideways glances from Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan. Even at the age of 75 Crowell continues to create memorable songs as his sparkling show at London’s Union Chapel demonstrated.
We were grateful he revisited our old favourites – Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight, Glasgow Girl, It Ain’t Over Yet and especially ’Til I Gain Control Again – but this was billed as The Airline Highway Tour to promote his most recent album. So it was worth the journey to hear Taking Flight, one of its strongest ballads and our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com.
The track is a duet featuring Nashville country star Ashley McBryde, who co-wrote it. For the live show, in McBryde’s absence, the vocal response to Crowell’s lead was delivered by his special guest, Derby-born Kezia Gill, and she did a fine job, even helping her partner to remember his own lyrics...
We were twenty feet from stardom
Now you’re staring down post-partum
An unwed mother soon to be that small voice on your phone
Love gone wrong is a favourite theme of Crowell’s. He has had plenty of practice. As he told us: ‘In marriage I’ve over-achieved.’ On Taking Flight he reflects on the distance that has grown between two former lovers. Crowell always grips you with his opening lines, and this is no exception:
We were somewhere east of Hattiesburg
On a lonely stretch of nightmare
The second verse sums up the lovers’ plight:
We’d been ploughing through each day like so much Mississippi red dirt
Burning with no purpose save get out while we still can
Hell-bent past the point of no return and going nowhere
With the best of good intentions, one more line drawn in the sand
The chorus has the aching quality that is the Texas troubadour’s trademark:
Taking flight, forget about tomorrow
Wrong or right, the chips are gonna fall
Taking flight, going nowhere ’til we get there
Next time Hell starts freezing over, we’ll be sure to give a call
Crowell explained how the song evolved for an album, his 20th, sprinkled with collaborations (Lukas Nelson, producer-guitarist Tyler Bryant, Larkin Poe and Charlie Starr): ‘Ashley came over to the house to take a swing at writing a song together. This is a fictional account of a discussion we had about stardom and driving at night in the South. With the exception of the Allman Brothers, I can’t say I was ever a fan of Southern rock. Tyler Bryant’s off-the-cuff riff at the end of the song made me reconsider.’
The album takes its title from a stretch of highway, the southernmost segment of Highway 61, following the Mississippi River, linking Baton Rouge with New Orleans. It was the road Houston-born Crowell, fellow Texan Bryant and their band took to reach the remote studio where the recording sessions were held.
Crowell’s alliance with Bryant inspired him. It made the veteran, almost twice Bryant’s age, re-evaluate the twilight stage of his career. ‘My ambition isn’t to be a household name any more. My ambition is to be satisfied with the work that I do. I’m at a place where it really is all about having fun. That’s one of the great perks of this job – falling in love with the people you’re playing with. And we caught that on tape.
‘Tyler is one of the most impressive young men I’ve met in a long time. He’s full of energy and passionate as all get out. As soon as I met him, I thought, let’s go. We immediately started going back and forth between my home studio and his, making demos and talking about what we wanted to do.’ His backing musicians at the Union Chapel, Catherine Marx on keyboards, and Eamon McLoughlin, London-born house fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, earned high praise from Crowell.
I have followed Crowell’s career since his days as a sideman alongside Albert Lee, Glen D Hardin, Hank DeVito and Emory Gordy in Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band in the Seventies. His highly literate songs have been covered by a host of artists including Emmylou herself, Waylon Jennings, Bob Seger, Johnny Cash, Jerry Jeff Walker, Rosanne Cash, Crystal Gayle, Alison Krauss, Keith Urban and Willie Nelson who last year devoted an entire album to Crowell compositions, Oh What A Beautiful World.
At the Union Chapel he performed a couple of covers he has helped to make famous over the years: Jennings’ Ain’t Living Long Like This and Townes Van Zandt’s Pancho And Lefty. The typically wry song he wrote with the late Guy Clark, Stuff That Works, was another doff of the Crowell stetson; he is soon to release a ‘lost’ album from the archives he had made but had forgotten about. Then Again, due out on June 26, had been gathering dust for 20 years. We have already heard two advance singles with a political slant, Are You One Of Us?, with a spoken call-and-answer part from Clark, and Go Light A Candle, featuring Emmylou and Lera Lynn.
‘I’ve worked with amazing people in the past, but I was looking too far ahead. I wanted the music we were creating to make a name for me, so I wasn’t completely present with them. My ego was involved. But now my ego seems to have finally evaporated. Now it’s just about the work and what a blessing it is to be able to do it. The work truly feeds me in the moment.’
Crowell told the congregation at the Union Chapel that he felt blessed to be playing at such a beautiful venue. We felt blessed too, still marvelling at the wonderful wordsmithery of Sometime Thang, another gem from Airline Highway...
She’s a wildwood flower in a red Corvette
Tanya Tucker meets Cate Blanchett
Stacked like dishes in the kitchen sink
She doesn’t give a damn what it is you might think
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