![]() I was trying to work my way through that, “Hardlytown” being the place where maybe you don’t get back what you put into it, but you keep at it anyway. Where you start to factor in joy and spiritual payoff, and that becomes another set of equations that start to figure into it all. However, there’s the whole existential math. That was like the first 15 years of my life as a musician, playing out in public. When I started out being a musician, I spent way more than I made back. There are many ways to do that math, of course. And how, so often, what we give feels like more than what we get back. ![]() Yeah, that song is addressing this idea of the way that we set up the systems in order to live our lives the way we think we want to. Is that pretty close to what that song is about? To me, “Hardlytown” is about people who are staying the course against a world that’s pushing back against them. Simple in theory, but very hard to play in a way that swings as hard as Matt and Brevan do. You know what I mean? A lot of the parts are pretty simple, but they’re sympathetic to the songs. It was meant to feel like this churning machine, almost. Then I brought those ideas to the two people that played all that stuff: Matt McCaughan played the drum kit and a friend of mine named Brevan Hampden played a lot of the percussion. I spent a lot of time coming up with the way I wanted the drums to work, at home, and sketching out drum patterns and drum parts, and layering different percussive elements over that. Yeah, in a lot of ways the record was written around the drum parts. ![]() The second time I listened to this album all the way through, I really noticed the drums. If my options were to either record remotely or do nothing, I would have chosen not to make a record because that collective energy feels really important to this music. That’s why I was hesitant to jump into making anything totally remotely. The music is a collective music and it thrives on the collective energy of the players. Taylor: I think for the type of music that I make, the best light that it can be shown in is when you can hear everybody working together. Not long before heading back to his native California to finally visit his family there, Taylor caught up with BGS by phone about Quietly Blowing It, releasing June 25.īGS: One of the reasons I like listening to “Sanctuary” is because you can hear the band in the groove, in the space between the verses. I find the question often to be the thing remains steady, more or less.” Because the answer might change from day to day. In a lot of ways, I’m less interested in the answer than I am in the question, if that makes sense. “I’ve been talking for many years about this idea of making an album that’s full of questions with no answers. “That’s always been the way that I write,” he tells BGS. One could say that he positions himself as a moderator who introduces a conversation, rather than an expert who knows everything about everything. (His prior effort, 2019’s Terms of Surrender, landed a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album.) As he’s done for years, Taylor asks a lot of questions in his lyrics without filling in the answer. And in some ways, Taylor believes that a sense of tension is what this album is all about.īut in contrast to the image of making a million minor mistakes, Quietly Blowing It may be his most accessible album yet. ![]() Recorded in the summer of 2020, Quietly Blowing It reflects a joyful spirit even as a fog of anxiety hung over the sessions. Taylor decided to make another Hiss Golden Messenger album, he instinctively knew it needed to be done in real time, in an actual studio, in his adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina.
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