Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor has a gift for finding quiet flashes of emotional resonance, not unlike the late photographer William Gedney. The new HGM album Heart Like a Levee began its life as a song cycle commissioned by Duke University, based on an archival collection of Gedney’s photographs taken in 1972 in and around Leatherwood, Ky.’s Blue Diamond Mining Camp. The songs that emerged explore the points where Taylor’s own struggles as an artist intersect with the hopes and fears of the people in the photographs. “There came a point when I had to take the Gedney photos off the wall because I was not trying to write for that world anymore,” he told Rolling Stone. “Even so, I’d still take them out to check in occasionally. There’s an emotional quotient to those photos that really spoke to me on a universal level, something very deep about those pictures.” Megafaun’s Phil Cook, one of the ace musicians who helped bring the gospel-tinged narratives to life, opens the show. STEPHEN TRAGESER
Hiss Golden Messenger w/Phil Cook
