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 North Carolina
in 2010. It was the dead of winter and the pit of the financial crisis,
a moment when the dire ramifications of debt—in its 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. In his own words:
Bad Debt comes from ten dense acres of oak, cedar, and apple trees in Pittsboro, North
Carolina, directly south of the Haw River. The house where it was made was built in the
early 1970s by a hippie cohort that settled along Brooks Branch; though this may sound
like some kind of brag, I offer this to explain just how cold it was during the fall and
winter when this record was conceived. Most hippies—except for the most famous one, of
course, and probably a few others—are shit carpenters.
The record is about my God: that is, whether I have one, and whether there is a place for
me in this world. I don’t go to church, and I am not saved. I can party too. I can do a
saxophone now and again, bang the drum. Bad Debt was my revelation, and there are
many for whom I’ll never make a record better than this one.
Ruminating on the riddle of faith, a firstborn son, and thorny existential questions large
and small, the album laid the lyrical and compositional foundations for HGM’s critically
acclaimed releases to come. Half of these domestic devotional songs appear elsewhere in
the HGM discography in radically reinvented arrangements and permutations—Taylor’s
writing practice revealed itself following Bad Debt as essentially iterative, the deliberate
enunciation and re-articulation of koans—but they exist here in germinal, psalmic purity
and economy, as unadorned and plain and perfectly ragged as the cedar floorboards in that
Brooks Branch cabin.
Bad Debt remastered by Chris Boerner at Kitchen Mastering. Artwork
reimagined by Sam Smith (Lateness of Dancers).