2013’s Haw (named after the river that rises in Piedmont country in the north of the state) showcased more ambitious arrangements still. The evolution of the Hiss Golden Messenger sound continued through 2011’s Poor Moon, by now with a fleshed-out full-band sound. The album was eventually re-released in 2014. Originally released on the UK label Blackmaps, most of the copies of Bad Debt were destroyed in a warehouse fire caused by the riots in London in 2010, meaning it never reached the audience it deserved. However, ill fortune was to make one further intervention on Taylor’s journey. Bad Debt was born in the thick of a Southern winter, its tender reflections on the intricacies and contradictions of faith woven gently in the quiet of a Piedmont night and it sparked a creatively fertile period in which he would release six albums in as many years. Rewind to 2010 and, with his newly born son Elijah slumbering upstairs, Taylor went into his kitchen, placed a cassette recorder on the table, picked up one of his favoured Martins and recorded the album that first alerted the world to his considerable talents and encyclopedic knowledge of American guitar music. And my kids get to see their dad do something that he is obsessed with every day. I make a living doing the thing that I love most in the world and I have to pay attention to my relationship to that thing, to really treat it with care. I try my hardest every day to keep my head down and let art lead the way and have fun. “It took me a while to find myself, I guess. “I think things happened when they were supposed to happen,” he reflects. Ironically, his career was about to hit its high-water mark, just as Taylor was most settled into family life. It documents a time when Taylor had quit his day job to have one last stab at making his defining album and showing his children their dad is deserving of a place alongside the musical greats who look down from the covers of the classic albums on the shelves in their house. Its writing began in a Washington DC hotel room in January 2015, snow flakes dancing against the window as a powerful storm raged at America’s East Coast. After returning home from lengthy live commitments for 2014’s Lateness Of Dancers, Heart Like A Levee finds Taylor, an accomplished and versatile guitarist who began playing in his early teens, wrestling with the dichotomy of being a 40-something, sometimes-absent father and a touring musician.
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