Hear Hiss Golden Messenger’s Political New Track ‘I Need a Teacher’

Hiss Golden Messenger, the musical project from singer-songwriter MC Taylor, will release a new album, Terms of Surrender, September 20th via Merge. The group has shared the first track off the release, a politically-inspired folk song called “I Need a Teacher.” The track is accompanied by a music video from director D.L. Anderson, which showcases the real-life teachers who demonstrated in North Carolina against cuts to public education last year. Taylor wrote on Twitter, “I wanted to create a portrait of the people that put their lives on the line for our kids every day. I’ve watched it many times at this point, and it makes me weep every time.”

Terms of Surrender, which is currently available for preorder, was recorded at Aaron Dessner’s upstate New York studio, Sound City in Los Angeles and Roger Moutenot’s Haptown Studio in Nashville, and produced by Taylor along with Brad Cook. The album, a follow-up to 2017’s Hallelujah Anyhow, will feature guest appearances by Dessner, Jenny Lewis and Phil Cook.

“It was February of 2018, and I was standing in the dusk on a hillside outside of Arrington, VA,” Taylor wrote on Facebook of the new album. “It was very cold and very beautiful. There was not another soul around. I had gone there looking for something, trying to find the thread, trying to remember why it was that I started making music, trying to understand why I felt so confused and conflicted and guilty and lonely. These were human questions: Who was I? Why was I here? How much time did I have left? Where was my joy? Terms of Surrender is, at its most elemental, a collection of songs about what we are prepared to sacrifice in order to live the lives that we think we want. It’s a wandering record, one that realizes that joy is so fleeting and so delicate that when you see it, you better grab it and try to understand what it’s made of.”

Hiss Golden Messenger previously announced a fall tour of North America. The tour kicks off September 24th in Greenville, South Carolina and includes stops in Seattle, Denver, New York and Philadelphia. The group will also open for Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre on August 21st and 22nd. The band has announced that $1 of every ticket sold will go to the Durham Public Schools Foundation.