09
7pm
Don’t miss a special solo set from Hiss Golden Messenger, performing the 2010 record “Bad Debt” in its entirety, along with other favorites. Coming to Buskirk Chumley Theater on October 9th. Tickets on sale now.
In 2010, M.C. Taylor—leader, songwriter and singer of Hiss Golden Messenger—sat down at his kitchen table and started writing and recording the songs that would eventually become his beloved album Bad Debt. At the time, the songwriter was living in a drafty cedar cabin in the woods outside of Pittsboro, North Carolina with his wife and three-month old son Elijah, having recently moved across the country from California. Taylor was, for all intents and purposes, out of the music game.
While his child slept, Taylor wrote and sang his finished compositions into a cassette tape recorder, voice and guitar in the same intimate moment. As songs began to coalesce—intimate meditations on labor and joy and love and the heartbreaking, confounding fullness of life—Taylor shared them with his closest friends, feeling as though he had found something special. He had 200 copies of the album pressed on vinyl, created the artwork himself, and sold them out of the trunk of his car. When those copies sold, he pressed and sold another 200. These early, hand-wrought versions have become sought-after relics.
Bad Debt was the name Taylor gave to the deep and vulnerable collection of songs he wrote at his kitchen table; it went on to be profiled in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Uncut Magazine, and many other publications, paving the way for Hiss Golden Messenger's critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated career.
In the fall of 2024, Taylor will play a series of solo shows during which he will perform Bad Debt in its entirety, in addition to songs from the rest of his celebrated catalog. Keep your ear to the ground.
Hannah Frances (b. 1997) is a vocalist, guitarist, composer, and poet that NPR’s Ann Powers calls “a stunning vocalist and songwriter, making monumental and mythic freak folk,” and was awarded Pitchfork’s Best New Music for her triumphant new album Keeper of the Shepherd. Through cutting lyricism and astute fingerpicked polyrhythms, Frances’ perennial sound melds avant-folk, progressive rock, and jazz. There is no singular way Frances grips us with her guitar or her storytelling. Drawing comparisons to Joni Mitchell and Jeff Buckley, her voice is colossal in its strength: piercing, warm, and always poised to embrace, even in its quietest expression. Whether performing as a solo act or with her full seven-piece ensemble, her mythology spellbinds with an insistent gravity.
All proceeds will benefit Amethyst House. Amethyst House is a Bloomington, IN based not-for-profit substance use disorder treatment program that has been in the Bloomington community since 1980. Amethyst is a United Way agency that provides residential and outpatient services for those recovering from addiction. Amethyst House provides a foundation for recovery by partnering with individuals, families, and communities impacted by substance-use disorders, offering high-quality residential and outpatient treatment services.
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7:00pm - 9:00pm