Hiss Golden Messenger (SOLO)

I walked from Gospel Flat to Bolinas Beach in the dark of dawn, feeling like a pot imperfectly mended, leaking light. Some call that beautiful but that morning I wasn’t so sure. I thought if I looked out at the water for long enough, let the sun rise and arc over me, something would break loose, some sort of divining might occur. I have chased all manner of being free, and here I was: At the end of a long, long trip—I'm not talking about a music tour here, but something bigger and more existential and more treacherous—that had my spirit ragged and tired and aching. ... When I arrived at the farmhouse on the edge of that bay, my intention was to sleep and if I was lucky maybe begin to recover something I felt like I had lost, some kind of life. If I was lucky. The family that owned the farm gave me use of a high-ceilinged art studio overlooking muddy fields stretching off into the distance; a chicken coop of clucking hens stood outside the door. The room was full of paintings, wild canvasses of oranges and pomegranates, teapots, skulls, clocks, and children. There was a bed, and a small kitchen, and I was alone, and I slept. When I awoke on that first day, it was evening, and I walked down the dusty main street into town to watch a parade. A Mexican restaurant gave out food, and a Mariachi band played. People were happy. Could I be loved like that? When I walked back to my room, night had fallen, and I wrote one line: Truth, lies, magic, faith—I've been trying to find the missing link in the chain. I woke the next morning and sat at the water's edge until the sun shone down on me. ... Some of the songs that eventually coalesced into the album called I'm People were written during that lost moment in Bolinas, California. Others were written in my orange-carpeted studio in the North Carolina Piedmont looking out on a lone dogwood. And still others in a motel room and around the mezcal bars of Santa Fe, NM, amidst the thrum of vihuelas and fiddle whine. That's a lot of American geography, a lot of poetry, and a lot of tragedy. I spent a long time on the words, trying to make them feel like I spent no time at all on them, and endless hours on the choruses. How to sing them. What phrasing they wanted, and needed. What they were to be used for. The songs on I'm People are about running towards and away from things, about reasonable and realistic hope and expectations, about having babies, getting older, love and lust and luck and music. They are songs about solitude and heartbreak and poverty of the spirit, and maybe community as some kind of antidote for these particular types of sicknesses. Shedding old skin. Mystery as a beautiful necessity. My grandmother Lucy's Cadillac, filled with cigarette smoke, Conway Twitty singing “Slow Hand.” The lightning fields outside Santa Rosa, NM, midnight. Late nights drinking wine, running wild, bondage, fealty, devotion, seeing and being seen, owning and being owned. My wife, my children, summertime in the mountains, wild roses climbing the fence, a peaceful mind, rummaging through scrap heaps of the heart, breaking and making and breaking again. To dust. Truth, lies, magic, faith. ... I'm People was produced by my friend Josh Kaufman and myself at Dreamland, a decommissioned church outside of Woodstock, NY. I wanted the record to feel the way that upstate place feels, deep in the pocket, a place of poetry, earth and sky and mountains. A place where a lot of my favorite music has come from. The light that came down through the stained glass was a filter through which the music passed. Our gang during our time at Dreamland was small: Myself and Josh on various stringed instruments, plus JT Bates playing drums and percussion, and Cameron Ralston playing electric and upright bass. My longtime running buddy Chris Boerner engineered the album, with assistance from Gillian Pelkonen, who also sometimes sang harmony. We played and sang live in a loose circle, watching each other. It was very cold outside and the music was our peculiar heat. Later, we added parts from friends like Bruce Hornsby, Sam Beam, Marcus King, Sara Watkins, Amy Helm, Matt Douglas, Eric D. Johnson, and Griff and Taylor Goldsmith. They all contributed to the weave, and I'm thankful to them, and especially thankful to Josh Kaufman, who had a vision for I'm People that we saw through to the very end. In that way, it was very emotional. D. James Goodwin mixed and mastered the album. Graham Tolbert took the photograph of me on the cover. I'm People is an intensely human record, and so one that needed to feel immediate, vulnerable, and full of spirit; something you could touch, sing along to, dance with, know about, recognize, relate. I know what the record is to me and I bet it's not so dissimilar from what it's about to you, at least in the broad strokes: The heartbreak and exhilaration, the absolute black comedy of being a person on this razor's edge, this lion’s jaw, that is America circa 2025. What other choice do we have than to be hopeful?