Hiss Golden Messenger Announces New Album, I’m People, Out May 1st via Chrysalis Records

I’m People Album Artwork by Graham Tolbert

Hiss Golden Messenger—the North Carolina-based project of MC Taylor—announces his new album, I’m People, out May 1st via Chrysalis Records, and presents the lyric video for its lead single, “In The Middle Of It.” In conjunction, he announces a U.S. tour with a full band. Tickets go on sale Friday, February 13th at 10am local time and will be available here.

Arriving three years after Jump For Joy (2023), praised by The Guardian as “a triumph of wide-eyed wonder,” I’m People is an intensely human record—immediate, vulnerable, and full of spirit, something you could touch, sing along to, dance with, know about, recognize, relate. Taylor, grappling with the heartbreak and exhilaration, the absolute black comedy of being alive in America circa 2026, seems to ask: What other choice do we have than to be hopeful?

“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.”
— MC Taylor

Taylor refers to lead single “In The Middle Of It” as a “Santa Fe song.” Written in a corner room of the El Rey Court hotel, he cites “Highway 10 through the desert towns, Los Angeles to El Paso … Art Bell’s Coast to Coast droning from a bunker in the middle of Nevada. Ghosts and UFOs and vagabonds. The engine sings out over the long lightning fields. In the middle of it: the country, the story, the relationships.”

Stream “In The Middle Of It”

I’m People was written in New Mexico, California, and North Carolina, co-produced by Taylor and Josh Kaufman, engineered by Chris Boerner and Gillian Pelkonen, and mixed and mastered by D. James Goodwin. The album was recorded 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,” Taylor comments. The album features instrumentation from Taylor, Kaufman, JT Bates, Cameron Ralston, Bruce Hornsby, Sam Beam, Marcus King, Sara Watkins, Amy Helm, Matt Douglas, Eric D. Johnson, and Griff and Taylor Goldsmith.

Pre-order/Pre-save I’m People

I’m People Tracklist:

Hiss Golden Messenger Tour Dates: