North Carolina singer-songwriter MC Taylor, the creative force behind Hiss Golden Messenger, has announced his forthcoming album I’m People, set for release May 1st via Chrysalis Records. The announcement arrives alongside “In The Middle Of It,” a desert-soaked lead single accompanied by a lyric video that captures the wandering spirit of Taylor’s latest work.
Three years removed from 2023’s Jump For Joy—which The Guardian hailed as “a triumph of wide-eyed wonder”—I’m People finds Taylor mining the contradictions of contemporary American life with characteristic honesty and heart. It’s a record that confronts “the heartbreak and exhilaration, the absolute black comedy of being alive in America circa 2026,” while still reaching toward hope.
In his own words, Taylor describes the album as an exploration of dualities:
“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.”
The songs draw from deeply personal wells—family memories, late-night revelations, the transformative power of place—while maintaining the universal resonance that has defined Taylor’s work.
Lead single “In The Middle Of It” emerged from a writing session at Santa Fe’s El Rey Court hotel. Taylor calls it his “Santa Fe song,” invoking the mythology of the American Southwest: Art Bell’s paranormal radio show, desert highways stretching from Los Angeles to El Paso, “ghosts and UFOs and vagabonds” haunting the lightning fields.
The album was co-produced by Taylor and Josh Kaufman at Dreamland, a converted church in upstate New York. “I wanted the record to feel the way that upstate place feels,” Taylor notes, “deep in the pocket, a place of poetry, earth and sky and mountains.”
The sessions brought together an impressive roster of collaborators, including Bruce Hornsby, Sam Beam, Marcus King, Sara Watkins, and Amy Helm, among others—a fitting ensemble for an album that positions community as remedy for spiritual desolation.
Pre-Order I’m People: https://ffm.hissgoldenmessenger.com/imp.OPR
I’m People Tracklist:
1. In The Middle Of It
2. Who You Gonna Run To?
3. Shaky Eyes
4. Mercy Ave
5. I’m People
6. Seneca (Time Is A Mother, Baby)
7. Last Orders
8. Gabriel
9. Heavy World
10. Alright
11. Spirit Cat
12. Depends on the River