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It’s spring of 2023 in the North Carolina Piedmont,and songwriter and singer M.C. Taylor—leader of the band Hiss Golden Messenger—is feeling alive. Joyful. Eternal, he might say. For the Grammy-nominated musician, whose albums have traced an internal path through adulthood, fatherhood, spirituality,and depression for well over a decade, this is something new. “The tunes on Jump for Joywere composed in free moments throughout 2022, a year during which Hiss was on the road more or less constantly,”explains Taylor. “And perhaps because the post-pandemic energy out in the world felt so chaotic and uncertain, I found myself thinking a lot about the role that music has played in my life and how exactly I ended up in the rarefied position of leading a band and crew all over the globethrough dingy graffiti-scrawled green rooms, venerated music halls, dust-blown roadside motels. Sometimes playing in front of 5,000;sometimes 200. Sleeping sitting up. Laughing until my stomach hurts. Not being able to fall asleep at 3a.m. in some anonymous bed because my mind is spinning with anxiety or depression or adrenaline, or because my ears are still ringing. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul to pay Peter back. Over and over again. It’s an outlaw life but one, I’m coming to realize, that makes me happy.”The songs that make up Jump for Joy—the sharpest and most autobiographical that Taylor has written under the Hiss name—read as a sort of epistolary, postcards between the present-day songwriter and his alias Michael Crow, a teenaged dreamer very much like Taylor himself, whotrips his way through the 14 tunes that make up the record. In this way, Jump for Joy is a meditation on a life lived with art, and the ways that our hopes and dreams and decisions bump upagainst—and, with a little bit of luck, occasionally merge with—real life. “Creating this character became the way that I could explore these vulnerable, tender moments that were so decisive in my life, even if I didn’t know it at the time,”explains Taylor. He continues:Through Michael Crow, I was able to get inside these places that exist so deep in my sense memory: Me at 16, knowing intuitively that there had to be something out there for me, something mysterious and divine that wasn’t full of fucked-up, confusing pain; me with my hardcore band, age 18, wandering the vast expanses of Texas beneath a big, fat tangerine moon, scrounging change to fill the gas tank, trying to make a soundcheck for a show that never happened. There’s me at30, having kids, writing songs as though they were gravestone epitaphs, not yet understanding that nothing is so permanent and serious and that I needed to be gentler with my spirit. There’s me at 35, still chasing the thing because I’ve touched it once or twice and I know it’s the only way for me to feel whole and real and useful, but in the rear-view mirror,I can see everyone whogave up in search of something easier and not so heartbreaking.Produced by Taylor and engineered by longtime Hiss compatriot Scott Hirsch over two weeks in the late fall of 2022 at the fabled Sonic Ranch studio in Tornillo, TX, just a short walk from the Mexican border, Jump for Joy dances with joyful, spontaneous energy that feels like a fresh chapter in the Hiss Golden Messenger oeuvre. Taylor is accompanied throughout the albumby his crack live band: guitarist Chris Boerner, bassist Alex Bingham, keyboardist Sam Fribush,and drummer Nick Falk, a collection of musicians that have helped make Hiss Golden Messenger’s live performances legendary affairs.Consider opening track “20 Years and Nickel,”a thematic preamble that finds Taylorreckoning with the 25 years (or, “20 years and a nickel”) spent trying to write some kind of masterpiece over a rolling second-line groove thatwouldn’t sound out of place on a Meters record. Three songs later, “Shinbone”contemplates the span—geographically, temporally, and emotionally—from Taylor’s childhood fence-hopping days, the smells of sage and eucalyptus in the air, down the winding roadto the present. “You ever had a storm talking to you?”he asks, the rhythm locked in a four-on-the-floor groove over a slippery synth line before hitting the mantra-like refrain: If you lose it all, can you