Hiss Golden Messenger plays hometown shows, plus 4 more concerts to check out
This story was updated Jan. 8, at 12:15 p.m.
There are some can’t-miss shows this week. Take a look.
Hiss Golden Messenger
The details: Jan. 10 and 11, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle. 300 E. Main St., Carrboro. Tickets start at $25. 919-967-9053 or catscradle.com. Lilly Hiatt will open.
Depression and despair aren’t essential to making great music but for some singer-songwriters, it doesn’t hurt. M.C. Taylor, frontman of Hiss Golden Messenger, wrote the powerful and poignant “Terms of Surrender” after his father had a heart attack.
The Durham-based singer-songwriter told Rolling Stone he wasn’t just moved by this “turbulent time.” He was also moved by psychedelics. Taylor went old school for creativity and consumed some mushrooms.
“It was dusk and it was really gold and still,” Taylor told Rolling Stone in September. “I could just hear the wind and the evening birds, and there was not another soul around. But then, out of the corner of my ear, I heard the faint sound of voices, kids laughing and playing. I thought I was tripping. I mean, I was tripping but I thought that maybe I was tripping even harder.
“But then I realized that the property I was on was abutting this other piece of property that I couldn’t see. There must have been a family out doing their thing. For that minute or two, when I was just standing on this hillside in Virginia, completely alone and hearing these voices, and laughter, it was really beautiful, actually.”
Grace Potter
The details: Jan. 16, 8 p.m. The Ritz, 2820 Industrial Drive, Raleigh. Tickets start at $36. 919-424-1400 or ritzraleigh.com
“Daylight,” the latest album by the sultry singer-songwriter, was inspired by a new beginning: after the end of Potter’s marriage and her group, the Nocturnals.
“After the dissolving of my band and my marriage, I found myself in the position of being completely alone and really isolated from everything that I had built my career on, which was my band,” Potter told Shape.com.
“It was a very divisive experience, but from the ashes of the destruction that I had sort of created or manifested somehow, came the most incredible reaffirmation of my life and who I wanted to be as an embodied woman in the world,” she said. “I was able to step out of the traumatic parts of all that and into a position of really understanding myself and claiming the gifts I have and the things I’ve worked for in a way that I never felt confident enough to do before. So I just sort of stepped out of the shadow of that experience. And that’s really what this whole record, ‘Daylight,’ is about.”
The Disco Biscuits
The details: Jan. 15, 8 p.m. The Ritz. Tickets start at $40.50
There’s no band quite like the Disco Biscuits, who combines jazz, rock, techno, blues and classical. The group is comprised of a bunch of Ivy Leaguers, who met while attending the University of Pennsylvania. The members of the act could have entered a number of fields but chose music.
Keyboardist Aron Manger says he knew early on that he wanted to avoid the corporate life, so he became a musician. He recalls a pivotal moment he had as a teenager performing at a party.
“I’m just this 16-year-old kid playing jazz at this event, and an accountant comes up to me and says, ‘You’re lucky,’” Manger says while calling from his suburban Philadelphia home. “‘You get paid to do what you love. I dread waking up every day of my life.’ The guy was incredibly unhappy. It gave me perspective. I didn’t want to end up with a miserable job and a miserable life.”
Magic City Hippies
The details: Jan. 11, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, 723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham. Tickets start at $17.50. 919-901-0875 or motorcomusic.com
Miami’s Magic City Happies will deliver its amalgam of funk, soul, pop and hip-hop.
George Willborn
The details: Jan. 10, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., Goodnights, 861 W. Morgan St., Raleigh. Tickets start at $21. 919-828-5233 or goodnightscomedy.com
The comic, who has appeared in such films as “Chi-Raq” and “Love Relations,” is at his best in the moment.
This story was originally published January 8, 2020 at 8:15 AM.