The legendary, much-heralded but little-heard, double-distilled 2010 masterpiece Bad Debt from Hiss Golden Messenger. M.C. Taylor recorded this spiritually devastating, austere antecedent to the widely celebrated Hiss Golden Messenger albums Haw (2013) & Poor Moon (2011) direct to a portable cassette recorder at the kitchen table of his pine-entwined home in rural Piedmont North Carolina in 2010. It was the dead of winter and the pit of the financial crisis, a moment when the dire ramifications of debt-in it's economic, political, and personal senses had assumed a rank immediacy and terror for many working people around the world, not least of all in the American South. Taylor, his one-year old boy Elijah sleeping in the next room, was compelled to chart the sacred valences of debt, doubt, and family in fresh ways, in the process stripping bare and reinventing his songwriting idiom. Three years after the destruction of much of the first CD-only edition of the album in a warehouse fire during the London riots, this reissue restores the stark masterpiece to it's intended full song sequence, including three additional songs, including the previously unreleased track "Far Bright Star" never previously available in any format.
