By Bryan Reed

A boy named Elijah has left his tiny black canvas sneakers under my chair. In the warmly-lit living room where the boy’s father, 36 year-old M.C. Taylor leans forward on a couch, fiddling with a black mesh-backed cap, talking about music and — at his interviewer’s insistence — about God, Elijah’s shoes are a subtle interruption to the room’s tidy, unfussy decoration and stacks of books. Though he’s not here, the boy has left something of himself in the room, as he has in the songs his father writes and records as Hiss Golden Messenger.

The boy’s name is significant to those of a Judeo-Christian persuasion. The Old Testament prophet Elijah raised the dead, brought fire from the sky, ascended to heaven in a whirlwind, and foretold the coming of a Messiah. In the New Testament story of the Transfiguration, Elijah appears with Moses on a mountaintop to inform Jesus of what fate awaits him.

“He is a very important character in the Bible,” Taylor agrees. “It’s also just a good name. We just liked the name.”

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Hiss Golden Messenger’s fourth album, Poor Moon, ends the way its predecessor, last year’s Bad Debt begins: with the plaintive, probing and powerful “Balthazar’s Song.”

“Are you with me now?” the song begs at its beginning. Taylor never makes explicit who his speaker is addressing, but later, he continues, “You could come to me/ You could take away my mind/ You could fill me up/ Like an empty cup/ That would be fine.” It’s clear he’s looking for some kind of savior — or at least an alleviator.

The idea of spirituality is appealing, Taylor says. It’s comforting to think that there’s something out there that might be looking out for you, protecting you the way parents did when you were a child. “People get that protection in all different ways,” Taylor says, “and I’m not convinced that one is necessarily greater than the other. Some people do it with church, some people do it with meditation, some people do it with heroin or whiskey.”

In his work as Hiss Golden Messenger, beginning with 2009’s Country Hai East Cotton, through 2010’s Root Work and Bad Debt LPs, and culminating in this year’s Poor Moon, Taylor has used spiritual imagery as fuel for impressionistic songwriting that feels both mystical and earnest.

In announcing the release of the spare, all-acoustic Bad Debt, Taylor wrote on his blog, “The Old Straight Track,” “Bad Debt is about my God: That is, whether I have one, and whether there is a place for me in this world. It’s also about donkeys, snakes, betrayal, redemption, scarecrows, wandering and love, though anyone that listens to the words may wonder whether I’ve gone off the deep end for the Lord.”

In fact, he hasn’t. Taylor is not a religious man, but he is a curious one. When he was growing up in Southern California, Taylor’s family did not regularly attend church. His parent’s didn’t trust organized religion, and Taylor still tiptoes around claiming any sort of faith. He’s in the middle of reading José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which outraged the Catholic Church in its fictional retelling of the life of Jesus — one in which the protagonist is more human than deity, and which Taylor says is very beautiful. “I think that spirituality can be a crutch, or it can be kind of a balm,” he says. “The songs of mine that deal with this stuff — which is not my whole catalog, but the past few years it’s kind of moved in that way — is like trying to pry apart what it is that is helpful and joyful in spirituality, and how I can involve myself with that, and what it is that is nonsense and just total dogma and un-useful.”

Elijah, who is not yet 2 and is presumably barefoot while sleeping in another room, is part of the reason his father’s songs have begun to re-examine spirituality.

The responsibility and gravity of parenthood can be overwhelming, Taylor says. “There are things that we have control over, and there’s so much that we have no control over. It can be terrifying, and it can really turn a person’s mind inward and like a serpent just start eating itself.”

The other part is more utilitarian. Taylor’s music resides at an intersection of a number of genres in which spiritual considerations are natural tropes: American (and specifically Southern American) folk music, country and western, psychedelic rock, even reggae and dub. Borrowing these genres’ tendencies to explore faith, sin and redemption seemed like a natural — and useful — tool. “Those sort of heavy relationships in songs provide an allegory for this much more important here-and-now relationship to other people,” Taylor says.

The bible, he says, disclaiming that he might come across as cynical, is a useful tool for the type of imagistic songwriting he favors. He appreciates the book and respects its importance, but “it’s flawed,” he says. “It’s a flawed piece of work.”

And it’s far from the only influence on Taylor’s music.

Hiss Golden Messenger is an outgrowth of The Court & Spark, which began in 1998 when Taylor and longtime collaborator Scott Hirsch (whom Taylor considers a “musical soulmate”), having tired of the frenzied, volatile hardcore they’d played in Ex-Ignota during their late-teens and early-20s, began to explore a more folk-based style of playing. The Court & Spark released four albums and an EP of texture-heavy rock rooted in Americana to steady acclaim.

But Taylor, an avid record collector who cites influences as disparate as dub musician Augustus Pablo, krautrock vanguards Neu!, Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis and Pennsylvania folk singer Michael Hurley as influences, was disappointed when critics didn’t pick up on those cues in The Court & Spark’s music. “It was like, ‘Goddammit, why aren’t they hearing that we put this Klaus Dinger beat on this tune, but we’re using the same space-echo that King Tubby would have used?’” Instead, critics reductively called The Court & Spark “alt-country.”

What those critics might have been picking up on is an attribute in Taylor’s songwriting that Hirsch says has been a constant thread in his friend’s music. “Mike (as Taylor is known to his friends) has always had a way of conjuring a vibe that I can only describe as ‘authentic,’” Hirsch says. “You hear a new song he is working on and it sounds classic already somehow.”

Even so, the alt-country tag doesn’t fit Taylor’s songwriting in Hiss Golden Messenger, either. He largely shies from narrative songwriting. (Wordy songs are a pet peeve.) Though the concise narrative of “Jesus Shot Me In The Head,” Poor Moon’s tale of a troubled soul using faith as a crutch, offers some kind of exception, Taylor’s focus is on minimizing word counts to maximize impact. Hence his fondness for Haiku. “That kind of economy of language is really what I’ve always been trying to get at,” he says.

For Taylor, the music should be expressive enough on its own. “The voice, in music, is all about breath, and phrasing, and timbre, and rhythm,” he says. “I feel like I can sort of exercise all of those things when I have a small, finite amount of words to sing, not a big yarn.” Songs need to have their own strength, he says. “There has to be something in it that’s so compelling that you could totally fuck it up and it would still work.”

Fittingly, two of Poor Moon’s songs are instrumentals: the gently rollicking fiddle tune “Pittsboro Farewell (Two Monarchs)” and the Hirsch-penned meditation “Dreamwood.” Neither wants for words; both capture the same feelings of cautious hopefulness and introspective curiosity that characterize Poor Moon as a whole.

“Generally, they’re these little prayers or homilies,” Taylor says, describing his style of songwriting. He’s not sure they’re directed anywhere specific. Maybe just to the listener. But, he offers, “If there’s a higher energy up there that helps with the order of things, then I hope that the songs are making it there. It maybe sounds like hokum, but the older I get, the clearer it becomes that I have control of almost nothing, and I’m sort of hedging my bets here.”

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For Taylor, it seems as if music already offers the kind of balm spirituality might. He calls it sacred, says if he didn’t have it, he’d be dead. “I’m so lucky to have this thing that I can do that is really emotional, but is structured in such a way that people don’t think I’m absolutely crazy for sort of expressing myself like this,” he says. “Not everybody has that and people go crazy. People do awful things because they don’t have a way to articulate their emotions.”

On the back side of Poor Moon’s handsome jacket, Taylor is pictured crouched beneath a straw hat, barefoot in a wooded clearing. Elijah, a few small steps in front of him, is examining some artifact of nature, a butterfly, perhaps, or a particularly interesting piece of bark; the photo’s borders end before the object can fully reveal itself. Inside the photo’s tightly-cropped window, the scene is quiet and peaceful. The father is a calm guardian for the son, enthralled by the world he sees. One could go mad thinking about the world, the universe, that exists outside the photo’s edges, but Taylor doesn’t have to. He’s got Hiss Golden Messenger for that.