Album Info

Paradise of Bachelors is pleased to announce the first-ever recorded collaboration between Hiss Golden Messenger and Elephant Micah, the respective musical projects of M.C. Taylor of Durham, North Carolina and Joe O’Connell of southern Indiana, in our estimation two of their generation’s most compelling songwriters and lyricists. Their split 45rpm 7”, released on September 4th, 2012, finds these critically lauded artists versioning each other’s compositions and wrestling each other’s angels.

The two songs, both possessively titled, explore related issues of power, domain, submission, and mortality in the aftermath of a heavy rain. Hiss Golden Messenger offers an ambling, mandolin-laced take on “My Cousin’s King”—an ambiguous centerpiece of Elephant Micah’s superb Louder Than Thou LP—while Elephant Micah’s abstracted interpretation of “Balthazar’s Song” dilates the bleary donkey’s lament (after Robert Bresson) that opens HGM’s Bad Debt and closes Poor Moon.

The 7” is available in a limited, hand-numbered edition of 500, featuring kustom kudzu stamps, as well as digitally.  Vinyl purchases from this site include a link for immediate download of the MP3 edition.