Taylor McCall. Remember That.
What is better than finally getting to see the artist that you have been listening to for years but had to eagerly await his return to the states and furthermore hope that his touring schedule aligned with your own life? Maybe seeing him tear down the motherf*cking house. I just need a minute to really process and express what it was like to see McCall in person. This kid (the internet says maybe 26?) is not of this time. I swear, he just woke up from a long trip in the early 70s and is finally joining us in the 21st century bringing classic rock, youthful dissent, and rugged craftsmanship to our soggy and saturated modern tastes.
Opening for McCall last Wednesday night in Virginia at Richmond Music Hall was Pet Moose Project. I love identifying sound twins so let me paint you a picture: Dave Matthews with Van Morrision and Bob Seger. I had never seen or heard of them before, but as a Richmond mainstay, their comfort on stage bled into the audience while PMP played some easy listening. While working their day jobs, they are maintaining a strong social media presence and staying busy writing new music and performing whenever they can. Their passion for music is clear on stage as the 5-piece band strum and sing with smiles plastered on their faces betraying the real reason they get on stage: to jam out with friends and introduce people to quality music. https://petmooseproject.com
As it trickles, steady and salient, a stream finds its way out–Taylor McCall is never hurried yet carries us to the end. Gently at first, then rocketing us through healing guitar riffs, quivering tambourines, and swelling percussion, he writes for our ears to hear and plays for our bodies to feel. His music production is both instinctive and intuitive, neither overproduced nor manufactured. When you listen to him, McCall is sitting next to you as he croons and aches like Janis Joplin, never performing out of entertainment but emotional necessity.
When you watch Taylor play, he uses one hand to reach into your chest while the other picks effortlessly. Tall as a tree and towering over his bandmates, he can wrap his trailing fingers around the neck twice over as he shreds on one of his 30 guitars he brought out (okay 30 is logistically improbable, but it was a lot). Shredding so hard in fact, that one of his strings popped while playing “Hell’s Half Acre,” yet he continued to play fluently, further demonstrating that he is a master over his music, warping it to his will. Watching him play guitar with the thrill and dexterity of a surgeon, I was awestruck and paralyzed left pondering my own abilities. BRB, buying an electric guitar now.
His album artwork elevates his music reflecting the world he built; it’s the first listening of the album and paints us into a mood of sepia-soaked angst, anguish, and self-awareness. Black Powder Soul, a skull-faced cowboy with guns drawn against a setting burnt orange sun in the desert, drops you in the middle of a crossroads and the choice is yours. And his most recent album successfully replicates this sentiment as he pays homage to his late grandfather, a picture of him, fresh-faced and at-the-ready in Vietnam introduces us to Mellow War as a series of imagined letters to home.
While an intimate show of less than 50 people, the raucous whooping before and after each song filled the room enough for a sold out arena. I didn’t get to ask their affiliation with McCall whether they knew him or not, but there was a group of college guys standing right in front proudly singing every song (and spilling beer). They lovingly embraced each other and swayed during one of McCall’s serenades “So Damn Lucky.”
He hypnotizes his listeners, pulling out what we put away. One of my favorite lyrics of all time “Addiction’s tough but love is close” from “Waccamaw Drive,” reminds me of Zach Bryan’s duet “Dawns’”: “I’m scared/ Love’s just another drug I have grown a victim to.” McCall says plainly and poetically the truth we all face but never own. Citing gospel, blues and rock as influences from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, JJ Cale and Bobby Charles, there is no mistaking the grit and gospel you hear in his music balanced with his powerful storytelling.
With a 15-song set, his first headlining tour, Mellow War, wrapped a few days after his show in Richmond but was also the first time he played with a full band. Having experimented with solo shows and other band members in the past, he remarked in an interview with Adventures in Americana, posted on his Instagram, that he had struggled to find people he could play “simpatico” with. But it’s evident with Justin Tocket on bass (the sound engineer and bass player on his last two albums) and Logan Todd on drums that they’re tapping into his eternal vision, kit in hand. Throughout the show, all eyes were on Taylor…literally. Both Todd and Tocket intently gazed at their visionary, keeping pace and matching keys waiting for his cue to take us to another dimension.
McCall cannot be boxed in; he notes in a pre-show write up for his appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival in England this past July that his music is not meant to be reduced to a single genre, “My mystery is that most people see me as another southern guy or country musician and that’s not the whole being of my existence. Spirituality and world music to me is connecting with a greater force and that’s what my music is; it’s connecting with something beyond me.” Adding, “My job is to skydive with my emotions.” What is more clear than that? And when you hear his music that is exactly what’s happening, you’re free falling. As an avid fisherman, oftentimes standing in the river or the woods with his father, waiting for the spirit to reveal itself, Taylor doesn’t harness the wind for power, he breathes back into it and sets it free. Simply put: McCall’s intuition is otherworldly, so light up and listen while he takes you away.
Check out tour dates and find more information here: https://www.taylormccall.com