WALDOBORO, Maine - The Waldo Theatre (916 Main St, Waldoboro) hosts Hiss Golden Messenger (performing solo) from Durham, N.C. live on stage Friday, July 29th at 8pm. Alisa Amador will be opening the show.

Songwriter M.C. Taylor’s music is at once familiar, yet impossible to categorize. Elements from the American songbook—the steady, churning acoustic guitar and mandolin, the gospel emotion, the steel guitar tracings, the bobbing and weaving organ and electric piano—provide the bedrock for Taylor’s existential ruminations about parenthood, joy, hope, and loneliness—our delicate, tightrope balance of dark and light—that offer fully engaged contemporary commentary in his latest album. 

“I went looking for peace,” he says about his new album “Quietly Blowing It,” released June 25, 2021, on Merge Records. Throughout the album Taylor brings his keen eye to our “broken American moment”—as he first sang on Hiss Golden Messenger’s critically acclaimed, GRAMMY® -nominated ‘Terms of Surrender’—in ways that feel devastatingly intimate and human. Surrounding himself with a trusted cast of collaborators that Includes Buddy Miller, songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov, songwriter and Tony award–winning playwright Anaïs Mitchell, multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Dawes’ brothers Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith, and his oldest musical confidant Scott Hirsch, Taylor has made his most audacious and hopeful work yet with “Quietly Blowing It.”  It’s an album that speaks personal truth to this moment in which the old models of “being” feel broken and everything feels at stake. 

Opening the evening is Alisa Amador whose music is a synthesis of the many styles she’s voraciously absorbed: rock, jazz, funk and alternative folk, all wrapped in the spirit of the Latin music she grew up with. With a sound described by Vance Gilbert as, “Shawn Colvin meets Joni Mitchell has lunch with Amy Winehouse meets Suzanne Vega and Diana Krall,” and NPR calls, “a pitch-perfect rendition of my wildest dreams,” her soulful singing, poetically incisive lyrics, and syncopated rhythms, are likely to make you cry, laugh and dance all within one set. Alisa won the Tiny Desk Contest Top Shelf video in 2022.

Concessions, including beer and wine for those 21+ will be available at the show. Doors open at 7pm. The Waldo is no longer requiring proof of vaccination, and has shifted to masks optional for all visitors. We are limiting our capacity in order to provide space between patrons.

Tickets are $25 in advance online and $30 in person. $1 from every ticket goes to support the Durham Public Schools Foundation whose mission is to foster community support for public schools and invest in our students, educators, and families to ensure success and equity for every student.

Visit  www.waldotheatre.org for more information.