I’ve long been a fan of the prolific MC Taylor, who goes by the stage name of Hiss Golden Messenger. This is his latest song, In The Middle Of It.

On his latest release – his 12th since his debut in 2009 – he sounds like a cross between Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, at least to my ears. And that (also to my ears) is no bad thing at all.

His music is a hybrid of many genres: there’s folk and country, as you might expect from a former college lecturer who specialised in folklore, as well as blues and soul, R&B and straight-up rock’n’roll.

Like so many others in the same wheelhouse he started out in a hardcore punk band before Americana infused his songwriting and he formed a country-rock band, The Court And Spark.

It’s a song that encapsulates the madness of America in 2026, with all its contradictions – and the constant battle between hope for better world and, well, the guy who seems hellbent on eradicating it.

It’s easy, when overwhelmed by the constant lunacy, to forget that away from all that there are tens of millions of good Americans just trying to get on with their lives.

To get on with the day to day business of living and loving and working and having babies and bringing them up right, and all the rest of it.

Taylor comes from Southern California and lives in North Carolina but wrote this tune, In The Middle Of It, in a corner room of the El Rey Court hotel in the beautiful desert town of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

It was then taken back to the east coast to be recorded in Dreamland, a studio in a decommissioned church outside Woodstock in upstate New York.

“I wanted the record to feel the way that upstate place feels, deep in the pocket, a place of poetry, earth and sky and mountains,” says Taylor.