Scott Hirsch is an American singer-songwriter.

After many years spen… Read Full Bio ↴Scott Hirsch is an American singer-songwriter.

After many years spent as a steadfast and inventive collaborator—not only playing bass and producing four albums with Hiss Golden Messenger, but in large part forging that band’s sonic signature—multi-instrumentalist, recordist, and audio engineer Hirsch made a solo album called Blue Rider Songs.

The album features notable, and notably subtle, contributions from Jade Hendrix (harmony vocals); Thomas Heyman (pedal steel), Hirsch’s old bandmate in the San Francisco group the Court and Spark; and HGM stalwarts Phil Cook (organ and harmonica) and Matt Douglas (saxophones), among others.

The songs on the album emerged from various personal contexts: a year of near-constant touring with Hiss Golden Messenger in 2015; a move with his family from Brooklyn to Ojai, California, and the launch of his new Echo Magic West studio there; and above all, the process of making the self-titled Golden Gunn album with longtime musical partner M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger and their mutual friend Steve Gunn. Hirsch wrote much of the music on that album, and watching Taylor and Gunn set words and vocals to his instrumental productions proved the necessary catalyst to take his writing and recording into fresh territory under his own name. Hirsch even reinterprets Golden Gunn standout track “The Sun Comes up a Purple Diamond”.

The album title references Der Blaue Rieter, the short-lived German modernist art movement (1911-14) pioneered by painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who were fascinated by color theory and synesthesia (for Kandinsky, blue was the color of spirituality, abstraction, and the eternal).