Included in:

• Vinyl Me Please's Best Folk Albums of 2016 (#1)
• The Independent's Best Albums of 2016 (#18)
• American Songwriter's Top Albums of 2016 (#24)
• Rolling Stone Country's Best Country Albums of 2016 (#31)
• Paste Magazine's Best Albums of 2016 (#45)
• USA Today's Best Albums of 2016 (#50)
• Glide Magazine's 20 Best Albums of 2016
• Aquarium Drunkard's 2016 Year in Review

The writing of the songs that became Heart Like a Levee started in a hotel room in Washington, DC, in January of 2015 during a powerful storm that darkened the East Coast. At that time I was feeling—more acutely than I had ever felt before—wrenched apart by my responsibilities to my family and to my music. Forgetting, momentarily, that for me, each exists only with the other. How could I forget? Though maybe my lapse was reasonable: I had just quit my job, the most recent and last, in a series of dead-end gigs stretching back 20 years, with the vow that my children would understand their father as a man in love with his world and the inventor of his own days. They would be rare in that regard. And then—driven by monthly bills and pure fear—I left for another tour, carrying a load of guilt that I could just barely lift. But in that snowy hotel room I found the refrain that became my compass: I was a dreamer, babe, when I set out on the road; but did I say I could find my way home?

—M.C. Taylor

Composed during the same period of time as Heart Like a Levee, Vestapol is an intimate collection of eight previously unreleased songs—performed and recorded almost entirely by M.C. Taylor in various motels on the road and at his home in Durham, NC—dealing with exile, guilt, forgiveness, and trust.