Ellis Paul has been traversing lands and discovering their riches since 1965. Born in the potato farming country of upstate Maine, he struck out for Boston after excelling as a middle and long-distance runner in high school on the strength of results good enough to earn an athletics scholarship to Boston College. It was there that he turned to guitar and songwriting after fate intervened to sideline his athletics career in the form of a knee injury.
Open mic stages and New England coffee houses were the incubator that set him on the fast track to honing his craft as a singer-songwriter-guitarist in the early 1990s. Before long he had emerged as one of the brightest lights in the galaxy of prodigiously talented stars working the Boston-area folk scene at the time, a cohort that included Patty Griffin, Patty Larkin, Vance Gilbert, Dar Williams, and Martin Sexton, among others. Paul’s distinguished discography, released on the Rounder, Black Wolf, and his own Rosella labels, was also launching at around this time. Stories (1994) and A Carnival of Voices (1995) stand out as particularly impressive examples of his precocious command of folk song forms and growing confidence as a lyricist. The 1990s and early 2000s saw him accumulate a cabinet full of music awards, maintain heavy annual touring schedules, and steadily build a nation-wide audience of loyal fans, an audience that continues to grow with the release of each new album.
Several critics have noted that Ellis Paul embodies a distinctively Boston school of songwriting, characterized by observational economy, vividly drawn characters and a “show-don’t-tell” philosophy of lyric writing. And indeed, he does exemplify all of these traits in his extensive catalogue, brilliantly and abundantly.
But to focus on him as a master of songwriting alone is to miss the bigger picture, for he is and does so much more. An original American renaissance man, he is also an illustrator, poet, children’s book author, producer, music tour leader, collaborator, innovator, educator, commencement speaker, honorary doctorate recipient, respected spokesperson among his peer group of leading folk artists, and esteemed mentor to newer songwriters such as Rebecca Loebe, Antje Duvekot, and Seth Glier.
More recently, his 22nd and latest album, 55 (2023), culminates a string of outstanding recent releases stretching back at least as far as Chasing Beauty (2014) and The Storyteller’s Suitcase (2019), each of which has continued to set the bar ever higher on his oeuvre. From the emotionally charged, sophisticated Americana of “Plastic Soldiers” and “Kick Out the Lights (Johnny Cash)” from Chasing Beauty, to the abject pathos of “I Ain’t No Jesus,” the metaphysical heartbreak of “The Innocence and the Afterlife” and the hilariously unreliable narration of “4th of July,” all from The Storyteller’s Suitcase, Paul turns his attention to midlife reflections on 55.
Born in Okemah shoes, with the Dust Bowl blues, a friend of the working man,” was how Willis Alan Ramsey described Woody Guthrie, a description that doubles to perfectly situate Ellis Paul’s exploration of the fractured, kaleidoscopic landscape of America’s soul. Ellis Paul shares his land with us. And in sharing it with us, the truth he reveals is that it is also ours. – © Phil Hoffmann, 2023
