Like many sculptors, I have a tradition of adding one last WHACK at the end of my album-making process: in this case, it was this thing. PAUL COUNT: 5 (three lead vocals, one bassman, one falsetto) I improvised this song in its entirety and tacked it on to the end, unlisted. It’s just a stupid…
I… I don’t know. Is it cute? Is it good? I can’t. It’s…. Why did I do this? I know it’s bad form to rip things apart that might be your favorites, but this is just kind of silly. OK, let’s dive in. I guess there was somebody I was trying to get to just…
Every songwriter has their trump song — the one they pull out when they know it’s time to wow the other songwriters. Before I had Under My Nails, I had this song to fill that function. Just before I fell into my first, misguided long-term relationship, I had a brief window of opportunity with a…
I’m not sure if my voice was this brittle back then, or if the tape is a bit sped up, but every attempt I made to regulate it made it sound like a different mutant, so what Keith Irwin’s copy yielded is what we have: There were different little triumphs before I started playing out,…
Just to do a reality check on myself, I looked it up, and Ben Harper’s Welcome To The Cruel World and Fight For Your Mind both came out before this tape, so that right there is your explanation, in particular, for what happened here: I was trying to sing like Ben Harper while carrying the…
The reason I called this tape Sally Forth was two-fold: First, my manager Philip Harris used to give me an order to “Sally Forth and conquer” when he would get tired of talking to me (it’s telling that one of the closest group of friends I had developed the term “Paulerance.”) The other was that…
In prep for the new album, I’m going to have some fun talking about myself and my stuff for a while. Maybe I’ll learn something in the process. In the spring of 1996, I was in Stone Soup, and we had recorded our album. We were waiting on the final mixes for what seemed like…
This past Saturday, I opened my show at the Vagabond Cafe with “Just One,” off of Glutton’s Dozen. It hadn’t been in the sets for a while, and had popped out during a practice last week, so out it came. It went well, and will probably show up some more, so I wanna talk about…
It’s been brought to my attention that I haven’t concentrated on writing about my experience as a songwriter on this site at all, so a newcomer will think that all I do is go to improv jams and play in the subways. The truth is, I haven’t been writing up a storm lately, because I’ve…
I get asked about “Jerk” a lot, which makes sense — it raises a lot of questions about my self-esteem, and it rings alarms for some. When my cousin Eugenie heard it for the first time, she had kind of a tear in her eye as she raised the point that maybe I was pushing…