E LLIS PAUL IS ALREADY ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT STARS in the modern history of folk music. He was a chief architect of what has become known as the Boston school of songwriting, an urbane, literate folk-pop style that helped ignite the folk revival of the 1990s. His charismatic, personally authentic performance style has influenced a generation of folk-popsters away from the posturing artifice of pop, and closer towards the unpretentious realness of folk. He has bridged the gulf between the modern folk sound and the populist traditions of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger more successfully than perhaps any of his songwriting peers.
An increasingly topical humanism informs his work. Like Guthrie a half-century before, Paul displays a humble genius for putting the most divisive issues of his day into starkly personal and emotional terms.
“I feel like I’m more a part of a community now than just a songwriter singing about my own struggles and the struggles of the friends I see around me,” Paul says of his career today. “Maybe that’s the difference between being a singer-songwriter and being a folk musician, that transition into more of a community sense of writing. ”
At the same time, Paul remains the most mainstream-friendly folk songwriter to emerge from Boston since Tom Rush. Between 1993 and 2003, he won an unprecedented 12 Boston Music Awards, and his songs were heard on hit TV shows and in the soundtracks of several Farrelly Brothers films.
It would be easy — perhaps even advisable — to become complacent after succeeding so remarkably at all the things he set out to do. But there is a restlessness in Paul these days, a vibrant, glowing spirit of artistic adventure. Success to him is not a prize to clutch and protect, but an open door to a wider journey. One stop of that journey is the Me&Thee.
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[From the beginning, Ellis Paul] was always unique. He didn’t write like anybody, didn’t sing like anybody, didn’t perform like anybody. So many of the songwriters then were trying to imitate whoever they thought was successful. Ellis was always himself; he didn’t try to separate himself from his audiences. Perhaps it’s because he’s a Mainer; there’s no pretense, and I think audiences sense that.
. . . Paul has a sense of roots, of connectedness to the whole history of folk music; he sees the thread that runs through all the generations of this music. Bill Morrissey
Ellis Paul is a master storyteller. He combines the sensibilities of Bob Dylan, Bill Morrissey and John Gorka and delivers it with a passion that sets him apart in the company of a new breed of songwriters. Performing Songwriter
