Ellis Paul

September 19 - 26, 1 9 9 6 [Music Reviews]

Different Voices

Ellis Paul writes other people's memoirs
by Seth Rogovoy
The hot new trend in publishing is the memoir. Writers who in the past may have used their experience as raw material from which to craft artful, imaginary narratives now opt to give us the dirt plain and straight. Did you notice how few actual short stories were in the New Yorker's summer fiction issue? (Hint: four.) Instead the magazine was full of nonfiction narratives in the form of letters, anecdotes, essays, and two new genres: "personal history" and "morality tale." Metaphor is out; reportage is in.
Enter Ellis Paul, nonfiction storyteller in song.
"All my songs are about real people," says Paul. "I'm sort of writing journalistically, trying to tap into what happened hanging out with certain people and [relating] conversations we've had." He's speaking by phone from Davis, California, where he's just finished playing at a Tower Records to promote his third album, A Carnival of Voices (Philo/Rounder). The reedy-voiced, Boston-based singer-songwriter goes on, "When I try to write fictional songs, they end up grade-B, using clichés rather than describing details that are actually there."
Thus, Paul's new CD kicks off with "Midnight Strikes Too Soon," a groove-folk number laced with harmonica and a lazy, thumping bass drum line that talks about a friend who likes to hang out with Paul on her NYC apartment building's rooftop, from where "every window tells a story in cold hard truth." "There's a woman named Cathy," Paul points out, "and I actually do hang out up on the roof with her." He adds that the events of "Paris in a Day," which describes a 24-hour whirlwind tour of the French capital, are also drawn from real life.
Well, so what? Are the immediate experiences of a 30-year-old former Boston College track star who has been playing music for less than a decade rich and compelling enough to resonate for a wider audience?
So far the answer seems to be yes. With just two albums behind him, Say Something and Stories, both on the small Cambridge indie Black Wolf, Paul's jump to Rounder's prestigious Philo imprint -- home to such new-folk stalwarts as Bill Morrissey and Cheryl Wheeler -- is nothing to be shrugged off. (Philo re-released Stories last year.) And on A Carnival of Voices, Paul presents 11 new tunes (plus the now requisite hidden tracks) that will undoubtedly solidify his reputation as a manufacturer of carefully honed if occasionally flawed contemporary-folk gems.
According to his self-penned liner notes, Paul's songs originate in "a crowd of mismatched people inside my head, conversing in little clusters . . . I've stolen their laughing melodies and put them into song." Once there, he interacts with them: debating theology with a born-again friend in the ambling "Weightless"; feeling smugly superior to his workaday siblings in "Never Lived at All" (an uptempo, Billy Joel-like ballad); getting hot and bothered over an old flame on "Deliver Me," which is not a bad bit of folk/R&B, prompting thoughts of Carole King's Tapestry.
There isn't a lot of levity here, unless you count the line "We did Paris in a day/What would Marcel Marceau say?" Literally thumbs down, one supposes. But give the Maine native and winner of multiple Boston Music Awards and a 1994 Kerrville New Folk Award credit for the wittily titled "Self-Portrait," in which he reveals, "I tried to frame my own self-portrait into a three-minute, one-act play/But I'm a carnival of voices/It's hard to pin me down that way." Not only is this guy self-referential; he even writes his own reviews!
Paul's weaknesses have always been his vocals and melodies; the former are thin and the latter virtually non-existent. But on Carnival he turns his vocal limitations into strengths by emphasizing the spoken quality of his lyrics, many of which are actual lines of dialogue, and shooting for raw emotion where necessary. Jerry Marotta, the Peter Gabriel drummer who is rapidly becoming the new-folk producer/sideman of choice, does his best to fill out the picture with an all-star back-up cast including bassist Tony Levin (Gabriel, King Crimson), guitarists Duke Levine (Mary Chapin Carpenter) and Bill Dillon (Joni Mitchell), and vocalists Jennifer Kimball (the Story) and Patty Griffin.
"Everyone expects singer-songwriters to be confessional and all of this bullshit, but I don't want to use songs as therapy," Paul concludes. True, on the enjoyable A Carnival of Voices, he opts for the merry-go-round instead of the analyst's couch.
Ellis Paul plays a CD-release party at the Somerville Theatre this Saturday, September 21, with Jonatha Brooke, Vance Gilbert, Chris Trapper, and the Loomers.

Different Voices

Ellis Paul writes other people's memoirs