by Richard Cuccaro

From the very beginning it was obvious that, in the world of singer/songwriters, Ellis Paul had "the goods." 
Back in '94-'95,  a fellow volunteer at the Fast Folk Cafe informed me, "You gotta see Ellis!" So we headed 
over to The Fez to catch a performance. For starters, there's the voice. The power-packed tenor with that 
edgy burr quickly gets your attention. His writing and his delivery then grab you by the collar, lift you off the 
floor and look you straight in the eye, saying,  in effect, "Do I have your full attention?" Your startled mind replies… 
"uhhh… yessir!" It's not as though he's pumping out a barrage of gravelly, testosterone-laden demands for attention, 
No, it happens gently, when he drops a poem into the middle of a set,  softly expressing the ache of missing someone. 
A song like the gossamer "Weightless," posing the questions of "what is faith?" and "what is its power?" then weave 
his spell further, spinning  a web from which you can't escape (and don't want to).  

A year or so later, Ellis made an appearance in front of a packed house at the Fast Folk Cafe. I had observed a slew 
of Ellis wannabees copying his body English while they performed. I also remembered my own worship of Elvis Presley 
when I was young… so I combined the two, introducing Ellis… "I useta wanna be Elvis Presley… Now I wanna be… Ellis Paul! 
Ellis got to the mic and responded in mock exasperation (I hope), "How do I follow that?!!" He then followed that by blowing 
the roof off of the room.

  

The Foundation
A cursory examination of Ellis' tour schedule reveals a daunting workload. He's been one of the hardest working road warriors 
on the circuit. Learning about his approach to the craft of writing, be it songs or poetry, we perceive a highly developed work ethic. 
This has its roots in a childhood that is fairly unique among singer/songwriters, and certainly different in comparison to most of his 
audience. In other interviews we find out that Ellis, from Presque Isle,  Maine, was born into a potato farming family. Every year, 
from the time he was old enough, until he went away to college, Ellis headed out to the fields during harvest season to help bring in 
that year's crop. As he has described it: "My grandfather was a potato farmer. I worked on his farm, as I grew up. The whole area is 
based on the potato industry. Kids got out of school for three weeks each year, to harvest the crop. You wake up at six in the morning, 
and go pick potatoes till six at night. They bring you home in an old dirty bus. The climate when you wake up in the Fall - it'll be thirty 
degrees maybe and frost on the ground. By midday it might get up to seventy or eighty and then it would be cold again at night when 
the sun goes down. My father was Executive Director of the Maine Potato Commission. He did all the marketing of the potato product 
for the state. He also did research and actually invented a few potato hybrids."

We asked which music played a role in his early development. He recalled being impressed with Billy Joel's storytelling ability through 
about "2 or 3 albums" … songs like "Piano Man" and "Allentown." It seems obvious from his choice of acoustic rock covers that, at least 
subconsciously, the Beatles had a strong influence. 

Ellis got his early training in music from formal lessons in trumpet to singing in the chorus all through grade school and high school. As 
an English major, his writing was also promising during his school years and Ellis received a lot of support from his teachers back then. 
Ellis says, "I always knew I was going to be an artist… I didn't know I would become a folk singer."

From Athlete to Musician
Then, too, there was the championship -level high school and college track career. Ellis was the Maine high school state champion in the 
5 kilometer event and second in the nation in the age group championships. He accepted an athletic scholarship from Boston College. 
Three years into this career, he  developed tendinitis in his knee and during recuperation began playing a borrowed guitar. He played sometimes 
for three and four hours a day, getting hooked in the process. He couldn't get his head back into track after his knee healed and the first steps to 
a career in music were taken.

The Process
He began learning songs by other artists and started writing his own material within a few months. He has stated that his songs "were pretty 
horrendous to begin with," but "kept getting better and better." When he graduated, he started playing  open mics in in bars in Boston and 
eventually discovered that there were folk clubs where people were actually listening." He played them three or four nights a week., clubs like 
The Nameless Coffeehouse in Cambridge and a place called The Naked City, held in a hallway in an old building where folksingers got together 
and put up candles. The police eventually shut it down, but not before its audience grew to two hundred and not before Ellis cultivated friendships 
with many fellow singer/songwriters, among them, one who's become a close, lifelong friend… Vance Gilbert. 

Meanwhile, Ellis was working a day job as a case worker and teacher for inner city kids who were expelled from the school system for emotional 
problems and criminal activities. He did this for five years, a draining existence, keeping his music going on the side. 
He produced two cassettes of recorded material, Urban Folk Songs and Am I home and sold about five thousand over the course of two or three 
years.  These two albums are now available in CD form. The power of his talent --the voice, the delivery --  is evident from the first notes. When I 
listen to "Ashes to Dust," from Urban Folk Songs, the first song of his Ellis was thrilled to hear coming out of his car speakers, I wish I'd been there 
to cheer him on then. It's fun to listen to the early work and  wonder how stunned his early discoverers must've been.

He won the Boston Underground Showcase during this time, a marathon of clubs and judges that started with tapes from two hundred performers. 
Eighty were chosen to compete. In the first round, they were divided into ten clubs. Eight people showcased and two were chosen to compete at the 
next level.There were quarter-finals, semi-finals and the final. Ellis won the final in front of an audience of three hundred people.
Ellis is known for his love of DADGAD tuning. One early development that Ellis talked about in our interview was that when David Wilcox came 
through Boston for a gig, during the early 90's,  he'd stay at Ellis' apartment and show him how to play in open tunings. 

Ellis was playing around New England and doing colleges here and there. Around this time Ellis became friends with Ralph Jaccodine who had been 
wanting to start a record label. Ralph heard that Ellis was about to make a record without a label and offered to start one (Black Wolf Records) and 
begin with a larger recording budget. They got the great songwriter, Bill Morrissey to produce Say Something. The talents  of the great fiddler, Johnny 
Cunningham and guitarist Duke Levine, both friends of Bill's, were included in the recording. Duke also wound up helping to produce Ellis' second CD, 
Stories.  Ralph, producer of the great This is Boston Not Austin compilation has remained as Ellis' close friend and manager. 

By 1995 he was performing songs from both Stories and his next CD, (and still my favorite) A Carnival of Voices. My favorite tracks here form a 
personal gallery of dazzling, energetic works of art: "Paris in a Day," "Deliver Me," "All My Heroes Were Junkies," "Never Lived at All" and…"Weightless," 
from that album can still bring the water to my eyes. This song was up for the Kerrville Song-of-the-Year award, but lost out to Buddy Mondlock's "The Kid." 
Ironically, "Weightless" is about Buddy's main squeeze, singer/songwriter Carol Elliott. I still think that, while "The Kid" is a great song, "Weightless," for me, 
possesses more originality. The swooping rise and gentle fall in the passage, "Hear… me… out…" is very unlike what we hear from most singer/songwriters. 
The title track to his next CD, Translucent Soul, is the delightful and thought-provoking paean to his friendship with Vance Gilbert. For many, this track and 
"She Loves a Girl," describing the sacrifices made by a gay couple are the highlights of this CD.

    

As good as Ellis' CDs are, there's nothing like seeing him in person …the way he uses the dynamics of stage movement and sound, stepping away from the 
mic when necessary to avoid overwhelming the settings on the soundboard (like during "who put my world on pins and needles," in "All My Heroes…"). 
Then there are the times he'll walk out into the audience and sing totally without a mic. For those times when he's touring away from your area, last year's 
double CD album Live will have to do. 

There's "Conversation With a Ghost," both solo and with Patty Griffin, an audience favorite, "Martyr's Lounge," the poems "Tornado Girl," the explosive 
"Harmony," (both of which are new to me) and "Love's Too Familiar a Word." "Tornado Girl" is actually performed not in front of the huge audience at 
the Somerville Theater, but in a smaller room surrounded by a modest-sized audience.

For those die-hard Ellis fans (like myself), the familiar stories, such as the plane ride with the "dead-head" into Nantucket are like favorite photos in a prized 
album that you like to look at time and time again. 

This year's CD release, Sweet Mistakes, is, for the most part, a group of love songs already recorded that Ellis wanted to get out to his audience. Since most 
of the original masters were destroyed in a fire, the recording has more of a raw feel, having used other versions of the songs that were not as finished. It's 
available primarily at Ellis' concerts and the songs are satisfying in their spontaneity. There are remixes of "3000 Miles" and "The Martyr's Lounge" as well 
as new songs that Ellis is singing in concerts right now. These include "Sweet Mistakes" and "Roll Away Bed." There's also a sung version of "The 20th Century 
is Over," one of my favorites that I've heard Ellis recite sans melody. I was surprised that it wasn't included on the Live album, so I was gratified to find it here.
There are plans to publish a book of poems sometime around about May of this year and a tour with Vance Gilbert in the fall. The next CD, Moving at the Speed 
of Trees is also expected to be released in the fall.

I'm hoping to catch Ellis at another show sometime soon; if not in the spring, then maybe at a summer festival. Anyone near the 4th Annual Woody Guthrie Festival 
this coming summer in Okemah, Oklahoma should look for Ellis there. He's made all of the first three so far, as one of Woody's inspired followers. 
In closing I thought I'd include a poem to Ellis that poet Marj Hahne recited (slammed?) to Ellis last year at the Mainstage Coffeehouse at its former location in 
Mt. Kisko, NY. He stood at the foot of the stage (see below) and let her take over the show, briefly. While her exuberant accolades might seem a bit over-the-top 
in spots for some, they get to the heart of what we feel about this whirlwind we know as… Ellis Paul.



Praise Poem for Ellis Paul  © 2001 Marj Hahne
Tell us, Ellis, Mr. Singer-Songwriter Sage, Mr. Six-String Evangelist, you
linguistic mystic, you sooth-tongued voodoo guru, how you do whatchoo do,
how you hocus-pocus stoke us with your folk tales, your wildfire story jokes,
your hear-me-out lyrics, your 3000 miles of lines &emdash;
a moment on your lips
a lifetime on the hips of my Man! You blow my mind!
You know my mind, you man with 3000 eyes, you
larger-than-life-size Mr. Potato Head, you man from Maine,
you're my main man, you are, like, so totally cosmic.
You are like rain, the way your words hold water,
the way they raise high the heart-roof, raise high the river
of this crazy ain't-slowin'-down world.
Yes, I'm crazy for you, Ellis, so amazed by your grace &emdash;
how very grand the human face is on your sand-mandala songs.
Mr. Sandman, you rock me awake, break the cradle of our
same-old same-old, rattleshake this shake-'n-bake fate, this
rock-a-bye-bye-dreams state.
State your order at the stage: Give us Paris in a Day
doesn't matter what you play, you can slice 'em, you can
dice 'em, you can even julienne, french-fry 'em, Mr. Je Ne Sais Quoi,
Mr. Bodhisattva Balladeer, Mr. Music Messiah, you deliver every time
like it's the last coming, like it's coming down to the wire,
you deliver me higher than an Eiffel Tower kite.
You've got me flying, sighing, crying crocodile smiles,
I am swimming in the Ganges of your swami-charmed
do do do do do
How do you do whatchoo do, how do you
raise the dead, shed snakeskin lives,
how do you swallow sky?
Mr. Red-Bliss Potato Head,
Mr. Perfect Word Dervish &emdash;
how you wet flesh
how you spin breath

The Gigs
March
1   8pm Appel Farms, Elmer, NJ (800)394-1211 
2   8pm Unitarian Church of Princeton, Princeton, NJ (609) 497-4018 
3   7pm Godfrey Daniels, Bethlehem, PA (610)867-2390 
8   9pm Rosendale Cafe, Rosendale, NY (845)658-9048 
9   8pm Slater Mill, Pawtucket, RI (401)781-0061 
21  8pm Club Cafe, Pittsburgh, PA  (412)431-4950 
22  8pm Common Ground Coffeehouse, Bryn Athyn, PA  (215)914-4888 
23  2pm Ocean County Library, Toms River, NJ 
      8pm Performing Arts Center, Lincroft, NJ 
30  8pm Pickard Theatre, Brunswick, ME 
April
5   8pm The Barns of Wolftrap, Vienna, VA (703)938-2404 
6   7pm  Fitzgeralds, Berwyn, IL (708)788-6670 
7   4pm University Union, Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL  (309)298-1873 
18  7:30pm Ginkgo Coffeehouse, Saint Paul, MN (651)645-2647 
19  8pm Pres House, Madison, WI (608)241-8633 
20  9pm Blueberry Hill, Saint Louis, MO  (314)534-1111 
25  8pm The Four Corners, New London, NH (603)526-6899 
26  9pm Acoustic Cafe, Bridgeport, CT (203)335-3655

Website:  www.ellispaul.com