Troubadour returns to road with new album, healed voice
Ellis Paul rides his cars harder than a rodeo rider does a fiery bull. His previous vehicle — a Honda, like all his other vehicles on tour — traveled more than 475,000 miles before it died.
The tenor troubadour recently bought a Honda CR-V with some of the surplus funds from crowdsourcing his 20th album, “The Storyteller’s Suitcase,” scheduled for an April release.
Paul will roll into Columbus, guitar stowed in the back of his new vehicle, to perform two shows: one for adults Saturday at the Columbus Performing Arts Center, and a show for children Sunday at the Abbey Theater in Dublin.
Just as keeping his midsize SUV in top shape requires frequent oil changes and yearly checkups, Paul, 54, discovered several years ago that a similar care regimen was required to keep his vocal cords as smooth as fresh pavement. After all, the singer had nearly run his voice into the ground after 5,000 shows over 30 years with barely a break.
Like a car with a stalled engine, Paul found himself with nowhere to go for several years. Songs for “A Storyteller’s Suitcase” sat on the page for months; his singing was too frail to withstand even a few choruses.
His voice isn’t as supple as it was at age 25, and Paul sips tea onstage at each performance, but he no longer takes the delicate instrument for granted. Finishing “Suitcase” — his first entirely self-produced record — felt like a major victory, he said.
“This voice is the voice I have, and these songs are a testament to the fact that I’m still creative,” he said. “If Bob Dylan can do it, why the hell can’t I?”
Returning to his acoustic core after two albums of electric guitars and country stylings, Paul chose 100 meaningful days out of his life to document in song.
The 2017 riot in his current home city of Charlottesville, Virginia, in which three
people died, inspired one track. Another came from explaining his father’s death to his then-5-yearold daughter. Still another involved a 1979 family reunion.