About This:

During a lecture once, composer John Cage related an old Chinese Buddhist poem: "The mind is like a mirror," wrote a Zen monk. "It collects dust; the problem is to remove the dust." Few contemporary songwriters "remove the dust" and mirror real-life with the clarity, detail and shine that 32-year-old Maine native Ellis Paul does, and few craft such lucid, moving portraits, never resorting to the manipulation we take for granted in Hollywood tearjerkers and maudlin love ballads. From the devastating "Conversations with a Ghost" to the outraged "Who Killed John Lennon," to the hilarious "Paris in a Day," Paul -- with songs The Washington Post calls "closely observed tales that address universal themes" -- has consistently reflected both the madness of our times and the capacity of our hearts.

All of which makes Translucent Soul, in addition to being an unusually apt title, the most telling and ambitious of Paul's four albums, which have already sold in excess of 50,000 copies, and prompted The Boston Globe to hail him as "the quintessential Boston songwriter; literate, provocative, urbanely romantic." Because after five years of relentless touring, reaching out to everyone from Greyhound pilgrims in "3000 Miles" to tornado obsessives in "Tornado Girl," the seven-time Boston Music Award and 1994 Kerrville New Folk Award winner finally turns that mirror toward his own internal landscape as much as the America he's learned to detail with such warmth, humor and conviction. It's a move motivated in part by the recent dissolution of his marriage, an event fraught not only with pain but with questions of identity and destiny hard to ask, and even harder to answer. But he finds the courage to do so. The mirror, after all, never lies.