Paul Lewis is an English singer song writer from York whose music feels like a favourite old coat; it fits well, warms you up and makes you smile. Paul’s music is gloriously simple and executed in a way that only experience can – it’s not overly fussy or over produced, he is a rare find.

By Marin Frank

Teasing us with his Spanish guitar to accompany him, Paul’s natural and gentle voice transports you to an exclusive seventies bar filled with red velvet booths – you can almost hear wine glasses chink and the hubbub of people talking in the background. What Paul does with his songs is crazy, he takes you back to another time and another place. I hear hints of Burt Bacharach, Simon and Garfunkel and Sting in his delicate jazz ballads. His songs are new and fresh yet utterly familiar, they wouldn’t be out of place as backing tracks for The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or Love Story. They’re so American that they remind you of a time when jeans were flared, and the summers were long.

Paul creates wonderful little stories within well-crafted songs, in Love and hate are too close to call, he sings “Follow me to Avalon and dance with me to the dawn”. These are great evocative words, designed and performed to entertain and excite. The lyrics are painfully under-stated and draw you in, and the more you listen the better they become.

Heaven shines out amongst this universe of songs, an upbeat track similar to Englishman in New York, but filled with detailed personal lyrics, “I can live a hundred lifetimes, I could spy some distant shore I’d reveal my final moment, if you’d admit you wanted more”, and “I can count the stars till morning, I can name them after you”. These are all so very right, the music and words work so perfectly together that you get lost inside them.

But saying all this, what’s really frustrating is that most of these great tracks are invisible, unable to be heard like a busker in a vacuum. There is very little Paul Lewis out there on the usual platforms. He has a presence on Soundcloud if you’re feeling adventurous but not anywhere handy. Paul’s market is an older one so CD’s and records have to be Paul’s next move, we want some of his easy jazzy tunes to play in our cars so that we can drift away into the musical world that his music creates. Hopefully this will come with new album Approaching Alewife, an early release album filled with more jazzy tracks.

Find Paul Lewis on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/captain-haddock666/albums

Approaching Alewife is available now on Spotify.