My new single “Have to Do For Now” was on NPR Music’s All Songs Considered this week
my new single. In case you missed it, I just released a new song called “Have To Do For Now”
Best Of Luck is one month old as of today! I learned so much in the process of making this record. From day one Ben Harper had my back. If he hadn’t showed up for me not only would I not have had a new record to share with you all, but I wouldn’t be out here again working across the country (and soon Europe) doing what I love night after night. Thanks Ben for your friendship and guidance. Thank you for the example you set for me to clean up my act, get sober, and get to work. This is just the start.
“Something In Return” (Live) by Christopher Paul Stelling The new album album ‘Best Of Luck,’ produced by Ben Harper, is available now
Christopher Paul Stelling is a songwriter based in New York City.
Having been building a reputation as a formidable and passionate performer, his debutalbum, “Songs of PraiseandScorn” saw its release way back in February 2012 to much acclaim. Christopher has played well over 150 shows in 2012, and continued touring through the beginning of 2013. After an upcoming european tour, his followup record False Cities was released May 21st 2013.
Stelling’s official debut album was self released on February 21st, 2012.Songs of Praise and Scorn was recorded with friends over a 5-day period in August 2011 in a 200-year-old, actively working funeral home in Kentucky. Fifteen songs were recorded, but only 10 made the cut for the actual album. The album was met with very favorable reviews, prompting The Village Voice to say, “Every song on his debut album Songs of Praise and Scorn cooks with both down-home comfort and avant-garde brio, Stelling building earthy folk troubadour stories over a fluster of wild arpeggios.”American Songwriter noted, “Stelling is an artist who can leave one shaking one’s head in bewilderment over how somebody can play difficult guitar parts and sing a completely disparate melody line at the same time. But he also hasn’t forgotten how to just play simple chords when that’s what a song calls for.
Christopher Paul Stelling is a troubadour in the truest sense. His songs find their roots in the storytelling methods of southern folk music. His meticulous finger plucking guitar playing couples well with his commanding vocal style as he weaves the two around stellar songwriting that encompasses subjects near and dear to early American folk artists.” Christopher Paul Stelling is a singer-songwriter and guitarist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Stelling was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and has also resided in Colorado, Washington
“Destitute” by Christopher Paul Stelling from the album ‘Itinerant Arias,’ available now
Itinerant Arias finds Stelling backed by a band, electrified if you will. It is a record inspired by movement and travel. The album cover a photograph taken by Stelling himself depicting an arrangement of found objects on his table. With a little more than a week before returning to the road, he retreated to a friend’s Connecticut cabin out in the woods with some musician friends. They slept there, ate there and didn’t leave for the next eight days, recording the haunting and powerful record.
“We would wake up in the morning, make coffee and record. The idea was just to live together, eat together and make this record. Having been alone and on the road, it was great to make a home with these musicians for those eight days. These songs were minimally demoed, arranged on the spot and recorded together live.
The album begins with the bittersweet ode to battered perseverance in “Destitute. As Stelling explains, “We begin at rock bottom. When all the layers of self pity are pealed away and all we have left to do is remind ourselves that it gets better from here. It’s a song about putting one foot in front of the other, about looking up. A nice place to start.”
Later Stelling addresses the plight of the refugee with the lilting and soulful“Sleep Baby Sleep.” He explains, “I became aware of the Syrian refugee crisis first hand a couple years back when crossing the English channel from Calais to Dover. Seeing the camps, driving right past them, looking at me from behind the fences, desperate to find a home… and me able to pass, with the right passport, the right nationality, the right look made me feel ill. I’ve gotten to know some wonderful displaced Syrians in my travels and they are some of the dearest people I’ve met. This is a song for them.”
The politically charged appropriately raucous “BadGuys” rages righteously against the ones who create turmoil, “Those nightmares creep into your reality,” Stelling says. “You’re reading about them in the papers. Who are these monsters and where do they come from? They’re just terrified little children hell bent on destroying the world, but you and your people got some home-made and there’s a second line coming down the street, everyones faces painted up like skeletons and you join in, because fuck it.”
The record ends with the intimate acknowledgement of life’s unavoidable uncertainty featuring Stelling’s melodic guitar picking backed by strings and a moving vocal chorus on “A Tempest.” “If we go, we’ll go together. To think of life as many voyages that tumble into one. Each new journey informing the next, but there’s always surprises and beautiful distractions along the way. We are on a ship out at sea, unsure if we are on our way back home or leaving for good. Who knows where we are headed? Nobody. So enjoy it.”
“Oh, River” (Live at Echo Mountain) by Christopher Paul Stelling from the album ‘Itinerant Arias,’ available May 5th
Julia Christgau – vox and percussion
Kieran Ledwidge – Violin
Matthew Murphy – Bass
The highly anticipated new album Itinerant Arias by acclaimed singer-songwriter and guitarist Christopher Paul Stelling is releasedtoday. While Stelling has spent the last several years traveling with just his guitar, Itinerant Arias finds the virtuosic finger picker backed by a cadre of friends and musicians, lending a rollicking energy to a record inspired by traveling through and observing an undeniably tumultuous world.
A track by track insight into the songs of Itinerant Arias from Stelling himself , Christopher Paul Stelling arrived on the scene in 2013 with a distinctive sound already formed on his debut record Songs of Praise and Scorn. Over the course of four albums, he has continued to refine that sound to his growing vision of our complex world. With Itinerant Arias he takes a bold and successful step forward as a bandleader and master chronicler of our times.”
Christopher Paul Stelling is a songwriter based in NYC.
Having building a reputation as a formidable and passionate performer, his debutalbum, Songs of Praise andScorn saw its release on 2/21/12 to much critical acclaim. Christopher has played well over 150 shows in 2012, and continued touring through the beginning of 2013. After an upcoming european tour, his followup record False Cities was released May 21st 2013.
Amidst the euphoria of playing in bars, cafes, theaters, festivals, under bridges and in living rooms, were late night conversations with friends, new and old, about the undercurrents of tension and change in their countries and concerns about what was happening back in his own. And so Stelling wrote songs about it all. Darkly beautiful and powerful songs which became the album Itinerant Arias which arrives on May 5th. Months ago, these songs seemed cynical, even paranoid. After all, everything was going to be fine.
Along with the track, there is a video depicting Stelling at home in Asheville, North Carolina preparing to hit the road again. As Stelling explains, “I wanted the video for “Destitute” to convey the bittersweet relationship that I have with leaving. Just when I start to settle in it’s time to go. As hard as it is to find any routine in my home life, touring has become like a nightly reunion. My friends are out there, and I get to go see them, check in, and play them my latest. Destitute is a song about counting your blessings.”
Unlike previous records, “Itinerant Arias” finds Stelling backed by a band, electrified if you will. It is a record inspired by movement and travel. The album cover a photograph taken by Stelling himself depicting an arrangement of found objects on his table. With a little more than a week before returning to the road, he retreated to a friend’s Connecticut cabin out in the woods with some musician friends. They slept there, ate there and didn’t leave for the next eight days, recording the haunting and powerful record.
Christopher Paul Stelling is one of those performers you could easily envy, with a superbly salient voice and ultra-skilled fingerstyle-cum-claw-hammer playing technique, all on one instrument. A real talent as well as an engaging character.
As any musician knows, the time that passes between conceiving the idea of an album and hearing it in its entirety can be very long; the songs on there need to have some staying power for the player as well as the audience. Christopher comments ‘Well, yeah, I finished the record back in September last year, and I started writing it in February, so I’m over this one,’ he laughs. ‘I’m ready to start looking at another project. I’m totally glad people can hear it now and I’m happy with how it’s being received, but I haven’t really listened to it for a while now.’
As well as being an effective, exciting 10-tracker, Labor Against Waste was in itself a labour of love for Christopher. ‘The record is out on a label, but my friends and I did the whole thing; I went into the studio initially with The Low Anthem to record a bunch of songs I had, and then I went off to Europe, came back with some more songs and went into the studio with a band and some good gear. It was recorded in segments because studio time is fucking expensive and it was mastered and mixed by us, so in that way it’s a very important one.’
I had a lot of difficulties to decide where to put this one should it be in my top albums of the year, having see the guy perform earlier this year . “Labor Against Waste” by Christopher Paul Stelling is an album that is very dear to me. A great album despite some minor flaws. And those aren’t really flaws.
Here is a note from my label, Anti- records to whom I’m very grateful to for understanding my desire to release this song sooner than later: CHRISTOPHER PAUL STELLING DELIVERS RESPONSE TO UNCERTAIN TIMES
Tumultuous times inspire passionate art. It’s how our humanity fights back. Singer-songwriter Christopher PaulStelling has delivered an appropriate response during one of the most divisive and angry years in modern American history. Listen to his electrified new single called “Badguys” .
“We’re gonna round ‘um up and put‘m in the stew. what you hear is not me, it’s just some horse-shit fantasy that they cooked up now they’re selling it to you.” he intones hauntingly before the rousing chorus confirms what we all fear, “the darkness has taken over again. Let us not forget that we are merely children of men – only thing worse than original sin, is the knowledge that the bad guys always, bad guys always win.”
Stelling commented: “At first I wasn’t sure where this song came from and honestly, i don’t have much of a recollection of writing it but i remember it frightened me. i assume it was written at the beginning of the political circus we’ve all been living through, and the end of which we thought for a time would bring us some relief. I’ve always been one to hope for the best and prepare for the worst… and of course to never underestimate the ignorance of the uninformed and easily manipulated masses. I’ve been traveling non-stop now for two years. I’m writing this from Sardinia. What i’ve learned from my travels and talks with people all over Europe is that this is about so much more than just America… We’ve placed ourselves in this position as a global power, and our behaviors and action reach far and wide… We are better than this. We owe it to ourselves and to the rest of the world to set a better example… Everyone now is left with such a feeling of uncertainty. We have to be certain about something though, and that is that history tells us it never works out to just “wait and see”. it’s time to fight for our souls. there is too much at stake.”
Christopher Paul Stelling’s third album, “Labor Against Waste”, I expected a certain intensity to his performance. But I didn’t expect him to nearly implode behind my desk, as the fierceness of his heartfelt songs was set against deft fingerpicking on his beat-to-hell ’64 Gibson gut-string classical guitar. That guitar, bought in Asheville, looks like a well-worn friend, with its dark bruised wood and his initials hand-carved into its body. Stelling marked the instrument a year after he bought it, when he made New York City his home in 2007.By the time he played “Horse,” his third song at the Tiny Desk, Stelling seemed overtaken by the song he wrote. Watch him lean in as if he’s about to lunge, his eyes bugged out, sometimes rolled back in his head revealing just the whites, skin blood-red, voice like a preacher on fire. His music feels undeniable: Best witnessed live, it’s steeped in tradition yet filled with vitality, immediacy and soul — all the reasons worth discovering someone new.
Set List
“Castle”
“Scarecrow”
“Horse”
“Warm Enemy”
Christopher Paul Stelling has a new album to be released and a gig at the Guitar bar in Nottingham the album titled “Labor Against Waste” is coming in just 3 weeks on 16th June on Anti Records world wide. With a huge tour to follow this perpetual tour. This is just the start. 69 shows, 10 countries. Illustration by Salome Iljana.
Christopher Paul Stelling is not just an incredible guitarist—one who is capable of filling a room with only his dexterous finger-picking, voice, and stomp of his foot—but he’s also an excellent songwriter. Watch in the above video as Stelling performs the haunting lullaby “Dear Beast,” off his new album, Labor Against Waste,
Channelling folksters and bluesmen of the past while staying firmly planted in the present, Stelling draws from many styles to craft rich melodies on his old nylon string guitar, which he calls “Brownie.”
Stelling and a friend snuck into an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn to shoot “Dear Beast” and the dilapidated, cavernous space fits the song’s theme of finding beauty in the ugly aspects of ourselves.
“‘Dear Beast’ is a song about a lost faith renewed through a reversal of perspective; through embracing that which is lost as a new kind faith,” writes Stelling in an email. “It’s about excepting our flaws completely, and moving on from there with them in our full embrace. It’s about taking responsibility and caring for the beast that lives in all of us and for the metaphysical beasts that we’ve created because of our inherent need to feel watched over and protected.
23/6 – Nottingham, UK – Guitar Bar
24/6 – Cardiff, UK – The Moon Club
25/6 – London, UK – The Garage
The Fat Angel Sings 