Meshing '90s pop music and Bach, musician Paul Spring is 'Always Almost Home'

ANNOUNCER: While we're on the subject of music, you've heard the music of our next guest on the show before. By day, Paul Spring is a campaign manager for New York City Council Member Chi Osse. By night, he's a session guitarist and singer songwriter in New York City, who's been sampled by Kenny Beats and Thundercat. But Paul is a Minnesotan. He grew up in Winona and St. Cloud and spent time living in Minneapolis.

His new album Always Almost Home is out Friday, November 10. He talked with our producer Gretchen Brown.

GRETCHEN BROWN: Welcome to Minnesota Now, Paul.

PAUL SPRING: Thanks, Gretchen.

GRETCHEN BROWN: So I want to get right to the music. Let's listen to a song from the album. This is When Was The Last Time You Were Home?

PAUL SPRING: (SINGING) Taking a ride down Veterans Drive, I know every block. As it blows by, I could do it with my eyes closed. When was the last time you were home? It's a simpler place from a simpler time. There were kids my age at least close to my age. We could play outside on our own. When was the last time you were home?

GRETCHEN BROWN: You're talking about taking a ride down Veterans Drive. I'm picturing St. Cloud. Is that what you're talking about?

PAUL SPRING: Yeah, that's a street in St. Cloud that my house is just off of.

GRETCHEN BROWN: It feels very nostalgic to me. There's also a line about a lake with no boats. Is that Lake Sagittarian in Collegeville or--

PAUL SPRING: Yeah. Well, you know it well.

GRETCHEN BROWN: [LAUGHS]

PAUL SPRING: Yep, that's Lake Sag.

GRETCHEN BROWN: I think you said that you'd lived 22 different places in 33 years-- that's a lot. Is St. Cloud home to you?

PAUL SPRING: Yeah, I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out on this album. Every album I make, I start it with a question. And the album I did last year called Thunderhead was inspired by Homer's Iliad. And the question was, where does my anger come from? It's kind of an intense album. But I felt like I should follow it up with Homer's Odyssey inspired album. So the question I started this album with was, where is my home?

Out in New York, there's tons of Midwestern transplants. And we're often talking about home. And one of my big pet peeves is when people just write off their home and say they'll never go back there. And they dislike it, and they dislike the people. And they kind of talk down on it. Because I really respect my home a lot and learned a lot from it. And so this song is kind of a meditation on that. And it begins with sweet saccharine nostalgic things.

And then it takes a turn towards darkness and talks about the vampire killings back in the '80s and child abuse and stuff because I think it is worthwhile to note the good and the bad things about your home because you have to love and accept them and think through them.

GRETCHEN BROWN: I think one of the interesting things about being an adult is figuring out what home is because you never quite get that feeling that you got when you were a kid.

PAUL SPRING: It's a common question in our generation. I think it's also an ancient question, obviously. It's a tough one too for us though because of the financial impossibilities of actually owning something permanent. The boomers kind of climbed up the ladder and pulled it up behind them.

GRETCHEN BROWN: Permanence feels a little elusive when you're in your 20s and 30s, I think.

PAUL SPRING: And I really love that I've lived so many different places because you see that people can really make a home anywhere. And everywhere, it conjures the same feeling. And you have to make the same decisions and acceptance. So it's really just about committing.

GRETCHEN BROWN: I want to listen to another song from the album. This is called Go Getter.

[PAUL SPRING, "GO GETTER"]

PAUL SPRING: (SINGING) She'd said, I'll be back again. I'm just stepping out the door. And when I return, could I get some more? More of your heart, less of the ache. More of the deep, less of the fake.

GRETCHEN BROWN: OK, there's a fun beat. Tell me a little bit about this one.

PAUL SPRING: Yeah, I'm trying to make it fun. I'm usually a little too serious, but there's a laundromat a block away from me. And I always do mine at the same time on Tuesdays. And it's almost always the same people in there. And there's this radio station that plays hits from the '80s and early '90s. And it's so cool in there when the people of that generation start singing along to a song and dancing along to a song. It's like a scene out of a musical sometimes in there.

And I was just thinking, oh how cool would it be if I could write a song in that style? Probably never be a hit and never be in some laundromat someday, but might as well give it a shot, you know?

GRETCHEN BROWN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, let's talk a little bit about your musical influences because on the show, we like to ask musicians to bring a track or two that inspired them. And you brought two that were totally different. So I think we have to talk about both of them. So your first pick was He Wasn't Man Enough For Me by Toni Braxton.

[TONI BRAXTON, "HE WASN'T MAN ENOUGH FOR ME"]

TONI BRAXTON: (SINGING) Yeah. Uh, uh. Darkchild, yeah. Uh, uh. Listen, girl. Who do you think I am? Don't you know that he was my man? But I chose to let him go so why do you act like I still care about him?

GRETCHEN BROWN: I mean, this is what I'm picturing in the laundromat.

PAUL SPRING: Yeah, this song played once in there.

GRETCHEN BROWN: Why do you like this song?

PAUL SPRING: Oh my God, what's not to love? It's so good. Yeah, Toni Braxton-- holy crap. I love the drum machines that guy uses. It's a songwriter producer named Rodney Jerkins, a.k.a. Darkchild. And I had this playlist of all of his songs. He also did like Destiny's Child Say My Name. On that song, it kind of sounds like a harpsichord or something.

And I try to kind of mix classical influences in as well. And in his other songs too, Say My Name especially, he has very classical chord voicings and arpeggios. The production on the album, all the digital stuff I'm doing with the drum sounds and the bass, I'm mimicking sounds like that.

GRETCHEN BROWN: Yeah, I can hear it. Let's listen to your second cut because it's a little more traditional.

[CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING]

PAUL SPRING: It's ridiculous to hear those two songs back to back, but it gives me the same feeling. It just kind of lowers my blood pressure instead of heightening it. It took me a while to come around to classical music. My parents had it playing non-stop in our house growing up, NPR Classical. And it often scared me. You wake up in the middle of the night in second grade to go to the bathroom and Shostakovich is playing. And it's the most terrifying walk to the bathroom ever.

But I love Bach. I came around to him in the pandemic. And now I play a weekly gig in the East Village where I play Bach every Tuesday night. The abstraction of it means really anyone can connect to it from around the world, I think, and find beauty in it. It's so perfect. And I thought it would be cool to take that older sense of harmony and counterpoint, mix it with these '90s sounds.

GRETCHEN BROWN: You spent time getting your musical career off the ground in the Twin Cities and St. Cloud. And it's been really cool to watch you evolve as a musician since then because that first CD was really traditional folk. And I think you gave an interview to the current back then and said, Bob Dylan was an influence. And now I'm hearing so many other influences like I'm hearing that Bach. I'm hearing Toni Braxton. And you kind of go electronic and folk is still there, and--

PAUL SPRING: Yeah, consistency has never been a strong point for me. I do something different every album, which is maybe why my career has never really taken off. [LAUGHS] But I'm having a lot of fun.

GRETCHEN BROWN: Yeah. Well, you did make the leap and move to New York. And you've worked with other musicians as a session guitarist. And I had heard through the grapevine that you'd sang back up with Post Malone on SNL. And I looked it up, and I'm pretty sure that was you singing with him last year on Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol. Is that you?

PAUL SPRING: Yeah. Yeah, me and some friends. My friend Robin, who is that band Fleet Foxes, he invited me to sing with him because he wrote that song with Post Malone. And he needed a choral group to do that on SNL. So that was really fun. I'm grateful that he invited me to do that. And Post Malone is a sweetheart. Really good guy.

GRETCHEN BROWN: That's cool. So the album is out Friday, November 10. Do you have any tour stops planned in the Twin Cities that we can tell folks about?

PAUL SPRING: I'm coming back to Minnesota. It's a ways out here, but I'm playing a show January 19 with my friend JE Sunde at this new venue in St. Paul called the ROK. R-O-K, pretty sick name.

GRETCHEN BROWN: Well, awesome. It's been awesome talking with you, Paul. Thank you so much.

PAUL SPRING: Yeah, thank you for having me, Gretchen. This is kind of a dream come true to get interviewed on here.

ANNOUNCER: Awwn, that was producer Gretchen Brown talking with musician Paul Spring. More information at mprnews.org.