The Greek word nostos, meaning the triumphant homecoming of a conquering hero, may spring to mind when one learns that Paul Taylor, aka New Memphis Colorways, will be playing his first Memphis show in over three years this week. Certainly with his multi-instrumentalism, compositional acumen, and sheer musical feeling, he’s a heroic Memphis troubadour, doggedly releasing finely wrought albums and working shows with multiple bands despite lacking a “hit” or major name recognition. Growing up “a second-generation Memphis musician,” as he puts it, was working well for him, leading to many years of steady playing around town. Perhaps the real hero’s journey began when he and his wife decided to follow their hearts and transplant themselves to Door County, Wisconsin, three years ago. What was at stake? Only everything he’d built up over a lifetime in Memphis music.
“When we moved up here in 2020, it was the great pandemic shake-up and my gerbil wheel of being a busy Memphis musician completely ground to halt,” Taylor recalls. “That was when Sarah and I thought, ‘You know, we love Door County. Why don’t we move there?’ Because this was months and months before a vaccine or anything. Nobody knew what the world was going to look like. We were like, ‘Just in case things get really crazy, what if we hid out in Door County and kind of see how things go?’ She looked and found a winter cabin that we wound up staying in for six months.”
They already loved Door County, Taylor having been introduced to the area by Memphis guitarist Eric Lewis many years earlier. “Eric does an annual show here, the Fishstock concert series at Camp David, run by this amazing family that’s almost like a hippie commune. He’s been doing it for 25 years. I started coming up and playing drums with him here in 2007. So that was a critical part of how I moved up here. Sarah fell in love with the place, too, and we wound up getting married here.”
In Covid-induced isolation, he was more productive than most, swapping tracks with Steve Selvidge and Luther Dickinson to create the MEM_MODS debut, and working on solo tracks with tweaked programmed beats and soulful singing, now being released as his New Memphis Colorways EP, Let the Mystery Be. But as the pandemic eased a bit, something unexpected started to happen.
“I think I was sort of on the ground floor of a sort of new music scene reinventing itself up here post-pandemic,” Taylor explains. “Up here, there’s always been a lot more gentle folk music and bluegrass, but there are younger people starting to come up here. I got really lucky and wound up playing a bunch of weekly gigs that I’ve been doing for almost three years now. I play background jazz guitar at a dinner gig. And then I met a 72-year-old guitarist/songwriter from Chicago who turned out to be an absolute jazz master named John Lewis, and we formed an organ trio with Sister Bay native Solomon Lindenberg on keys. We’ve been playing all this funky music for two years. And then I formed this band that I’m going to be bringing down to Memphis, which is a whole other story.”
That story simultaneously reaches into Taylor’s past and indicates his future. “I formed that band, Three Springs, with two Wisconsinite fellows that I’ve befriended, Adam Cain on drums and John Frater on bass,” says Taylor. “It started with me showing them a whole bunch of songs that were on my first few solo records that I thought had really suffered from being some of my first recordings, when I was pretty inexperienced. But they’re some of my favorite songs, so I formed this band as a vehicle to give those songs a fresh life.”
New Memphis Colorways fans know to expect the unexpected, but Taylor says the group specializes in “originals that are everything from power pop to instrumental tunes to funk,” and has plans to record while here as well. He emphasizes that a strong Memphis streak runs through all his music, no matter where he is. “Even though I’ve been up here for three years and plan to stay, I will always consider myself a Memphis musician.”
Paul Taylor’s Three Springs plays The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Friday, November 17th, at 7:30 p.m. Visit crosstownarts.org for details.
