Tag: New Memphis Colorways

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Music Music Features

Paul Taylor’s Homecoming

Courtesy Paul Taylor

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.”

Paul Taylor with Three Springs (Photos: Courtesy Paul Taylor)

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.

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Music Record Reviews

Autumn Almanac: Paul Taylor’s Old Forest LP

The Old Forest Trail, half of this year's double-EP release by New Memphis Colorways

With the Memphis Zoo now backpedaling on their ostensible commitment to avoid using the Overton Park Greensward as a parking lot, everything old is new again, and that includes a renewed appreciation of Overton Park by we, the people. How timely, then, to revisit some music inspired by that great green space. In this case, it’s two EPs by Memphis native Paul “Snowflake” Taylor, aka New Memphis Colorways, which were paired together earlier this year as a single LP in glorious vinyl.

One side of Paul Taylor’s double-EP release (Credit: Paul Taylor)

Memphis Flyer readers already know Old Forest Loop, a groovy, rollicking EP of instrumentals, which Andria Lisle profiled on its release in 2018. All riffs, beats, and changing gears, Taylor conceived of it as “homemade and light-hearted, and I see it as kind of a start-over for me. This is music I deliberately made for people to take summertime drives to — they can grill to it or swim to it.”

And yet, it somehow matches the elation Memphians feel at the return of cool weather as well. It’s an active record, an up record, and fits that impulse to get out of the house for some hiking, biking, or more. Having taken it on a test run while cooking out in the backyard, I can attest to the truth of Taylor’s claim that it pairs well with grilling.

Another side of Paul Taylor’s double-EP release (Credit: Paul Taylor)

If that’s one side of fall, the beauty of these twin EPs being brought together is that the older work, 2015’s The Old Forest Trail, perfectly matches autumn’s air of melancholy and reflection. A largely acoustic outing, it is, in Taylor’s words, “An homage to a sacred natural space in the middle of Memphis TN — the Old Forest Arboretum located in Overton Park.” The somewhat more wistful sound also matches what Taylor was going through in the year of its release, and he notes: “Also lovingly dedicated to the memory of my father, Pat Taylor 1949-2015.”

As he told Lisle, “When my dad [Memphis musician Pat Taylor, a veteran of numerous bands including the Breaks and the Village Sound] was sick, I was playing acoustic guitar by his bedside, and when he passed in early 2015, I was spending a lot of time in the Old Forest in Overton Park.” The peace of wild things, as poet Wendell Berry put it, is thus very much present in this set of songs, which sometimes echo Nick Drake’s application of a folk picking style to unexpected chords.

Another aspect of this album that is uniquely Memphis is the label: It’s the first release in many years by the great Peabody Records, founded by the late Sid Selvidge, now kept afloat by his son Steve. As Taylor points out in the notes, Old Forest Loop/The Old Forest Trail is “a joint venture between Peabody Records and The Owl Jackson Jr. Record Company.”

Ultimately, a refreshingly holistic view of Overton Park comes across with this album: a place of rambunctious activity and a place of solace. Delve into both with this multifaceted work by one of this city’s greatest players.

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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday on Tuesday: “Hangover Funk” by New Memphis Colorways

Music Video Monday is running on a slight delay.

We hope you had a fun Memorial Day weekend. Like most of America, Music Video Monday took the day off yesterday. But we’re committed to our mission of bringing you the freshest music videos from Memphis artists, so we’re treating this Tuesday as a Monday. And we have the perfect post-long weekend for you: “Hangover Funk.”

Paul Taylor is one of Memphis’ favorite musical sons. After starting out with Cody and Luther Dickinson as the “T” in punk legends DDT, he has played with everyone from Ann Peebles to Amy LaVere, earning Grammy and Emmy nominations along the way. During the pandemic, he recorded a new album “It Is What It Isn’t” under his new solo project handle New Memphis Colorways. Listening to “Hangover Funk,” you won’t believe that he played literally every instrument. But if you ever saw him play live as his one-man band Interrobang, you know that he can play all those instruments at the same time.

You can see Paul’s hands at work in the soothingly psychedelic video for “Hangover Funk”, but they’re attached to a visible man. Talk about a transparent process! Take a look:

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Music Record Reviews

New Memphis Colorways: Fueled by Fusion

It Is What it Isn't by New Memphis Colorways

“Jazz” is a big word, and can cover so many approaches to music that it may have lost all its descriptive power. That is especially true if one follows the music’s history into the 1970s and beyond. After traditional forms were blown wide open in the 1960s (with the ascendance of free jazz), the music’s influences and reference points became so far-flung that any noise, texture, or groove was fair game.

Anything being fair game is a good motto for the latest album by New Memphis Colorways, It is What it Isn’t, set to be self-released on May 21st. As the catch-all name for the various musical projects of virtuoso Paul Taylor, New Memphis Colorways has always considered the world fair game, of course, ranging from tightly woven power pop of The Music Stands to the stomping, almost surfing groove rock of Old Forest Loop.

Most of those earlier projects showed off Taylor’s inventiveness with a dollop of genre-appropriate restraint, his self-accompaniment on multiple instruments always in service of the song. But what restraints are in play when the song is jazz-funk fusion? Those are mostly the restraints demanded by each song’s groove, even as solo instruments take unfettered flight. Yea verily, this is the album where Taylor lets his freak flag fly high.

Imagining some of Herbie Hancock’s finest work from the late 70s or 80s, from Man-Child to Future Shock, will put you in the ballpark. It’s not that none of the players (all Taylor, in this case) show restraint; an effective groove requires that sense of space. It’s rather that the direction of the melodies, instrumentation, and breakdowns could surprise you with any new development at any time.

And that’s exactly what awaits listeners of It is What it Isn’t. Just take the lead single and video, “Hangover Funk.”

Video game skronks give way to the solidest of grooves, backing up some smooth/tweaked keyboard chords. Is this Herbie Hancock or George Clinton? Or Pac Man, perhaps? None of the above: this is New Memphis Colorways.

It’s first-rate funk (and excellent party music, by the way), all the better to undergird a full-on rock guitar solo that screams “good times,” which anything evoking the 1970s surely must. As the opening track of the album, it’s perfect, and sets the tone for much of what is to follow. But, having set the inventiveness bar so high from the top, what follows is essentially more funky unpredictability and more expressive synth and guitar playing.

One surprise, even in this cornucopia of surprises, is Taylor’s treatment of the jazz standard, “All the Things You Are.” It’s played with a jazzer’s sensitivity to the delicate harmonies, but what really sets it apart is the singing voice run through a vocoder. It’s as if Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” suddenly fell in love. And in combining the sci-fi iciness of a synthetic vocoder with such a chestnut of the 1930s, an eerie, Blade Runner-esque world is conjured up, perfect for our current moment in history. It’s that restless inventiveness that keeps this from being a retro fashion accessory, and propels it into a fusion work of the highest order.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Two-fer Tuesday: Stephen Chopek and Paul Taylor

It’s a very special Tuesday edition of Music Video Monday. Two of Memphis’ finest musicians sent in videos for Music Video Monday marking big changes in their lives. Stephen Chopek and Paul Taylor are moving out of Memphis, at least for the time being. Since they’re friends in real life, I decided to pay tribute to them together.

Chopek not only has a prolific recording career, he is also a one-man music video factory. The no-budget auteur has been Music Video Monday’s most frequent feature, and his videos never fail to wow with their creativity. He’s decamping to Atlanta to be with his family, so he made this video for his song “Unspoken Hopes” as a symbol of planting a new seed and hoping it grows. “There’s only so long that you can ignore intuition,” he says.  “Recurring ideas, plans, and dreams have a way of finding their way out the unconscious mind and into waking life. ‘Unspoken Hopes’ is about your inner voice manifesting itself into reality through repetition. This song deals with leaving 2020 behind and allowing our instincts to guide us into the future.”

Music Video Two-fer Tuesday: Stephen Chopek and Paul Taylor

“Fun fact,” says Chopek. “The very first gig I played after moving to Memphis in 2014 was drumming with Paul Taylor at the Blue Monkey.” (See Alex Greene’s record review here.)

Taylor is Memphis music royalty. He was the “T” in seminal Antenna punk band DDT, along with Cody and Luther Dickinson. Since then, he’s had a an extensive solo career and been a trusted, in-demand sideman both in the studio and on stage. Trust me, the man plays literally everything better than you. He’s leaving behind the Bluff City to head north, and he’s nostalgic about the Midtown he leaves behind. He says his video for “So Long, Rembert” is “an homage to a special house on a special street; the end of a critical chapter, as my wife and I have relocated to Wisconsin for the time being. So many important things happened in my life in this house, so many things came together for me musically in this room, I can’t help but feel sentimental and want to pay tribute to these four walls! This street, Rembert, right off Poplar Ave, has been home to everyone from Alex Chilton to Jeff Buckley. It’s been one of the last vestiges of bohemian midtown Memphis. Now, half the street is being torn down for condos and the MCA dorms are being replaced with a high rise. This music for me reflects the dismal yet hopeful nature of time moving forward! This video was made by literally screen recording while i slid my thumb to move the frames of a paused video to make my own homemade time lapse.”

Music Video Two-fer Tuesday: Stephen Chopek and Paul Taylor (2)

Paul and Stephen, we’ll miss y’all. Don’t be strangers. After all, everybody knows, once you’re in the Memphis Music Mafia, it’s for life. You’ll always get pulled back in. 

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Music Music Features

Sonic Popsicle: Paul Taylor’s Merry Mobile Offers Musical Delights

It was only January when we last wrote about Paul Taylor’s then-latest release, but that seems like eons ago. More and more in these quarantine days, musicians are starting and finishing projects in their home studios — or sorting through their archives. In the case of Merry Mobile, whose debut album, Surprise Attack, went live on Bandcamp last Friday, it’s very much the latter. And though the group has a tinker toy name, there was precious little tinkering involved — setting it apart from other projects tagged as New Memphis Colorways, which usually follow the one-man-band model.

“We recorded that stuff over two days at Zebra Ranch in 2013, live on the floor,” recalls Taylor. “It was such a departure from me sitting in front of a personal session and editing and overdubbing by myself. To have just done it and been done with it was quite a relief, in a lot of ways. I would have loved to have fixed the guitar solos and to have resung everything, but making the decision to leave it as it was was super liberating.”

Indeed, a feeling of liberation pervades the record, making it a welcome curative to the shut-in blues of 2020. This is partly due to the chemistry between the three players. The power trio tacks back and forth between tightly arranged song structures and open-ended breakdowns — often more atmospheric than typical “solos” — yet built around some very evocative guitar textures from Taylor.

Amazing, then, that that very guitar work caused Taylor to keep these recordings in the can until now. “The main reason I didn’t put the record out at the time was that I could hear my own mistakes. And it kinda took seven years of me not listening to it, to all of a sudden hear it and be like, ‘Wow, this is not nearly as unforgivable as I thought it was!’”

But beyond any forgivability, it explores new territory in terms of mashing up genres. “I used to joke at the time that we were the world’s first indie rock jam band,” laughs Taylor. “We had a lot of instrumentals and a lot of jammy stuff, but then also my more power-pop-influenced songs as well. All mixed together. You know, Memphis music!”

As with so many great Memphis bands, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. “There’s an interesting combination of players,” says Taylor. “I’d given bass lessons to Daniel McKee, the bass player, when he was a teenager and I was in my mid-20s. Then he and I struck up a friendship for a couple years before we formed the band. And then I just randomly put up a post on Facebook looking for a drummer, and Brian Wells was like, ‘I’d love to do it.’ He and Daniel already made a bunch of music together. And Brian, to me, was the secret ingredient, because he plays in a really old-school way that’s not super gratuitous. And stylistically, it was such an interesting fit. I feel like he’s what made it.”

There were others involved as well, of course. “It was co-produced by Luther Dickinson and recorded by Kevin Houston. It’s got some really killer horn arrangements by Marc Franklin. It’s an interesting artifact of a band that I’m super proud of. It was my first-ever band-leading experience.”

Taylor carefully chose the name for his first project as a leader. “I named the band the Merry Mobile in the fine tradition of Memphis bands co-opting the names of old Memphis institutions — such as Big Star. Easy Way was another great one. Coach and Four was really good.”

And what was the Merry Mobile? “Ha! It was an ice cream truck in the ’50s and ’60s that had a lawnmower engine with this circular thing, and it went down the street. It was just a Memphis and Louisville thing, strangely enough. And by the ’70s, so I’ve heard, if it was in certain neighborhoods you could go and buy, possibly, other things, besides ice cream? Just your friendly neighborhood Merry Mobile!”

Paul Taylor plays a live-streamed solo concert on Facebook Wednesday, May 13th, 8 p.m.
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Music Music Blog

New Memphis Colorways: A Man, A Band, A Plan

Paul Taylor, aka New Memphis Colorways

Memphians not hip to specific personnel in the local music scene may have seen the name New Memphis Colorways pop up in their feeds from time to time, and wondered just what that could be. A man? A band? A plan? [Panama? – ed.]

Actually, it’s all three. First of all, it’s the man otherwise known as Paul Taylor, a self-taught multi-instrumentalist who grew up in the midst of many Memphis music luminaries, including his own father, legendary singer and guitarist Pat Taylor. “And I learned most of my songcraft from Richard Orange,” Taylor adds. “He was very much a second dad to me.”

Orange, of course, first came to Memphis as leader of the band Zuider Zee, whose recent release of archival material from 1972-74, Zeenith, was dubbed one of 2018’s best reissues by Rolling Stone magazine. That’s especially relevant because echoes of that era, albeit with some serious reconfiguring, are all over New Memphis Colorway’s new album, The Music Stands., to be celebrated at a release party on Friday, January 31 at The Green Room at Crosstown Concourse. It will simultaneously become available on all streaming services.

“The first two tracks are my weird modern take on Memphis power pop,” says Taylor, “and then it shifts to songwriter/acoustic mode for a couple songs, and then a couple of art rock instrumentals. Then the last song is a reflective ballad.”

While it’s easy to lay claim to the territory first mapped out by Big Star, Zuider Zee, or the Hot Dogs back in the day, the proof comes as soon as the proverbial needle drops. (Someone please put this out on vinyl!) “Impossible Goals” revs up like the Clash, then hits you with unexpected riffs and the kind of unaffected, straight-arrow singing you might have thought was extinct.

One astounding feat is the way Taylor’s voice has hints of Alex Chilton, even as his songwriting has more echoes of Chris Bell. And yet the music also could sit comfortably next to much later touchstones, like the Posies, in all its unexpected harmonic and rhythmic turns.

“I don’t want to be super-referential to the past,” notes Taylor. “I hold in my head, daily, the Sam Phillips quote, ‘If you’re not doing something different, you’re not doing anything at all.’ I do make study of older music, and I think it’s critical that you learn it note for note. I’m transcribing jazz solos or learning Steve Cropper or Teenie Hodges or Reggie Young, or the drumming of Gene Chrisman and Al Jackson Jr. These are my heroes. But I don’t deliberately set about making music that shows that off. At the end of the day, I try to throw that away and just let the songs come out.”

And come out they do, as some notable musicians, having heard advance tracks, have remarked on.

“Paul Taylor’s new record, under the nom de plume New Memphis Colorways, is like looking through a glass phosphorescently. Truly an artist of wizardry, sailing uncharted waters of sound, colour and light. An otherworldly adventure in melodic transcendence. Not to be missed.” – Richard Orange

Okay, that was from his “second dad” and mentor. But other songwriters have weighed in as well. Chuck Prophet, with whom Taylor has worked extensively in the past, said, “Paul has really come into his own here. Although the songs are deceptively simple, there’s a world inside each track. These little musical creations are killer. They will creep up on you. They’ll reach out and grab you. It’s all very soulful. And a little magical too. Kinda proggy. Kind of indie. And utterly impossible to describe. I dig it.”

And one of Memphis’ more literary songwriters, Cory Branan, had this to say: “Paul’s out of his damn mind. He conjures more original musical ideas in 12 bars than most musicians do with entire albums. The Music Stands. finds him, as always, accessing strangenesses and welding the unexpected with a singular vision.”

One striking thing about the record is that it doesn’t sound, like so many records, like the product of tinkering. It has the impact of a full-on rock band. Which would seem to answer the second query as to what exactly New Memphis Colorways is. But if you assumed it was a band from, say 1979, playing on these tracks, you’d be wrong. Nearly all the instruments were played by Taylor. New Memphis Colorways is a band in a man.

“I grew up listening to a lot of Todd Rundgren and a lot of Prince, and people like that who made records where they played everything. It’s what I’ve been doing since I was literally seven years old, when my dad was helping me four-track songs, so it seemed like a natural thing for me to do. The next record I make, I would hopefully play an acoustic guitar and hire a band around me, and do it live, like a lot of Memphis records that I love were. This one is more of a D.I.Y. affair, which is fun.”

Nevertheless, the album release show will have a full band. “I have musicians that are just incredible,” says Taylor. “Hopefully we’ll be playing more shows.”

Add that to a long list of releases, projects and entities with which Taylor is associated, much of which he releases on his own label, the Owl Jackson Jr. Record Company. “New Memphis Colorways is my brand,” Taylor clarifies. “And it’s all encompassing. Anybody who knows me knows I do a bunch of different things. The EP I released previously [Old Forest Loop] was drastically different from this, and the next one will probably be drastically different.” Still other eclectic expressions come in the form of an album of experimental instrumentals that exist only under the hashtag #nmcvignettes, and an even earlier online release, The Old Forest Trail.

The diversity of these varied projects is a delight in its own right, and ultimately shows that, at heart, New Memphis Colorways is a plan. “I’m a huge fan of skateboard art and graphic design in general,” explains Taylor. “If you were to release a skateboard, it might have different color combinations and variations on the same graphic: colorways. The whole concept of New Memphis Colorways is that it’s new combinations of ideas.” In this newest work, one finds the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach of the ’70s alive and well, and definitely kicking. It’s an approach that suits New Memphis Colorways just fine.