When You Know You Know

Haunted by clarity, his voice carries the seed sound.
-Joseph Rael; Beautiful Painted Arrow

Paul McMahon is a brilliant example of listening to an inner voice and having the courage to express it.
-Caecilie DiaZolena

Paul’s musical wizardry combines insights worthy of Dylan with the vocal charm of Willie Nelson and the eclecticism of the Beatles. Paul has written some of the most beautiful love songs of our times and he can sing them with tenderness, passion and humor. He is simply one of my favorite singers and songwriters and performers alive today. Without Paul McMahon’s songs in my life the world would really be a dark and difficult place.
-Sharon Gannon, co-founder Jivamukti Yoga School

McMahon has got treasures – so many that he needs to swat the dragons away. Styles and skills arcane and universal play through his “folk” songs with fluid ease, and with no regard for preservationist purity or a that’s-how-they-used-to-do-it accuracy. You’ll catch whiffs of rural blues, Dylanesque long-form narrative, deft fingerstyle folk, garage rock, chant, crooner pop, punk, maybe even some madrigal – all of it fully digested and now apparent only as traces in an original, mature voice. We’ll call it folk because it is one man and his parlor guitar. In truth, McMahon is his own poly-genre.
Most of McMahon’s lyrical themes can be teased out of the multiple puns in the title of his latest CD, Hymn to Her. It is devotional (with an Eastern bent) and in the same breath carnal; comic but deep with pathos; mythological and current, often in the same image. To say that McMahon weaves together sacred and profane, timeless and topical doesn’t quite do justice to the spontaneous grace and high-resolution detail of the tapestry.
So to describe the genre-bending Woodstock-based songwriter Paul McMahon in a way that will not engage the treasure-hunters, I will borrow a technical term from the language of musicians: He is a bad__s m__________r.
Hymn to Her is a stripped-down, modest recording, highlighting McMahon’s heavyweight musical assets: an assured, second-nature self-accompaniment on acoustic guitar and a rangy, agreeable voice with sweet spots in all registers (and an uncanny ability to turn into an inhuman drone instrument, like a shruti box or a didgeridoo)
At its wildest, it is not formless music, but rather beyond inherited form. Form is just another element at play, along with words and melody. McMahon’s sharp pop instincts steer and steady his improvisational flight. They are always at the ready to pull a surprising resolution or refrain out of the air or to alight on a melody worth working with for a while, before some lyrical association or other pulls his attention elsewhere.
Clearly, a lot of traditional musical disciplines have been well learned here and then let go. Their boundaries have dissolved and McMahon has found his own largely improvisational path: desultory, whim-driven and, in a way that reminds me of the novelist Henry Miller, unapologetic for his attention deficits.
I see McMahon as someone for whom music is a spiritual pursuit, not so much in his content as in his poised trust in the ongoing good will and bottomless resources of the Muse.
Visit Paul’s website to learn more at paulmcmahon.tv/music.
-John Burdick, Hudson Valley Almanac

Paul McMahon is a unique creative force who has been active in multiple fields over a few decades. A survivor of the No Wave art punk era, he was in Daily Life with Glenn Branca and A Band with Wharton Tiers. A 2010 CD/DVD release called 135 Grand St. on Souljazz records documents 10 No Wave bands filmed in 1979 at the loft he shared with Nancy Chunn. He has released 10 albums since 1986 and several of his youtube videos were recently linked to by NME. His farflung credits include showing his artwork at the Metropolitan Museum, duelling one-liners with Soupy Sales on national TV and studying with the great Native American rainmaker Grandfather Thundercloud. He lives in Woodstock and creativity thrives in his vicinity. His bff babymama Amanda Jo Williams has a hot new release on Neurotic Yell, and he has been associated with Army of Love, Gayle Two Eagles, Naked, Bicyclettes Blanches, Venture Lift, Clayton Denwood, Shamsi Ruhe and Naked to name a few local music acts. He has also been active as a presenter, founding the acoustic venue Dharmaware Cafe and the 'everything center' (for changing times) in Woodstock called the Mothership, a venture which is credited by some with saving the world.

paulmcmahon.tv is his website and he tweets @PaulMcMahon2012