Paula Wolfe’s third album ‘White Dots’ (Sib Records 2019) was hailed ‘exquisite’, ‘glorious’ and ‘addictive’ (* * * * MOJO) and saw ‘The multi-hyphenate in excellent form’ (Folking.com).
Proclaimed ‘a MOJO artist’, this ‘collection of songs that combine glorious Brill Building-style chant, jazz drums and lustrous strings’ (MOJO) saw critics compare her to many of our greats. She has been described as ‘a latter-day Carole King’ (MOJO) and ‘part Kirsty MacColl’ (Velvet Sheep) whilst for others her songs recall ‘the eloquence of Ray Davies and Paul Weller in their pomp’ married with ‘the spirit of Lily Allen and Laura Marling’ (Travellers Tunes).
With the album’s first single, ‘Georgia Blue’, positioned as ‘ “That’s Entertainment” for the woke generation’ (Travellers Tunes), all were in agreement that Wolfe is ‘super-smart and keenly observant’ and who presented a new array of characters on ‘White Dots’ with ‘unerring charm’ (Velvet Sheep). They included a cross-dressing train driver, a solitary caravan dweller in southern France, an ageing bachelor looking for late love online and Mexico City’s street children working its nocturnal streets while their compatriots busked on the Paris Metro on the other side of the world.
Throughout her career, the work of the London and Norfolk based artist-producer has consistently received strong support. It is no surprise, therefore, that this ‘joyful soul pop follow-up’ (MOJO) to her critically acclaimed 2009 ‘Lemon’ (* * * * MOJO, * * * UNCUT, * * * Maverick) is no exception and that Wolfe’s skills as a songwriter, producer and musician continue to flourish and to enchant: ‘Layered with such vivid characters and enriching landscapes, Wolfe has provided an album that keeps on giving.’ (Travellers Tunes)
‘White Dots’ is also a body of work that confirmed Wolfe as ‘a major talent’ (MusicOMH) and affirmed her reputation as ‘a splendid songwriter’ (UNCUT), who writes ‘exceptional’ lyrics delivered with a ‘gorgeous’ voice (Maverick). Little wonder her intelligent balancing of lyrical theme and musical form have earned her personal praise from the Head of Music at BBC Radio 2 and 6Music (Jeff Smith) and the type of accolade expressed by one critic who has declared her work, ‘A flawless exercise in modern art, that boasts enough melody to make this as warm and approachable as possible, whilst being unafraid to extend an olive branch to the musos; stunning’ (New-noise.net).
Wolfe is no less acclaimed as a live performer and has been described as simply ‘mesmeric’ (The Guardian Hay Festival) and ‘brilliant’ (Sky Arts). So, if critics have long marked her out as ‘a rising star’ (BBC Introducing), ‘a rising talent’ (Time Out) and indeed ‘a formidable talent’ (Netrhythms), what was she doing between her second and third release?
Well, in between building a studio in a 16th century run-down country house and then writing, recording and producing the album in its entirety, she completed a PhD, established a global profile as a leading scholar in the field of music production, taught to pay the bills and secured a publishing contract. Released alongside the album, her book, Women in The Studio (Routledge 2020), was received as ‘captivating’, ‘crucial’ and ‘timely’ and nominated for The Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research Award 2020 from The Association of Recorded Sound (ARC) and the 2021 Book Prize for The International Association for The Study of Popular Music (IASPM): https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-the-Studio-Creativity-Control-and-Gender-in-Popular-Music-Sound/Wolfe/p/book/9781472474872.
Since the double drop, Wolfe has been delivering public lectures internationally based on her book and her own creative practice. She has also entirely reworked her early catalogue which, along with her remastered second album, are all coming out this summer and autumn.
You might well ask, why would anyone re-work their early releases? Well, shortly following the third album, she had her early recordings remastered with the intention that the full catalogue be re-issued before the releasing her fourth.
However, she couldn’t access the original files. Part of that first generation of female artists who, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, embraced the arrival of digital recording software to develop their own sound, she had recorded the first two records onto disc on a digital 8 track using an early version of the software Cakewalk. Attempts to remaster from the CDs were unsuccessful, so she decided to re-record all the songs.
What then started out as a ‘straightforward’ re-recording, soon morphed into a complete reworking. Although it took far longer than envisaged, it developed into an insightful, important period of work, with Paula publishing a paper about the very creative and technical processes that have come to define her work as a self-producing singer-songwriter.
Somewhat ironically, the title track of the EP Find is actually about songwriting itself – or rather – the pull at the end of the summer to return ‘home’ to the craft. Many of the songs on those first two records, though, are stories based on her time living in Manchester in the north-west of England throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. An era of hardship for many, her characters often find themselves on the edges, living out their marginalisation. They also speak of her own troubled loves from that time, thus combining storytelling, a key feature of Wolfe’s later work, along with the confessional. What is striking is that these songs, based on particular events, from a particular time in a particular place, feel compellingly relevant.
As dark as some of these stories are, Wolfe’s production, on the other hand is upbeat with the songs benefiting from her new string, brass and woodwind arrangements performed by a small team of local session players she recorded in her house, while she provides all the guitars, the bass (which she taught herself to play as part of the project), the synths and beats and, of course, her signature vocals.
Having garnered widespread acclaim throughout her career for ‘hitting the mark on both sides of the desk’ (Fatea Magazine), this project demonstrates that the plaudits for Paula’s skills as composer, arranger, producer and mix engineer, in addition to those as a songwriter, musician and singer, remain as well deserved as ever.