Local singer-songwriter Paul Cody, who combines his first name with his son’s as his stage name, says some of the songs on his new album, New Beginning, are 30 years old.
“I either rewrote the songs or re-imagined them or recorded them just the way I wrote them in my early 20s,” he says via Zoom from his Strongsville home. “I would write the song and record it on cassette, and it would sit on a shelf because it didn’t fit the material I was playing in my live bands at the time.”
A few years ago, when Cody, who grew up in Cleveland, retired from his day job, his plan was to do music full-time. He knew he probably had enough unrecorded folk/rock songs to do another rock album, but he also realized he might have enough country/folk/rock songs to make a country record.
“I said, ‘I wonder how many country songs I have?” he explains. “I looked, and I had enough for almost two albums. I had musician friends telling me to do just an EP because that’s what unknown artists usually do first to get attention. I thought, ‘If I don’t record all of them together now, I may never do them because I write more rock songs overall.’ I chose to make the country album and ended up with 17 songs and feel that they lay out pretty nicely from start to finish. If I get a break in the business, I now have enough material to cover me for a while.”
Growing up, Cody, the youngest of eight children, listened to a bit of everything. And ever since he was a kid, Cody says he could remember a melody and hum it after he heard it just once or twice. He could play a kid’s organ from ear at age 5 with no training.
“I listened to church music to Big Band to the Beatles, Stones, the Who, the Beach Boys for rock to John Denver, Boxcar Willie, Johnny Cash and others for country and singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Jim Croce, Don McLean,” he says. “Lyrically, though, I was really influenced by Paul Simon, Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor and Kenny Loggins as well as the Eagles. It all made me kind of an old soul growing up versus what was on the radio in my teens. In my 20s, I became a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffett, and so there are shades of both on this album as well in either the lyrics or delivery or harmonies. As I’ve evolved as a songwriter, I still write the song first from my perspective but then step outside myself as the listener to see if it is relatable and interesting enough musically so that I reach a compromise that results in a song that reaches people and that they want to hear more than once.”
The first band he formed locally was a folk/rock group he named the Advocates after a song he’d written. When that group split up, he formed Wish, which was more rock-oriented.
“The Advocates played all over town,” he says. “It was a full-blown folk-rock band. After the Advocates, I did solo stuff and then formed Wish with a percussionist/drummer from the Advocates and played all over Ohio, including at Blossom twice opening for national acts.”
For New Beginning, both the digital version of the album on Bandcamp and the physical CD have a 16-page booklet available with the lyrics to all 17 songs as well as pictures of all the musicians that Cody refers to as the Erie Riders. He’s recorded all three of his original music albums with his friend and producer/engineer Chris Keffer at Magnetic North Studios in Beachwood, and for this album, he sings in a slightly deeper voice.
“Many of the songs are deeply personal,” he says. “‘Song for Daddy’ is a metaphor for my father’s failing heart and the ‘band’ [that plays on the song] was my brothers and sisters and I after he passed away two weeks after I graduated high school. The last song, ‘Thank You Mom,’ was a poem I’d written for her at the top of Pikes Peak in 1999 and presented to her for Mother’s Day the following year but finally put to music for this album.”
He says that every girlfriend or wife he’s ever had appears in at least one of the songs on the album. “For a Little While” was written at the end of his second marriage and then rewritten for the album. “It Comes and Goes” relates the story of a dear friend whose wife suffered from cancer for the last 10 years of her life. ‘Angel in Las Vegas’ was a based on a real girlfriend and story. ‘Raise A Glass’ was written after a suggestion from his brother Ken, who said he should try to write something fun and less serious. It came to Cody in about an hour as a cross between a Jimmy Buffett and Bob Dylan song and already has over 10,000 streams on Spotify.
The Georgia Satellites-like “Aint Got Nothin’” is one of the few songs on the album that was purely fictional. “I had just the first few lines for the song with melody, and it sat for a very long time that way until I decided what the song could be about,” says Cody.
The album’s title track gradually builds and works particularly well as an opening track. Cody wrote it in the wake of the break-up of the Advocates.
“I was married for the first time and didn’t know what to do with my creative energies. That song came out of living a domesticated life,” he says when asked about the tune. “That’s how the lyrics came to be. It was a big rock anthem with Wish. We had a keyboardist who would make it sound like a Moody Blues or Doors song. That one goes back a ways. It’s unchanged from when I wrote it in the ’90s. I ended a Wish album with that because I was coming out of a divorce, and the ‘new beginning’ was me starting my life over. This time, I thought I would start the album with it. It’s a new beginning again for me as I start doing music full-time and get back into it.”
His deep, booming voice evokes country greats such as Glen Campbell, John Denver and Johnny Cash.
“What I did was that I went through each song and figured out what key to play them in,” he says. “I asked, ‘What key would my voice sound the best and most country in?’ I did that and I found that even though I could still hit the high notes as originally written, my voice had deepened and I took advantage of that.”
He also added some storytelling aspects to the album.
“I came up with [the song] ‘This Is Mine’ by speaking and then went into the song, and I had a harmonica at the time,” he explains. “I can’t play it very well, but I made up some things. I started remembering some of my influences from the ’70s who would do some storytelling and would talk between lines in the song. Johnny Paycheck did that and Willie Nelson has that talking and singing tendency. I just wanted to let those things come out in the songs.”
Right now, Cody says he’s looking to play local clubs in the spring and then hit summer festivals. He and friend, Cleveland drummer Tommy Amato, will recruit a bassist and perform as a trio. He says his overall goal is to take the album all over the country and has hired a PR company to help him do that.
“The whole point is getting my album out and not playing a lot of covers,” he says. “I can sound like John Denver, but I don’t want people to say, ‘Play that John Denver song.’ I want people to say, ‘Play that Paul Cody song.’”
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