The first time I listened to Eli “Paperboy” Reed’s upcoming record, My Way Home, I assumed it was an album of covers. The songs carry an immediately iconic weight, which evoke the imagery of old gospel standards from the ’60s and ’70s. Everything about the LP — from Reed’s gravely howl to the silky-smooth harmony of his backup singers — is dripping with gospel authenticity. That’s why I was surprised to learn that the songs on My Way Home are 100% original, written by Reed over the course of just a few weeks.
In fact, Reed has been playing soul-inspired music for more than a decade. He served as the minister of music at Southside church in Chicago before moving to Boston, where he wrote and recorded his first full length album, Roll with You. It wasn’t long before major label deals were offered and Reed’s songs were optioned for major motion pictures, TV shows, and commercials. His follow up albums, Come and Get it and Nights Like This, earned more than two million dollars in licensing before an unfortunate turn of events ended Reed’s contract with Warner Bros. Records.
Free of a grueling tour schedule, Reed found himself involved with Gospel for Teens, an arts education program for at-risk youths based in New York City. It was while teaching gospel quartets that Reed was encouraged to write and record the kind of music that first inspired him: gospel.
I recently caught up with Reed to talk about his new album, the artists that inspire him, and his addiction to collecting 45 RPM records.
So I’ve been listening to My Way Home a lot this week. I was actually listening to it this morning, it’s really good.
Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
I’ve got my own thoughts, but could you tell me what this new record is about?
Oh man, I think it came from a place of, not necessarily frustration, but of wanting to try something different and to go back to the way that I made music when I started. I mean the songs were written with just myself and an acoustic guitar and a pad of paper, which is how I did things in the beginning.
I was inspired to write more songs that were not necessarily about the same old romantic tropes, and something that was more serious and more universal. Something that more people could relate to. From a songwriting perspective, I wanted to do something more serious.
I personally was raised by a Southern preacher, so a lot of the imagery you used in the album was very familiar to me. It definitely has a religious feel, but I don’t know if I’d call it a religious album.
There’s a genre of music that you don’t really hear much about, it is the idea of inspirational music, I guess. I wasn’t trying to make a gospel record, but I was trying to be more serious, whatever that means to you. Inspiration is how I describe it.
I certainly didn’t want to exclude anybody by writing the songs that I did, in fact I wanted it to be more inclusive. I think that the imagery and the power of gospel music is something that has affected me since a very early age, and it’s something that I continue to turn to in my own life. So I think religious or otherwise, there’s power in that music, no matter what faith you subscribe to.
So what does gospel mean to you?
The literal definition is “good news,” and I think that is something that still applies. I think it can mean something that picks you up when you’re feeling down. I think it’s about creating something out of nothing, in the depths of despair. I think that’s what’s real to me. I think as an art form, it almost doesn’t have much to do with the religious nature of the music and more about how it makes you feel and, as a performer, how you feel when you’re performing it.
It sounds like you have a long history with gospel music. How did you find it?
There was gospel music around my house from a very young age, whether it was The Soul Stirrers or Mahalia Jackson. So it was definitely not something that I ever wanted for. And I think as I got older, I got more and more into it, and I gravitated towards that kind of stuff, and I realized how foundational it was the kind of music that I already loved.
I kind of started down that path and was able to find more and more gospel records that I didn’t see anywhere else. It was music that wasn’t available digitally or on CD, so you just had to go find the records. It was just exciting to me, and it continues to be exciting to me, that you can find so much music — new and old. You know, if you go around to different churches around the country, you’re going to hear different styles from different groups, and I found it very refreshing.
And then, when I moved to Chicago, I started playing organ at the church of a woman named Mitty Collier who was a soul singer in the ’60s, and had started her ministry later in life, and I ended up being her organ player and singing for her during that year in Chicago. It taught me a lot about gospel music — and also performing — and what that all meant.
When I went back to Boston, I ended up in a group called The Silver Leaf Gospel Singers, which is the longest running quartet in Boston, one of the longest running in the country. It was founded in 1945, and when I was in the group, it was with a lot of guys in their 70s and 80s, and they really taught me a lot about what it meant to be in a quartet, and harmony, and all that.
Is that how you got involved with Gospel for Teens?
That was much later, actually. I ended up working with Gospel for Teens after I had been releasing records for awhile. I got in touch with the founder of the program, her name is Vy Higginsen. She started the program in 2007 and I met with her and, at the time, they had strictly choir music, and they had never done anything that was strictly for small groups or quartet, which is my true love when it comes to gospel music.
So I asked her point blank, “Are you interested in doing a quartet program?” And she said, “Well, we’ve never had a teacher.” I told her I would be happy to do it when I’m not on tour. That was 2013, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Actually, I have a class tomorrow.
Would you say that your work with Gospel for Teens influenced your upcoming record?
Absolutely. I think that, basically, I had been doing the class for a few years, on and off when I could, when I was off the road. And then in the summer of 2014, I had a pretty bad breakup with Warner Bros., and ended up at loose ends for the first time. So the class became the focal point of what I was doing instead of something that I did on the side.
I did the class on Fridays and didn’t have a lot going on the rest of the time. Working with the kids kind of energized me to start writing music, and start thinking about more stuff along those lines, and then last spring I ended up doing a tour for the 10th anniversary of my first album and, on that tour, I played with some old friends and ended up playing a lot more guitar, and it was a lot of down home music.
I came back to NYC last April and thought that I should write more stuff like that, and then combined with the influence of working with the kids, this is just what came out. I wrote most of the songs for this record in about three or four weeks.
It sounds like gospel music is something that you’ve been doing for a long time, which is interesting because there’s been a resurgence in gospel and soul influences. How do you feel about bands like Alabama Shakes and St. Paul and The Broken Bones being so popular?
It’s funny for me, I mean those guys are like the new kids on the block. But I’m excited about what they are doing, and I am happy that people are into music that sounds like that. I mean, I’ve been doing this for more than ten years right now, which is very exciting and I feel very blessed to have a decade long career.
And I’m excited to hear that people are interested in hearing music like that, and that’s all there is to it. I never would have expected this kind of resurgence ten years ago.
You mentioned earlier that the songs on My Way Home are more serious, that they’re speaking to a higher ideal. I noticed, when listening earlier, that lyrics from similar acts are all about modern romance, or about being broken hearted, but what you’ve written feels much more serious than all that.
I appreciate that, you know. I love soul music, but I after awhile it can be grating to listen to the same “baby this” and “baby that.” For me as a signer and a performer, I get tired of singing stuff like that. When we play live, the songs get opened up a lot, and I’ll expound upon the themes, and since we’ve been singing these songs, I feel like I have so much more freedom to just talk about whatever.
There is an amazing live record by Solomon Burke, it’s from the ’80s and it’s called Soul Alive! and most of his songs are nominally love songs, but he’ll do these ballads for about 10 minutes and he just goes off on his own tangents, and he just talks about whatever he wants to talk about, whether it’s love, or you can’t find a job, or you’re having trouble at home. It opens your mind to the options of what’s out there.
You don’t have to stick to the same old romantic themes. They can get tired, frankly.
Speaking of old records, I hear that you’re a collector.
I’m a big record collector. Mostly 45s, I have about five thousand.
How does somebody collect that many 45s? How do you find them?
There are great record stores around the country, and there’s also eBay which is helpful if you’re not close to any place or if you don’t have a lot of time.
I think that you get to know as a collector what is going to be good by the way it looks. You can tell what era it’s from by the way it looks, or what region it’s from by the way it looks. Different pressing plants have different fonts and different stampers that you can just see. And then getting to know the ways the different genres look.
Half the time that I am looking for gospel records, there isn’t even a label, it’s just a vanity pressing that the group pressed on their own to sell at their shows or at church. I’m always interested in those, and it’s just something that you learn to look out for.
Do you have a favorite 45?
I got this record, I was actually in my honeymoon in Savannah, Georgia, and I convinced my wife to stop at this thrift store. “It looks like they got some records, just let me take 20 minutes and take a look.”
And I found this record by The Peerless Four, which is a group that I had been aware of for a while, but I had never heard of this record. And it turned out to be kind of the holy grail of gospel funk, and I think there is only one other copy in the world that’s known, and I picked it up for 50 cents in this junk store in Savannah. I definitely still play it in my set all the time, it’s called “I Don’t Know What Tomorrow Will Bring.”
How do you preserve something like that? Do you make a digital copy of the record, just in case the 45 is ever destroyed or becomes unplayable?
It’s funny, I feel the record is way more resilient than any digital copy I could make. At this point, if they’ve lasted this long, and they’re in my possession, I’m going to take care of them.
I mean God forbid there’s a fire or something, that would be terrible. But I’m not a big fan of digital transfers. To me, I’m cool with having the records as they are. If someone asks me for a copy of something, I’m more than obliged to make one.
I started collecting vinyl when I was about 12, and I’ve moved around a lot, so my collection has kind of grown and shrunk depending on how much I could move at the time. It’s the worst.
That’s why I buy 45s, because they’re so much smaller and easier to move.
Ha, yeah I just figured that out. I recently spent a few years in Nashville and ended up going to Jack White’s place all the time, Third Man Records, and that’s how I finally got into 45s.
Yeah, for sure. Though his stuff isn’t old, right? Just reissues?
Some reissues, but mostly stuff that he’s recorded in house with local and touring artists. It was all musicians that I was already interested in, so I kind of started collecting their 45s for the novelty of it.
For me, whether it’s rhythm and blues or gospel or whatever, for a long time, the 45 was by far the dominant medium, most things were not on LPs or anything else, so you gotta go where the action is.
Do you plan to release more music on 45s?
I always put out 45s, one way or another. We’ll probably record some non-LP stuff for the Fall. I’m actually in talks with Yep Rock to do a record with Roscoe Robinson, who is one of my mentors, and he did some amazing soul records and gospel records, so maybe we’ll do a 45 with Roscoe and start trying some stuff and see how it goes.
And yeah, the 45 is my favorite medium, so I’m always looking to put stuff out on 45.
The more I collect them, the more I love them. Sadly, when I was younger, I didn’t really take great care of my records, I can’t really call myself an audiophile.
45s are just loud, that’s what it’s really about. They were cut for AM radio, they are loud. The bass is probably going to be distorted, in fact everything is going to be distorted. Audiophiles are not interested in 45s, in my opinion. But I like them because they’re loud.
I don’t call myself an audiophile, either. You really can’t be if you collect records. The quality is never going to be technically good. I mean, I love CDs; a CD is the highest quality recording you can listen to, in my opinion. A record is never going to be pristine, for the most part, unless you’re buying something that’s brand new, and you never are with the kind of music that I like.
