Bio

           Paul Clay is an exciting emerging artist whose music blends carelessness and glitz with concern and radicalism.  Drawing on his convictions, life experience, and influences as varied as Paul Simon, Enya, and Peaches, he is creating exciting music with a vibrant flavor and a sound all his own.
            Paul Clay was born in Redwood City, California.  At six he moved with his family to Ashland, Oregon, a small university town nestled in the foothills of the Siskiyou and Cascade mountain ranges.  It was in this cultural mecca that he first began exploring his interest in music, beginning piano lessons at age nine and writing his first song for piano two years later.  By middle school he had begun experimenting with electronic music on a computer and keyboard in his bedroom.  In 2003, as a highschool sophomore, Paul self-produced his first album, Made for Color.  The thirteen tracks, all recorded in his bedroom studio, range from instrumental electronica to dancy rants to a tongue-in-cheek paean to menstruation.
            Made for Color delighted Paul’s friends and classmates with its lighthearted lyrics, upbeat tempos, and fresh, bouncy instrumentals— Paul associates each song with one or more colors— and the young artist soon caught the attention of his local newspaper.  He sold copies at school and in Ashland record stores, and gained an enthusiastic following at his high school, where his creative stage performance won him the school talent show in his junior year.
            After high school Paul enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he currently is a Sophomore.  While at school, he performs his music often, both in full-scale concerts of his own, and in high-energy drag ball performances, for which he wrote the song “Boise Idaho (Drag Queen),”  winning the coveted title of Reed College Drag Queen of the year in 2006.  In November of that year he released his long-awaited second album, Lab and Family, a reference to the high school chemistry lab partners who became his first performance troupe.  This album marks a continuation of Paul’s commitment to playful and original songwriting, but also underscores his maturation as an artist and an individual during the three years since Made for Color’s release.  On Lab and Family Paul speaks more earnestly as a person navigating the first hectic years of adulthood and independence.  He also employs his music as a platform for issues about which he is passionate, such as alternative transportation and queer rights. 
            Paul Clay’s sound has evolved as well.  Though his songs still fit the mantle of electro-pop, this second album is even more varied than the last, and has an invigorating, frantic quality that he attributes to the frenzied commotion of life after high school, in particular “the emotional rollercoaster of being around lots of college-age women.”  The result is a music uniquely situated at the intersection of David Bowie, The Postal Service, Joni Mitchell, and Bjork.  From his hyper-dancy queertronica, to his passionate political electroballads, to his spanish-language proficiency in “Maremoto” (product of a high school semester in Guanajuato, Mexico and an early childhood in Costa Rica) Paul never hesitates to take his music in directions hardly explored by any other American artist.  Writes Alley Hector of oregonlive.com, his is “a dynamic and varied sound that at once reminds me of Electro-clash beats and a musical theater piece. And yet, be ready to surprised again because the next track may morph into a surreal and sweet folk song. I do so love the schizophrenic nature of his sound.”
            Whether alone on stage with his keyboard and synthesizers or accompanied by a drummer, dancers, and the occasional cellist or guitarist, in a dress or smearing mud all over the stage, Paul Clay is a dynamic, exciting performer not to be missed.