Eli Paperboy Reed

“It’s been twenty years since I’ve had a real job”, laughs Eli Paperboy Reed from his Brooklyn apartment. In some ways, he’s not joking, though those two decades have been chock full of the round-the-clock hustle that it takes to make a career in the fickle music industry. Indeed, Reed has found a way to maintain a famously high standard for both his critically acclaimed albums (nine and counting) and his notoriously sweaty, searing and soulful live sets. None of this was a foregone conclusion.

Reed cut his teeth in the early 2000s, first in the juke joints of Clarksdale, MS where he moved after graduating high school in 2002, and then in the southside Chicago church of Soul legend Mitty Collier. By 2005 though, Reed was back in his hometown of Boston, driving a van delivering flowers in the mornings (“the best job I ever had”) and spending his free afternoons busking in Harvard Square, Cambridge for tips. He put in the proverbial 10,000 hours playing guitar, harmonica and singing for 3-4 hours a day, as long as it was above 50 degrees.  He had just “released” his first album, the optimistically titled “Sings Walkin’ and Talkin’ (and other Smash Hits). It was recorded all live to analog tape in mono and Reed scraped together the money to press up 300 CDs.

With every step forward, Reed attempts something new, different and untested. The COVID lockdowns of 2020 inspired him to fulfill a dream he’d had since the very beginning: To record an album’s worth of songs by country music legend Merle Haggard. Reed’s versions of The Hag’s classic songs like “Workin’ Man Blues” and “Mama Tried” brought another milestone: An invitation to perform on the venerable stage of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry where he brought the house down.

Reed was one of the very first of the new wave of singers and songwriters to embrace unabashedly soulful music and he’s still doing it his way, two decades on. He’s celebrating that milestone with a 20th anniversary reissue of the album “Walkin’ and Talkin’” from 2005, this time on vinyl. “Listening back to those songs and my 21 year-old self” he says, “is a strange sensation.” “I can hear the wheels turning, the speed picking up, taking me in the direction I wanted to go, but I didn’t know where it would lead me or how long it might take to get there.” Twenty years on, Reed is still singing, playing and writing his heart out, heading towards the next stop.