The inclusion of a lyric sheet with a rock album is often superfluous. Sometimes, the words are better left buried in the mix. On Paul Creswell’s debut album, however, the lyrics are worth reading as well as hearing. The album’s title, The Talesman, is telling: The archaic-sounding word means to say that his songs are actually stories.
“I like storytelling in songs because I can create a range of emotions very quickly. That feels real to me because life is that way—characterized by mixes of emotions. I’m attracted to that ambiguity,” Creswell says. “Stories are fun to write into songs because they have that range, yet they’re also temporally confined. I think that if I wrote longer stories I might have a hard time deciding what to leave in or take out. In a song, you’re so constrained by the format that, unless a word or phrase contributes meaningfully, it’s got to be cut. I like those parameters. The challenge of making it all work is part of the fun.”
The Talesman’s music is carried almost entirely on Creswell’s acoustic guitar. He’s thoroughly grounded in the best aspects of the ’70s singer-songwriter aesthetic.
“I grew up appreciating poetry and listening to lyric-driven music like Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Case in point: ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds’ by Kristofferson. The humor in there, the alliteration, the rhythms and the internal rhymes—that song is ingenious and poetic but also simultaneously relatable. That’s inspiring stuff to me.”
The Talesman’s opening number, “Doubt,” narrates a fundamentalist’s disillusion steeped in the verbiage of evangelical Protestantism. Despite the protagonist’s loud affirmations of faith, “Doubt came creeping.” The evangelist demanded signs and wonders, but the sky remained silent. “Ms. Wilson” suggests a story from an old Weird Tales pulp magazine in its wild-eyed, tomb-robbing ghoul haunting a small-town graveyard.
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Most of Creswell’s lyrics reflect on small towns or rural settings. Some are ringed with an aura of strangeness or foreshadows of catastrophe.
“My grandparents had a dairy farm in northern Wisconsin that I used to visit every summer as a kid. I also spent a lot of time outdoors growing up. So, nature is an important part of my worldview, and I have warm spaces in my heart for rural areas. I’ve been in Madison slightly over a decade now. Once I moved there, I didn’t want to live anywhere else.” He began playing solo around Mad City two years ago and has lately been venturing down the road, traveling as far as Hannibal, Mo., for a gig.
“I’m writing more poetry these days, actually. I attended a writing seminar last summer led by former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Marilyn Taylor. That was a wonderful experience,” Creswell says. He will be reading his own words—including some from The Talesman—at the 2018 Winter Festival of Poetry in Madison.
Paul Creswell will perform on Monday, Feb. 2, at Art*Bar, 722 E. Burleigh St.
