Paul Spring
- Folk Pop
Paul Spring’s new album Dumb and Free releases on November 11th, 2025. Each song is from the perspective of a different person from his hometown, written mostly during a short creative burst in November 2024. Returning to Brooklyn for the winter and spring, Spring workshopped and arranged the songs with a live band during a winter residency at Sunnys Bar in Redhook. In June, he recorded with that same band – Nick Hakim on piano, Jon Nellen on drums, Adam Brisbin on electric guitar, and Kevin Copeland on pedal steel.
Between 2023’s Always Almost Home “meshing 90s pop and Bach” (MPR) and the “hidden pop gem” (Irish Times) of 2022ʼs Thunderhead, Spring experimented with minimal electronic production and Irish folk. Aquarium Drunkard called his album, 2024’s River Flows Two Ways, “a singular fresh offering as well as a catalogue introduction of sorts.” Later that year he released Kind of Heaven, recorded live over 2 days with producer and drummer Jon Nellen and featuring Nick Hakim on piano. Most recently, in the summer of 2025, Paul put out an album of original music entirely in Classical Latin entitled Vita Brevis. It was inspired by Latin hymns, and by the 60s albums of David Axelrod and the Beach Boys. The 7 songs were recorded in the studio of Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith (Dawes) in Altadena, CA with Rob Shelton (Meernaa) as Engineer and Co-Producer.
Paul was raised in Saint Cloud, MN and is now based in New York City. In addition to many headlining and support tours around the United States and Ireland, he has completed two river canoe tours. In 2015 he spent 48 days paddling 1200 miles down the Mississippi in support of his album Towards a Center. In 2024 he canoed 150 miles down the Hudson in support of River Flows Two Ways. Spring is also a devoted instrumental guitarist. In 2021 he released J.S. Bach 12 String Transcriptions, and between 2022 and 2024 he played a weekly Bach gig in Manhattan at a small bar called the Burp Castle.
In addition to his solo work, Paul was the lead singer and songwriter of the band Holy Hive until their dissolution in 2021. He has performed live as a background singer for Post Malone on Saturday Night Live and Fleet Foxes for a streaming performance. He has also appeared as a session guitarist and co-writer on Blackthought and El Michels Affair’s Glorious Game, and his guitar playing was sampled on releases by Kenny Beats, Vic Mensa, Sofia Valdes, and Kirby. In terms of accolades, he won a Parents Choice Gold Award for a 2013 children’s album entitled Home of Song. He is also a Grammy winning instrumentalist as of 2022, when he recorded a flute solo on New Orleans rapper Lecrae’s song “Good Lord”, which went on to win the award for Best Contemporary Christian Album.
