As a teenager, Paula Kelley was the proud owner of a full set of Bee Gees lunchboxes. As a grown-up, she aimed to make indelible pop music, the kind that tells secrets, moves hearts and keeps you up at night. She cut her teeth as a member of Drop Nineteens, and then on a string of solo-band projects that made her a beloved figure in the Boston indie scene…until she went underground.
Her first album under her own name in nearly two decades, Blinking as the Starlight Burns Out finds her exploring a deeper place— the place where the darkest of memories and the most heartbreaking of melodies are stored. You have a shelf where you keep the pop-noir classics by Big Star, Colin Blunstone, Judee Sill and Brian Wilson? Carve out a space there.
The story told is at once starkly personal and regrettably universal; the music employs strings, woodwinds, horns and lush vocal arrangements to reckon with ghosts from the past. As she puts it, “There was a dark force in my house. This album is an exorcism.”
A child of the ‘80s, Paula grew up with an ear to the radio and a taste for her family’s record collection. “During fifth and sixth grade I would listen to American Top 40 every weekend and write down the hits. If I couldn’t do it I’d have a designated friend do it for me.”
Her first band wasn’t quite bound for glory, but in 1990 she was recruited by Boston University friend Greg Ackell to join Drop Nineteens. An Anglophilic band in a city that loved its garage and Americana, Drop Nineteens helped birth the shoegaze genre with their acclaimed debut, Delaware, which featured Paula’s vocals and guitar. The band dissolved in a mess of bad temper soon afterward, leaving a different lineup to make the followup.
By now Paula had a haul of original songs, which she aired in a series of bands— first Hot Rod (whose one album, SpeedDangerDeath (Caroline) earned some good notices in 1993), then Boy Wonder and the Paula Kelley Orchestra. With each incarnation the arrangements got fuller and lusher, and the writing more personal. 2003 brought the orchestral pop epic The Trouble With Success or How You Fit Into the World— named by the Boston Phoenix as the best local album of that year. By now it was hard to miss the darker stuff hiding behind her trademark sweet voice and lilting melodies.
And that was it, for Boston and for putting out records, for a long while. She headed to LA, where her technical training led to gigs as an arranger and cowriter, for studio sessions and indie film soundtracks. She was the music director for “The Strip: A Living Comic Book,” a wild late-night stage show that the Los Angeles Times described as “R. Crumb meets the Cockettes on a bender.”
She was briefly part of the Dilettantes with Michelle Lewis and fellow Boston expat Kay Hanley. She even arranged a Christmas single featuring the SF Gay Men’s Choir.
But a crisis point was on the way. She’d long wrestled with self doubt and stage fright, and as the gigs got more frequent, the need to self-medicate got stronger; something ultimately had to give.“I had a good thing going, and I blew it up. I would get anxious and drink and take pills, and that was not sustainable.
One night in Los Angeles, I went to a party and just ingested everything…” This bottoming-out experience led to the hospital, and ultimately to recovery; she is now 11 years sober. But as everyone who’s been through it knows, you can’t truly recover without facing the demons you’d spent your life running from. “There was some bad shit that I had never consciously processed. As I was dealing with this trauma that happened years ago, going through therapy and rehab, I was still arranging. I just felt my career as a writer was over.” She made a sacrifice of a nearly-completed album she’d worked on with the Orchestra, and shelved it entirely.
When the songs did come calling again, they came from a different place. After a dark night of the soul, she woke up with a lyric and melody running through her head: “God, will someone tell me if I’m living?” And if that moment led to an improbably breezy tune…Well, that’s pop alchemy at work.
“It took getting sober, learning how to exist as maybe not a whole person or a well person, but a person who is on the way to becoming those things,” she says. “Because when I woke up with that line in my head, I knew what I had to do. I’d healed enough to be able to explore the gnarly themes I didn’t have the strength to withstand before. That song rekindled the writing process.
It’s like ‘Sit down kids, I’m going to tell you a story’.” That story wasn’t an easy one to tell. “Freight” and “The Girl Who Never Was” both confront abuse that she experienced as a young child; the lyrics address both the abuse itself and the shame of being forced into silence afterward. The latter song, she says, “is about my being stifled into non-existence. I had a family member whose presence cast a pall on the house. I lived in fear, not only of that person but of being shunned for speaking up and rocking the boat. In writing this album I made the decision to not chicken out and hide behind vague language.
And I was musically meticulous. There were times I had to be a pain in the ass, either to myself or someone else.” So what are the Beach Boys doing here? Providing sunshine and reassurance as always, and Paula turns in a gorgeous version of the Sunflower fan favorite, “All I Wanna Do.” Ironically enough, it was on an early Drop Nineteens tour where she rediscovered her love for that band.
“Someone in London played me Pet Sounds and that brought me back to everything I ever loved as a kid. I know it’s a risky move to cover a Beach Boys song, but Brian Wilson actually said that ‘All I Wanna Do’ didn’t originally come out the way he wanted it to. So for me that made it slightly less sacrilegious.”
Much of her other favorite music reared its head in one form or another. The finale “The Night” absorbs classic French pop, on a song about the safety her young self felt when the lights were out. “Jacques Brel, Michel Legrand, Claudine Longet. Rather than make it cool, I just leaned into the schlock with that arrangement. It’s not my fault, the song asked for it— in French.”
Her shoegaze roots come through on the opening “Party Line,” for which she arranged a surprising and buoyant four-part harmony. “It made me think of Spiritualized with Telescopes doing the vocals. It’s the requisite post-Cold War influenced track.”
Other influences are way more subliminal: On “The Denial” she wanted an empowering stomp rhythm, so she sampled John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance”— which sounded lousy when she slowed it down to match the tempo, so she recreated it instead. The same song nods to a particular moment on Colin Blunstone’s beloved solo album, “One Year”: “The song ‘Caroline Goodbye’ has about five tambourines going at the same time, so I lifted that idea for the verses of ‘The Denial.’ It doesn’t cut through the same way because the track is so dense, but I will never shy away from a good over-the-top tambourine moment.”
By now you’re probably not surprised to hear that Paula meticulously made sure everything on Blinking as the Starlight Burns Out was just where it needed to be. The production and writing (save for the one cover) are all hers; she plays multiple keyboards, lead and rhythm guitars and bass; and wrote for strings, horns and woodwinds. Longtime partner Aaron Tap also multitasks on guitars, basses, synths and vocals; Eric Skodis (Imperial Drag, Redd Kross) and John Thomasson make appearances on drums and upright bass, with a cameo from longtime Brian Wilson band member Probyn Gregory on French horn.
Samur Khouja (John Grant, Cate LeBon, Devendra Banhart) — who’s worked with a favorite modern artist, John Grant— mixed the record. “He really was an MVP. The back half of ‘The Girl Who Never Was’ has so much going on, and he wove the dense mish-mosh into a tapestry.” Life had another surprise in store when the album was well underway: Out of nowhere, DropNineteens came calling. Not having toured since the crisis and recovery, she said a definite maybe when her old bandmates asked her to come aboard for a reunion. After much persuasion she did sign on and was a key part of the Hard Light recording and tour—not only singing/ playing but arranging the album’s Clientele cover, and being the star of featured video “The Price Was High.” Post-tour relations are considerably friendlier than they were first time around, and the band is working on the next album.
In fact the future is looking rather good: She and Tap have returned to western Massachusetts where they’re opening their home studio to artists who need help in the writing, instrumental, or producing/engineering departments; “it’s like a one-stop-shop song factory.” But for now, she has her own stories to tell and her own musical statement to make. No longer the girl who never was, Paula Kelley is here right now.
