PAUL ANGEL - HERSTORY

 

The Beginning : I was born at Indio, Ca on Saturday, September 4th, 1982.

My father was a Record Store General Manager and one of the best Beatles Memorabilia Collectors and Guru’s, My mother was a Department Store Saleswoman. It was my dad who introduced music to me. He was a musician himself and had been in many local bands and recorded on an independent single in 1975 with Barry White’s String Musicians. With his collection of Beatles Memorabilia and his knowledge of music, it allowed him to befriend top songwriter/producer Billy Steinberg, pre-like a virgin/true colors. He named me Paul after Beatle Paul McCartney, my mom gave me Angel after her younger brother who died two-years before my birth. Without being old enough to witness their divorce, it put a little mental strain in my mind but music has always been my sanctuary  and solace.

 My music abilities : When I was in the first grade, I was chosen to be the lead vocalist in some of the choral songs we used to sing, the best one was my rendition of It Must Be Santa. At the start of 1993 I was learning how to play the guitar from my dad. He taught me Words Of Love by Buddy Holly and Mull Of Kintyre by Paul McCartney just the basics. When I went to a church school, I self-taught myself the Drums. I would have learned keyboards too if the piano teacher didn’t flake out a lot. From time to time I was learning the guitar even more until in the 7th grade when I fractured my wrist and I lost complete strength that I couldn’t hold down the strings of the guitar without it feeling a lot of pain. In 1997, I went back to learn guitar and started learning electric bass. My dad got me a sears and roebuck violin bass and I played that until it came apart during a repair job to fix the ground wires. This is also the starting point of my songwriting career. The Rain, Summer Days And Summer Nights and a couple others were written, and published through my first publishing company Earth Bound Music. I’ve joined the Jazz Band in High School during my sophomore year. I became their guitarist and occasional bassist using guitars from the band instructor, a Gibson Jazz Guitar. The next year I got my first real electric and bass guitars. A 1962 reissue 1982 Fender Telecaster Blonde Color and a 1962 Fender Jazz Bass. It was that year that I’d joined my first band, Detour as their guitarist/bassist/drummer. By the year 2000, I closed off Earth Bound Music as my publishing company And formed my principal music company, Roxy Angel and have Roxy as my nickname. This was also the realization point of my sexuality. 2001 came and I graduated with 3 letters to my name, one of them was a music letter. It was at this point that I wanted to make a Cd. The Rain and Golden Mirrors was going to be the original album title and a track listing was made of songs that never made it on mood ring except for two, The Rain and Lovers Tune. But plans were delayed since I was going through a little depression when I found out I was Gay and a Transsexual. I spent most of my time writing songs and going to community college.

 

The Mood Ring Project : In 2002, I talk to a friend of mine that I’d partnered with during High School and I helped him produce a cd for the schools choral class and co-write/co-produce his indie avant-garde album, John Perazzo – Shoes In The Dryer. He said that he will engineer my first cd, so the cd at the time was called Autumn Goodbye, title from the b-side of Britney Spears debut single. 10 songs or more was tracked but at the time I was too ashamed to say that I wanted to make a dance album, a time when you couldn’t make a dance album in Coachella valley and play it off as a hetero when I was dealing with being gay. The sessions was canceled all the way and the tapes (Everything was recorded on CD-R, no reel-to-reel tapes exist) were shelved. Surprisingly enough, three songs of the sessions were recorded for the Mood Ring sessions, but written and recorded differently. The Songs were The Lovers Tune, I Think That It Will and Harvest For The World, a power station cover. In the next year, I hooked up with another friend of mine, Noe, who had a 8-track garage studio. I’ve known him through his kids who were in Detour with me. I asked if in the future if he would be interested in engineering the resurrected Autumn Goodbye project, he said maybe. At this time, I continued to go to college and taken a composition class and passed. At this time my songs were becoming more vibrant and professional. My 100 songs goal was reached and more songs were written left to right. One of them was Missing Out On Me. Around this time, I was trying hard to find a job and I was still shy and afraid to stand up for myself, it got to the point that I needed something to put me more at ease and calm and so not afraid anymore. A road trip, my older cousin invited me to go to Spearfish, South Dakota. I was a little reluctant knowing I was broke and needed a job and certain members of my family were just bringing me down. My grandmother pushed me to go to this trip and thank god she did. It practically saved my life. It put me in a state of mind that I’ve been searching for a long time. I felt relaxed and cleansed. Now where does Mood Ring enter this picture and why am I mentioning South Dakota? Well, When I was in South Dakota, I’d visited a lot of great sites like Aladdin Wyoming and many cities like Rapid City, Spearfish, Sturgis. Well, I went to a shop called Global Market in Spearfish which sold a lot of literature, candle and burning incense, clothing and jewelry. I found that they sold Mood Rings and I’ve always wanted one, so I bought one there and another one at their Rapid City location. One of the songs that was written at that trip was Earth Song. When I got back home a month later, I went to work on  Autumn Goodbye. I was moving out of the Britney phase and getting real about my songs and my album. I was thinking of what is a better title for my cd. I took a look at the songs and played them on the acoustic guitar and finding their new styles and origins. I notice that the songs had a lot of eclectic kinds of music styles like trance/dance, pop, folk, jazz, new wave etc. So I didn’t want to call it Eclectic Music, that title will be used someday as a Anthology, but I wanted a name that symbolized that in a artsy way. Mood Ring arrived to me in a dream. One of those nostalgic dreams that allows you to find alternate meetings on things and find the essences and innocence and I was dreaming about my cd and music and Mood Ring was just appearing in my mind and I woke up and said, that’s It! So by September of 2004, Mood Ring became the new and permanent title. You’ll find that the music on the cd is just like a mood ring, there is a lot of love, sadness, happiness, loneliness and soothing feelings in the songs and the words really make it gel in with the fantastic backing tracks. Before September 2004 and after the trip, I continued looking for work and songwriting. I was talking to my father about a song I like called Whenever You Feel Like It By Kylie Minogue and I told him it was co-written by a songwriter name Billy Steinberg. He said that he knows Billy that they were great friends back in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I later on told him that I was thinking to contacting Billy to get advice since I was ready to get my songs out there. My dad didn’t believe me, but I figured out how to contact him. I wrote to him, telling him I’m a songwriter and he used to be friends with my dad. He calls me a week after I’d sent the letter and wanted to hear my songs. I contacted Noe and he lent me a four-track recorder with a  drum machine. I recorded six songs and sent them off to him, around that time, he sent a package for my dad and I with cd’s of his work.  Ironically, I got hired at Wal-Mart which was good cause I met Holly there who would help with the 2005 rewrites of Summer Days And Summer Nights and The Rain. When I’d turned 22, I decided to go and search for answers about my sexuality problems, I located Gay Associated Youth in Palm Desert and met Angela who would become one of the most valuable people in my life. Anyway, I got counseling a I now feel better about my sexuality. The worse part now is telling my family. Some of them know and my dad at the moment does not approve. He’ll recover. I was making out the song list for Mood Ring and I contacted Noe again, this time to record Mood Ring, he said yes. He recently upgraded to Pro-Tools Version 7.0 and wanted to experiment with recording dance music since he had a synthesizer. I was his project. From Nov 2004 to May 2005 was the pre-production stage with sessions at my studio, Starlit Glitter Room Studios and some sessions at G.A.Y. Center. May 2005 to now full-production commenced at NT Studios with some additional sessions at my studio. I contacted Billy again and now he is waiting for the new songs. Hopefully If he likes what he hears, I’ll be able to work with him on projects and get my foot in the door. The cd should be out by September of this year. And the first single, The Rain. I’m initially calling it the first queer dance album, even though there are going to be two other version to come out, the straight version and female version. In the coming months, I’ll be sending it to companies I admire like EMI-Parlophone/Capitol, Nettwerks, Tommy Boy-Silver Label and others. So lets hope for the best.

PAUL ANGEL