I am content as an afterthought

Paul K & The Weathermen - "Haunt Me Till I'm Gone" & "High In The Air" from The Blue Sun CD, Homestead Records 1992

A person runs into moments in his/her life where he asks himself, "is this what I wanted to be doing with my life right now?" He'll second guess the critical decisions in his life, and analyze his history to pinpoint that one decision he should have made differently in order to steer life into the direction he thought he was going. As time wears on those moments become few and far between, broken up by the tedium and frustration of present obligations. Further down the timeline, he'll stop questioning those life choices, realizing that he hadn't really planned this far ahead.

Paul K & The Weathermen were a odd discovery. I was living in Evanston, studying photography at UIC. Oh, and I drank a lot. In addition to the school and the drink, I worked and was married. It seems now that I had a quite a load to carry. Outside of academics, I'm not sure how successful I was (or have been, for that matter)as a husband. The job led me in the direction I would take professionally. Throughout that era, I managed to spend a lot of time alone. Riding the elevated trains to school and work, wandering around the downtown area, hitting the record stores. In a way, I lived an anonymous existence. I didn't live near friends or have neighbors I spoke with. I was faceless, silent. I had to be social to some degree, but the details are lost by now. I had a limited budget, so I could either buy a 7" single a week, or a used cd every two weeks. Amongst all the Sub Pop / Amphetamine Reptile noise that I was immersing myself in, I was also listening to a lot of college radio, particularly WNUR. I'm sure that's where I heard them first.

There is a line printed on Paul K & The Weathermen's "The Blue Sun" CD that reads, "these songs will never lie". A collection of early cassette recordings, the songs themselves are of individual life experiences - walking out on destructive relationships, living alone with no one to turn to, drug addiction and withdrawal, accepting the blame for personal failures and the final hope that life can still move forward in spite of it all - put together in an almost biographical fashion. And the cohesiveness of the collection as a whole unit makes every song that much stronger. Musically, the band pulls in influences ranging from coffee shop folk, poetic blues and rock balladry. It's not innovative, it's nothing new, but you can feel it on a level that nothing short of a funeral eulogy can register. And that's missing from a lot of records.
As much as I hate to categorize any artist , Paul K has the songwriting talent and strength that allows his records to stand very nicely among the rock/poet time line that includes Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Jim Carrol.

A final note: Pretty much all of Paul K & The Weathermen's discography is available for download from archive.org under the creative commons license. Do the work and find it: