credits:

Joe Paulik - vocals, 12 & 6 string guitars, piano
Michael Monroe - Bass, backing vocals, didjaridoo
Rick Brandenburg - drums, percussion, chimes
Bill Hinkley - fiddle, mandolin, lead 6 string acoustic guitar
Debbie Orris - cello
Leah thomas - backing vocals
Holly young - backing vocals
 
all songs written byJoe Paulik except:
"Peace of Wood" (Joe Paulik/Debbie Orris)
"Final Walk" (Joe Paulik/Debbie Orris)
"The River's Roar" (lyrics Kurt Gilbertson/music Joe Paulik)
 
CD cover art and woodburning by Susan Kohls
*CD booklet contains additional art, woodburned lyrics, and photos
 
Recorded and mixed by Michael Monroe at MisTree solar powered studio in Hovland Minnesota May - August 2000
 

notes:

I first began writing down the songs I heard in my head in 1974 when my band director showed me some basic chords on the piano. By the time I grouped these songs together and made this recording in 2000, hundreds of songs had piled up on my internal song shelves. I had originaly made this collection available in 1992, recording them on a 4 track cassette recorder. Only one song had been left off that recording, "Someday When We're Older"; in 1992 I had written the melody and many of the words of that song, and knew where it belonged in the sequence, but it was a very painful song to write and I wasn't ready to finish it then.

I selected the songs for The Road with two main criteria. I'd been performing live for a number of years at the time, and I knew which of my songs were most accessable to audiences by the frequency with which they were requested. I put many of those on this first album. I also wanted the collection to tell a metaphorical story that seemed to be a theme running through the lives of many people I observed including myself. The result is "The Road".

 

credits:

Joe Paulik - vocals, 12 & 6 string guitars, keyboards
Diana Yefanova - vocals, guitar on Mama
Debbie Orris - cello
Barb Lavigne - flute
Philis Anderson - English Horn, Oboe
 
all songs written by Joe Paulik except "Mama" by Diana Yefanova
 
recorded and mixed  by Joe Paulik in Wilderness Studios in Cook county Minnesota during the spring, summer and fall of 2002
 
*CD package and booklet contains lyrics, additional photos and notes
 
thanks to my mom and dad - for letting me be who I am
 

notes:

     I met Diana Yefanova, a visiting worker from Russia, at one of my campfire gigs at the Bluefin Bay Resort in 2001. She loved my music, would often come and sing with me, and wanted to record with me. She has since gotten married and become a US citizen.
     Barb Lavigne, Debbie Orris, and Philis Anderson were already performing together as a trio at the time, and I felt their sound would be perfect for this album's theme. An interesting fact about this recording is that, due to circumstance and rehearsal time constraints, I had to record each of them separately. None of them had heard the others' parts when they recorded their own. The result is very ethereal and rather astounding to me. It is as if they spiritually sensed what the others would do as they played their parts.
 

credits:

Joe Paulik - vocals, 12 & 6 string acoustic guitars, electric guitar, piano & keyboards, drum on
                        "Margay Cat"; synthesised drums
Leah Thomas - vocals, keyboards, and accordion on "Take My Knife"; shakers on "Margay Cat"
 
front cover painting by my mom, Patricia Paulik
CD handwriting by Joe Paulik
CD graphics and design by Laurie Sugiarto
*Cd booklet contains additional paintings, lyrics and handwritten notes
 
all songs written by Joe Paulik except:
"Take My Knife" (music traditional/lyrics Leah Thomas)
 
recorded and engineered at Wilderness Studios by Joe Paulik
 
recording dates: January 1999 on four track cassette except:
"Margay Cat" and"Take My Knife"  winter 1995 on four track cassette
"The Long Wait": winter 2002 digital
 

notes:

                I could write many pages about this album and recording. It truly is dear to my heart - in inspiration and circumstance. Though the CD was  published in 2005, the bulk of it was recorded in 1999 during a visit to my parents home. Using performance mics, and borrowing my brothers Les Paul guitar and amp, and my sisters keyboard, I recorded it in an emotional outpouring on my 4 track cassette recorder. This outpuring was fed by the experience of another failed attempt at courting someone who might want to be with a wilderness survival and outdoor enthusiast who makes a living playing music. That intense emotional failure provided fertile ground in which to record these special songs. The remaining three songs were recorded in other years: Margay Cat and Take My Knife were recorded with Leah Thomas in late December 1995. The original master tapes for "The Long Wait" were lost so it became the first song I recorded digitally.
                Infinite Dream, which as a teenager I had originally named Native Amarican Dream, was written in 1975 around the same time that an 8th grade Native American school mate of mine had showed me the book, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, quoting from it passages of brutality to me. Perhaps that can be called the official beginning of the writing of this album, but I know it goes back earlier. I remember early in elementary school being taught about the early white arrivals to this continent. The residue that remained in my young mind from these historical accounts was always that the Indians belonged, and were very cool, and their way of living was far more desirable, while the white aliens seemed like buffoons. Even then, my young mind was not attracted to a culture that wasn't attuned to its environment and seemed set on avoiding that environment out of fear.
                As a sophomore in high school, When The Legends Die, by Hal Borland was required reading. This book solidified and brought to the surface something from my depths and changed the direction of my life. It set me on a path of reading countless books of Native American history and fiction. Just on the subject of the Massacre at Wounded Knee, I read 4 or 5 different books. All this study inspired songs that seemed almost prewritten, like gifts from another world. The bulk of the songs on this album share a quality in that they seemed to write themselves; I had very little to do with them. When "Little Tree"  came to me during a vision quest in the late 1990's I knew the album was nearly completely written. If the other songs came effortlessly, the lyrics to the title song,"When The Legends Die", were the opposite. I had to fight and struggle to write them.
                The graphics of the album too, seemed to offer themselves over time. Slowly over three decades I gathered the materials for this work. When the Red Lake indian reservation murders in 2005 occurred I suddenly felt it was time to release this album. I hope you consider it for your music libray, as it truly is dearest to my heart.
 

credits:

Joe Paulik - vocals, 12 & 6 string guitars
Jessi Nichoson - additional vocals on "Redwood Smile"
written by Joe Paulik
recorded by Joe Paulik in Wilderness Studios in the summer and fall of 2004
 
Photo of me and my brother Jim by my dad, Gerald Paulik, in 1964
graphics by my brother, Jim Paulik
 
thanks to Tom Brown Jr. and the Tracker School for much of the inspiration behind these songs
 

notes:

      I made this demo  available in 2004 at the request of several long time friends from the Tracker School. This was fitting, as much of the content was inspired by things learned at the Tracker School and by Tom Brown Jr's books. It has become nearly impossible to separate what I've learned and experienced in the rest of my life from what I've learned at the Tracker School over the course of 32 years. The two are intertwined. Tom often says, "if you believe me you're a fool; prove me right or prove me wrong". In all my years of taking this chalenge to heart, I have yet to come across the misrepresentation of a teaching or skill by Tom Brown Jr. If any of these songs do not properly represent a teaching, the fault is mine.
      My original intent in 2004 was to have a band playing with me on most of these tracks, but that has not yet happened. In those years I was renting a little one room outbuilding with electricity back in the woods not too many miles from Grand Marais Minnesota. It was at the end of a dead end dirt road and so I had very little traffic noise to contend with. Most of these tracks were recorded outdoors there. The studio walls were trees on the edge of the forest outside the studio, from which I ran a power cord. If you listen closely, birds can be heard singing and calling on some tracks. An Ovenbird introduces the first track, "Quest Of Elija".
 

credits:

Joe Paulik - 12 & 6 string guitars, piano, vocals
Jessi Nicholson - vocals on "Tadpole" & "Power Of The arctic Brooks Range"
Nature - birds, animals, insects, wind & water
 
all songs written by Joe Paulik except:
"Power Of Place" - music Joe Paulik/lyrics Joe Paulik & Stephanie Wawrzyniak
"Chorus Of Voices" - Nature
 
"Tadpole" inspired by a story told by Jorge Brana
"Power Of The Arctic Brooks Range" Inspired by a story told by Kelly Louise

CD package contains additional photos and notes
 
Thanks to tom Brown Jr. for suggesting this project
 

notes:

As a child I was captivated by stories, songs, and movies such as Puff The Magic Dragon, Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer, and Winnie The Pooh. The mystery and meaning of these inspired creations has remained with me and grown over the years. The theme of "Power Of Place" has much to do with where the search for answers to these mysteries has taken me.
      I recorded the nature sounds on this album in far northeastern Minnesota, mostly in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.  I learned something during the process of combining those sounds with my songs that brought me to tears with nearly each song. 
      I had heard distinct melodies in nature before which I couldn’t figure out what they were or where they were coming from.  Finally I realized it was the melody of all the birds together, the “overall song”, that I was hearing.  It wasn’t even remotely like any of the songs individually, in melody or sound.  I also experienced that the birds were well aware of this overall song which they and all of nature’s entities were contributing to.  What I didn’t know was that the place from which my songs come is this same awareness of the overall song.  I call it “The Neverending Song”.  All I have to do is turn on my recorder and I’m recording the Neverending Song.  But I don’t need a recorder to hear, see, smell, taste, or touch it.
      When Tom Brown Jr. suggested I do a project called “Power of Place”, I hadn’t conceived of how effective nature sounds could be in translating that power. I had, however, always wanted to put those sounds on my songs.  I wrote these songs over the course of 30 years, three of them recently since Toms suggestion, with the help of Tracker friends.  Truly, the Neverending Song brings us to, punctuates, and helps define the Power of Place.  I still don’t know if Tom even knew I had been recording the nature sounds.
       I had spent many hours and days recording nature during various Boundary Waters trips. In making this recording I searched through countless audio files for the one that seemed perfect for each song.  When the right file struck me, I found time after time that at that point my job was simply to find a key point in the nature file that went with a certain key point in my song.  It was at this point that I broke down and wept many times because when those 2 key points were laid over each other I found that me and nature knew the rest of each others songs!  So often their voices, pauses, and volume increases, punctated my song perfectly.  Or was it the other way around?  It makes me feel humble, honored, loved, supported, and unlonely.
      As much as possible I let these tracks be their own punctuation and you are hearing a real time nature track. No tracks are looped or played more than once on the album.  At certain points however, I played more than one nature track simultaneously or had to splice them to create a certain effect or emphasize a point in the story.  Experienced tracking ears may notice that at these times nature is out of context with itself .  Call it an overlapping of worlds, or being in 2 places at once.
 

credits:

piano parts written and performed by Joe Paulik
photography, graphics, and layout by Mark Tessier
*CD package contains additional photos and notes
 
Many thanks to Tom Brown Jr.  I took several of the songs titles and concepts either from quotes he has made, or from the name of a class that he has run.  Also, he has guided me to use the part of myself from which this music arises.
 

notes:

This album was born of my love of recording nature's symphonies, and my affinity with ethereal relaxing music. My partner Jessi Nicholson is a TCM practitioner. Health practioners often play music and soothing sounds in order to enhance the sometimes sterile or boxed-in feeling of the offices in which they practice. Upon hearing many of the music and sound selections which Jessi had been using for this purpose, I was inspired to do something which I hadn't yet heard on those recordings.
      My idea was that uninterrupted and unlooped birdsong symphonies from wilderness areas were something which could "transport" patients to the natural environment in which those sounds occurred. Knowing how healing it can be just to be in the wilderness, I felt this would be a great aid. By letting the nature track be the "leading instrument", and playing an accompaniment on the piano to those sounds, I felt I could bring the human element to that environment, enhancing it. I felt that this in turn would strengthen the transportation of the human listener to that place. "Messages From Medicine River" is my first, and hopefully not my last, foray into this idea. Over the years it has proven quite successful, as many patients buy the album after hearing it during their treatments.
      There is an area in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota that embodies the feeling of home to me - it feels more like home than any other place I've ever lived.  I call it "Medicine River".  I yearn to be there whenever I think of it.  It includes the Perent, Isabella, and Kawishiwi Rivers, and the lakes that flow into them.  These rivers all flow together eventually.  The nature track herein was recorded on the Perent River at dawn May 4th, 2010.  Largely it is a real time sample of the sounds one morning on that special river.  Wind distortion, microphone bumps, and a few moments where bird calls were minimal were edited out.  It was a chilly morning, and you can hear the crackling of my campfire as well as river rapids.
      Some parts of the piano melodies I literally copied from the birds; they are the writers and I was merely a listener.  Others were directly inspired by the feeling of their songs.  Many were written in the summer of 2011: as I listened to the nature track, I played to it, and let it inspire me.  One day that summer, as I was composing several of the songs on the piano in my studio in Hovland, I stepped outside and accidentally scared a fawn which had curled up five feet from my open window.  So I decided to use Mark Tessier's photo of a fawn for the cover of this package; he related to me that it had come and lay down right outside his window. Some of the songs, such as "The Birdman of Medicine River" and "Behold the Royal Blue Jay", come from my childhood.  They were written around 1974 when I was in 6th grade, not long after my band instructor showed me some chords on the piano.
 

credits:

All songs written by Joe Paulik
Joe Paulik - 6 & 12 string guitars, vocals, & piano
Jessi Nicholson - vocals
 
photography - Stephan Hoglund Photography
 
thanks to Tom Brown Jr. for the inspiration behind much of the content
 

notes:

Tom Brown Jr. has written in several of his books about the effect that our modern industrial world is having on the environment. Quoting Stalking Wolf, an Apache scout and shaman who taught him for 11 years, he has also spoken of holes tearing open in the sky - holes in the ozone layer - saying that only the children of the earth would survive the earth upheavals, diseases, and wars in the future which these holes mark as being imminent. When I first read those words many years ago, I felt them in my heart as truth.
                Who then, are The Children of the Earth? Are they the ones who can survive naked in the wilderness needing no tools other than those which they fashion themselves? Are they the people who recognize the sacredness of this gift called "Earth" and give themselves fully to saving, protecting, and healing it? Or are they simply the ones who've dedicated themselves to acts of kindness and healing towards humans even in the depths of our largest cities?
                 I don't know the answer to those questions, and I've become less concerned about it in recent years; the Earth and the Creator can decide. I simply hope to dedicate every bit of myself to caretaking and healing the Earth, and to learning the skills it takes to fully understand the gift we've been given called Earth.
 
Future and Past Concentric Rings
 
                A voice calls from a mile away across a still evening lake. It ripples out like the concentric rings from a pebble dropped into a quiet pond, and arrives on your ears a few seconds later. Does the energy of that sound stop when your ears can't hear it anymore? Over the millenia, thoughts and events have been recorded in written words. Centuries later, we can feel the echoes of those thoughts when we read the words. When we learn from those words and respond accordingly, do we send ripples back which are then felt by the originator of the thought? Ancient writers certainly affected the future with their writings, and it seems many of them did it out of concern for our well being. What if they hadn't sensed us here? Things would be quite different. Are we not responsible for doing the same for future generations?           
                Do sounds and events travel from the possible future into our now? If they do, can we hear them? We are not schooled in it, yet this mysterious subject permeates the oldest records of many cultures. The ending of the Mayan calendar or the biblical "Armageddon" refer to predictions of specific times of upheaval. Movies and literature are replete with the subject. It holds a riveting fascination for us, and it seems a paradox that such a pervasive storyline in religion, literature, and entertainment somehow escapes educational acceptance and exploration. The Seventh Arrow is a term writer and teacher Tom Brown Jr. used at a class in 1986 in referring to these current prophetic times of apocalyptic upheaval. I felt at the time that his use of the term resounded perfectly with the feeling of a piano song I had written in 1981, and thus it was named, "Seventh Arrow".
                Lacking physical evidence, how could the prophets of old have known of these future Armageddon-like upheavals? Perhaps they sensed the energetic ripples caused by probable events in the future, and so sent a ripple forward with their writings. People sometimes dream of a topic unknown to them, only to see that event come to pass. Experience tells me that sounds and events travel, like concentric ripples on a pond, from the possible future to the now, as well as from now into the future.
                Sometimes I hear future children calling, feel them thinking of us several generations from now, about what we had done or didn't do. I feel their thoughts and, like a wave that hits the shore of a pond and then ripples back toward its origin, I envision a positive future, or I write words or music. Music, literature, and art are some of the vehicles on which these ripples, these voices, travel back and forth. Voices and thoughts splash and eventually ripple to a lakeshore - the painters canvas - and the painter's finished masterpiece reflects it back to the origin with the added energy of those changed by that art. Thus a voice from the future changes its eventual now. We all create the future. If we listen to the voices from the possible future, we take more care in our creations. Much more care.
                The music called The Seventh Arrow is a canvas, a shoreline, on which I've placed interpretations of voices I've heard. If the message touches people, it will ripple back to its origins with added energy. Communication is the vehicle of change. We can use this superhighway called art to communicate through time and affect the future. We are all artists with masterpieces inside us. When we respond to voices calling from the future and the past, we cannot help but reflect them with our art, our creations. Doing so gives purpose to life.
 

To me this is a mind blowing album. It is an exploration into our increasing social condition of being effectively orphaned from Earth Mother our Father the Creator; the challenge of choosing not to be orphaned in a world that demands it; a message of hope that choosing not to be orphaned is a most important step in our survival.
Zaspalo Je Siroče ranges from being intensely romantic, to deeply introspective, to high adventure. Vocally and instrumentally rich, I told producer Al Oikari to think "Pink Floyd meets Joe Paulik" when I enlisted his help many months ago, and his work blew me away.