More About Paul

"...MUSIC IS A MICROSCOPE TO THE HEART, AND A TELESCOPE TO THE STARS..."

Paul Summerlin is a composer, producer, songwriter, singer, conductor, audio engineer, and multi-instrumentalist. He is comfortable and accomplished in multiple styles and genres, including pop-rock, hip-hop, blues, jazz, classical, ambient, electro, and folk. His music has appeared with Seal on the BBC/Sundance series 'Live From Abbey Road', tv series 'Without a Trace', 'Young and the Restless', and 'Genesis of Healing'. He has composed concert orchestrations for Seal's 'Kiss From A Rose', 'Crazy', and 'Love's Divine', as well as string arrangements for producer Adam McInnis and American Idol contestant Stephanie Daulong.

Paul has been singing, banging on things, and making crazy-weird sounds ever since he was an infant. He started pressing the keys on the piano and matching pitch vocally around the age of 3. At 6 years old he was singing church hymns for memory in his echo-y garage while waiting for the school bus. At 8 he played Mozart on the piano and wrote his first-ever composition, 'Ants at a Picnic'. By the age of 12 he was playing Granados guitar transcriptions and Chopin preludes. He and his younger brother (currently music director for Seal) started playing rock and roll in their teens, and before they ever learned a cover song, they had written 4 or 5 of their own ideas. This ultimately led to the band BE, a forward-thinking, terribly tight, and brutally original pop-rock group who tirelessly pounded their musical mark onto the tape-machines and club stages of the midwest and deep south for some 15 years. For many of those years, Paul studied music in the 'conventional' way, honing his skills as a singer, conductor, composer, and pedagogue -- and he found some time to sit in for countless gigs with his comrades in the unbridled rock/party band, Hunkr Down, as well as sing, play, and write on studio sessions and radio jingles, church services, and classical concerts. He even sang some opera, and at one point he produced an entire hip-hop album 'at the click of a mouse', without ever touching an actual instrument. He spent 6 years in the northeast U.S. teaching and making music with college and high school students, during which time he conducted concerts in Salzburg, Prague, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, and elsewhere.


Recently, Paul has found himself relocated in New Orleans, Louisiana, back near his childhood roots, and is working on several different musical endeavours, which include scoring for tv/film, producing/engineering up-and-coming artists, teaching private music lessons, and playing live gigs around the city.