Paul Cataldo

See the man on the stage with the guitar. The one with the perpetual five days scruff on his face and the not so clean flannel shirt. The one with the Martin guitar who’s belting out a song about mountains or rivers or roads. See the sardonic look on his face? It’s not for long, he’s just into his song. As soon as he’s finished singing you’ll see a smile bloom on his face when he realizes that he’s one of the few people who’ve found what they’re made for and is doing it for a living. He plays music.



He’s been playing since, at age fourteen, he heard Neil Young for the first time. He found his adolescent sanctuary in the form of a guitar. He poured all his efforts into mastering the instrument with the songs of John Fogerty, Lindsay Buckingham and David Gilmour to guide him. Spending hours, days on end in his room, bent over, back aching completely focused on drawing all those classic rock songs from his Strat, he got good. He got really good and found himself playing lead with Shortbus, a Boston base cover band.

Three years of playing other peoples music was enough and he moved to New York and scrounged up enough money to stay alive and buy the Martin. Just in time for him to find the voice that was growing stronger within him. A voice that was destined to flow from him outward on a wave of strum and pick that told the stories of his life, his heart and soul.



His journey has just begun. Where his voice or his stories or his guitar might lead him is anybody’s guess. It doesn’t really matter to him. He knows that it is in the journey where he will find his true voice again and again. It is in his successes and his failures that he will find the character to keep perusing his dreams. It is in his loves and his heartbreaks that he will find the emotions that will have nowhere to go except out through his music.



Paul can be heard singing songs and telling stories about everything from alcoholism, war, poverty and jealousy all the way down the road to songs of peace and love. You can usually find him on tour somewhere between Portland, ME and Savannah, GA. His first full length LP "Rivers, Roads & Mountains" (2009) has been receiving steady airplay on college stations in the North East. The LP was recorded at Quad Studios in Nashville, the same room Young recorded his breakthrough record "Harvest". Some of Nashville's best known session players appear throughout the album as well as long time music companions Tony Montalbano and Eben Pariser of Roosevelt Dime.



His name is Paul Cataldo. He’s 27 and he's located in the Mountains of Western North

Carolina.



He plays music.