Singer/songwriter Paul Curreri coming back to Afton

Aaron Lee / Nelson County Times
Published: March 12, 2008

Folk/blues musician Paul Curreri is wrapping up more than a month of shows in Europe and traveling back to the states to play a show at the Hamner Theater in Afton on March 29.
Curreri, a Richmond native who lives in Charlottesville, played the Hamner Theater for the first time last year.
His fifth, and latest, album The Velvet Rut, was released in the U.S. in October.
The Nelson County Times reached Curreri in London.

What is The Velvet Rut-
It's just a phrase that I really dig. I first heard it when someone was referring to Charlottesville as a Velvet Rut. You know, it's nice and everything, but you're kind of stuck there. It's a nice place to be stuck, but you are stuck. I can't complain about where I am, but I might have been feeling a little stuck.
With the song Freestylin' Crost the Pond (on the Velvet Rut), is that true freestyle-
Yeah, absolutely. Because (when the song was written) my wife was over here in England and we didn't have a phone that would let us talk cheaply, so I would occasionally send her little MP3 hellos.
When I finished that one, and listened back to it, it was like four in the morning, and I thought it was kind of interesting. So, actually, I stayed up until about seven in the morning trying to fake it … I tried to take some of the interesting parts of it and add more interesting parts to it … but it was awful, it was boring and stupid.
But when it came time that I realized I might actually have a record — because I wasn't intentionally making a record with The Velvet Rut, those were all just sort of home recordings — I found that one and still thought it was interesting and wasn't quite sure I'd heard anyone do anything quite like that. Half my friends said it was a good idea to put it on there and the other half thought it was terrible, but in the end I guess I was the deciding factor.

Before you committed yourself full-time to music you turned down a job with MTV. Did they want you to be a video jockey-
No, I wish that were the case. I had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (with a  degree in film) and had done some pretty low-rent, but high-spirited, video projects that basically seemed to walk around with their middle fingers sticking in the air, perhaps at themselves, just because I was really over film by the time I graduated, but I had to graduate because my mom said so. My final project cost $17 and the average final project that year cost $7,000. I think they were interested in the spirit and so I was offered a job on the bottom rung, video editing promo commercials and stuff. But at that point I was so disgusted with film that I, like a doofus, turned it down. And the next thing I woke up and I was still in New York, maybe a week into my New York journey, and realizing I have no other viable skills what-so-ever and I couldn't believe I just turned down a job that'd actually pay me some money. So I ended up working in various bars, and mailrooms … things of that nature.

So, was New York kind to you-
No, it was horrible man. It was the worst year of my life ... nothing even comes close.

What setting or mood do you imagine most people are in when they're listening to a Paul Curreri album-
I hope it's able to slide into a variety of moods and luckily I have a variety of records so that increases my odds of getting listened to, hopefully, even more. I would hope that they're able to put it on to cook dinner to. And I would also hope they would be able to put it on when they just got a promotion. And I would also hope that they would be able to put it on when their girlfriend breaks up with them.

NOTE: Listen to a selection of Curreri songs and watch YouTube video of live performances by visiting www.myspace.com/paulcurreri

If you're going to Paul Curreri...

Who: Paul Curreri
Where: Hamner Theater, Afton, 190 Rockfish School Lane, Nellysford
When: March 29, doors open at 6:30 p.m. show starts at 7:30 p.m. Who: Paul Curreri
Where: Hamner Theater, Afton, 190 Rockfish School Lane, Nellysford
When: March 29, doors open at 6:30 p.m. show starts at 7:30 p.m. Cost: $15