For Immediate Release
May 6, 2015
Contact: Hilary@epitaph.com
 
“HARD WORK” PAYS OFF IN NEW

CHRISTOPHER PAUL STELLING CLIP
 
Video Premieres Today Care of NPR’s First Watch
 
Anti- Debut Album Labor Against Waste Arrives June 16th
 
 
Christopher Paul Stelling stands alone in his cramped kitchen, armed with just his guitar, a microphone, and his gravel-road voice.  He begins to play, his own manic fingerpicking style, the lazy drawl of John Fahey amped up on truck-driver speed, and then to sing: “I know my work is never done; till I can see the good in every one.”  The song is titled, appropriately, “Hard Work,” and it comes from Stelling’s highly anticipated Anti- debut album Labor Against Waste, arriving June 16th. Watch the video care of NPR .
 
Christopher Paul Stelling works hard.  An old-school traveler on the folk circuit, he has played over 400 shows in the last 3 years (and just keeps going – June 6th he starts a 5 week 9 country tour of Europe, then straight home for the Newport Folk Festival and a US tour through Thanksgiving and beyond).  So if he delivers his brand of folk with a ferocity not often seen in the genre, his labors must be understood in light of that refrain, “I know my work is never done; till I can see the good in every one.”  It’s a vision of redemption through work that is profoundly American, as old as the transcendentalists, as modern as songwriters like David Byrne and Warren Zevon.  “It's somewhat of a secular prayer,” says Stelling.  “It's a song about the strength it takes to love each other, no matter what the cost.  It's a song about who I’d like to be someday and who I've been.”
 
Even his videos work hard; rather than lip-syncing to a standard album track, Stelling has insisted with each new video from Labor Against Waste on recording a live performance (assisted on “Hard Work” by photographer Josh Wool), following in the tradition of American artists like Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp who have leaned on the authenticity that live performance brings to a video.  And it’s a fitting setting for a song about performance, about burning muscles and the deliverance that fire may bring.
 
Watching Stelling play guitar can leave you breathless.  Starting out, he would get home from his bookstore day job and play guitar for ten hours, eventually perfecting a melodic finger-picking style influenced by blues legends such as Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt, masters like John Fahey, and banjo greats Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb.  But in his thrusting voice, his fierce eyes, there is a hungry American tradition of road and roadhouse, of Waylon and Waits and the young Dylan turning up his collar on the side of a Minnesota highway.  This is what it means to be Christopher Paul Stelling; this is what it means to work hard.