Hailed as “the king of rhythm & soul” by Mojo, Eli Paperboy Reed made his way from Brookline, MA, to Clarksdale, MS, as a teenager, honing his chops while immersing himself in the juke joint culture of the Delta. After a stint playing with famed gospel singer Mitty Collier on the south side of Chicago in his early twenties, Reed returned to the Boston area and began turning heads with a series of albums that earned widespread acclaim, with NPR hailing the music as “inspired, raw and powerful” and Uncut lauding its “urgent, electric energy.” The records landed Reed multiple major label deals, scores of song placements in film and tv, and festival dates around the world as he established himself as one of the most compelling and consistent soul men of the modern era.
On his latest collection, Getting There, Reed explores a more grown-up kind of love, contemplating what it takes for two people to go the distance through good times and bad. Produced by legendary R&B iconoclast Swamp Dogg, the album is a joyful dose of timeless soul and roots music, but it’s also a deeply mature work of lyrical craftsmanship, one that reckons with the vagaries of love in the long term as it illuminates the myriad throughlines connecting soul, gospel, and R&B music with folk, country, and rock and roll. Add it all up and you’ve got an infectious take on the work that follows the fireworks, an ode to the extraordinary endurance of the ordinary, everyday love that makes the world go around.
“This is grown folks music,” Reed reflects. “I’m not 25 anymore, and I don’t want to make records that sound like I am. I want to make music that’s reflective not just of where I’ve been, but where I’m at right now.”
“I haven’t heard many white boys who can do what Eli does,” Swamp Dogg says with a laugh. “We were on tour together in Spain the first time I heard him perform, and I said to myself, ‘Now that’s a singing motherf*cker right there.’”
The admiration was mutual—Reed had long been a fan of Swamp Dogg’s remarkable catalog as a producer, songwriter, and artist—and the two immediately hit it off as kindred spirits. Over the course of the next decade, the pair would share stages again several times, always ending each performance with a duet on Swamp Dogg’s “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe.”
“I knew Swamp had been focusing on his own material for quite some time and probably hadn’t produced another artist in thirty years,” Reed explains, “but when I came up with this batch of songs, he was the first person I thought of. If anybody knows how to make grown folks music, how to weave all these genres together, how to be serious but also tongue in cheek at the same time, it’s Swamp Dogg.”
After meeting for pre-production sessions in LA, where they bonded once again over their shared love of everything from ’50s vocal groups to ’90s country, the pair began work on the album with Reed’s band at Restoration Sound in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, tracking most of the record live on the floor in just ten days.
“Sometimes we could get ahead of ourselves and overexcited,” recalls Reed, “and Swamp would always pull things back and get us to chill out and let the song play itself. I did a bunch of the keyboards on this record, but we convinced Swamp to play some piano with us, too, because I just love his feel and his groove and his phrasing. He’d ease us into this perfect, lazy pocket every time.”
“We’re always ‘getting there,’ right?” Reed asks rhetorically. “That’s what life is, especially when you realize that even when you’ve got a family and kids—or whatever the ‘goal’ was—that the race isn’t run and that it won’t ever be.”
Maybe it’s experience. Maybe it’s maturity. For Eli Paperboy Reed, it’s just grown folks music.
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Eli Paperboy Reed’s new Swamp Dogg-produced album Getting There is out September 11th on vinyl, CD and digital / streaming via Yep Roc Records. Eli’s new title track single “Getting There” is out now on all DSPs. Click here to pre-order / stream.
