Ellis Paul is one of the leading voices in American songwriting. He was a leader in the wave of singer/songwriters that emerged from the Boston folk scene, creating a movement that revitalized the national acoustic circuit with an urban, literate, folk pop style that helped renew interest in the genre in the 1990’s. Chuck E. Costa, a modern day troubadour who for several years has been touring the country cutting his teeth as a performer and songwriter, will open the show.

Ellis Paul is today regarded as such a classic urban songwriter that it’s hard to fathom what a small-town boy he was. He grew up in northern Maine, in a potato farming community so remote that his exposure to music came almost entirely from the one top-40 station he could get on his radio, and his school band, where he played trumpet well enough to earn a summer scholarship to the Berklee College of Music. He toured the country competing in track, catching a hard case of wanderlust, and earning a track scholarship to Boston College. It was there that he discovered songwriting, completely out of boredom when a track-career-ending knee injury left him bedridden for months, and he began making up songs on a guitar a friend had given him. By 1989, he was haunting the open mic scene that would soon produce the most important generation of Boston folk stars since the early ’60s, including Paul, Dar Williams, Vance Gilbert, Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball (then performing as The Story), Martin Sexton, Patty Griffin, and Catie Curtis.

In recent years, Ellis has also departed from his solo career to tour and record with longtime compadre Vance Gilbert, and to indulge his deep respect for American folk icon Woody Guthrie. He appeared with the all-star Guthrie tribute tour, “Ribbon of Highway, Endless Skyway.” For his Philo CD, The Speed of Trees, he wrote a modern musical setting of Guthrie’s unpublished lyric “God’s Promise.” Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, invited Paul to perform at a Woody Guthrie tribute show held in September 1996 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. The show was part of a 10-day celebration to honor Woody and also included performances by Bruce Springsteen, Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg and others. In 1998, the quintessential Boston songwriter was also made an honorary citizen of Guthrie’s birthplace, Okemah, Oklahoma, in recognition of all he has done to revive interest in the Dust Bowl troubadour. At the same time, Paul remains the most mainstream-friendly folk songwriter to emerge from Boston since Tom Rush. Between 1993 and 2004, he won an unprecedented 13 Boston Music Awards, and his songs were heard on hit TV shows “Ed” and MTV’s “Real World”; and in the soundtracks of several Farrelly Brothers films, including Me, Myself, & Irene, starring Jim Carrey, and Shallow Hal, with Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow. Director Peter Farrelly has called Paul “a national treasure.”

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Chuck E. Costa’s candid and visceral delivery of literate and well-crafted contemporary folk tunes has steadily raised his profile on the national club, coffeehouse and festival circuits. Since earning a degree in philosophy in Boulder, Chuck, a native New Yorker, returned to the Northeast and released three independent albums and an EP since 2002. With his dulcet voice and emotive lyrics, Chuck has grown into a singer/songwriter with a unique and honest voice. Last year, Chuck released his third independent release, Where the Songs Come From. Chuck teamed up with Mark Thayer of Signature Sounds to create an album of rich arrangements that stay true to the heart of each of Chuck’s songs.

There are artists who are good at their craft. There are artists who have developed and maximized their talent to a high degree.Then there are those fewer artists who seem simply to have been blessed with skills that outshine most others. Ellis Paul is one of those. . . . His songwriting is exceptional, his singing is heavenly and his instrumental ability is way beyond the norm. Among national-level traveling troubadours, he is one of the best. John Ziegler, Duluth News Tribune

Ellis Paul began his show solo at the keyboard, singing a song about a girl, a Buick back seat and a dad asking what the movie was about. Paul has a theatrical voice that travels easily from whisper to soaring volume. It’s a vibrating marvel of a voice that defies comparison to anyone else. Doug Hill, The Norman Transcript

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[Chuck E Costa] . . . sensitive, introspective . . . inspired. The New York Times