My name is Paul Artson. I am a songwriter living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. I was born in Oshawa, Ontario, and grew up around those parts.
After high school I spent two or three days as a high-powered investment banker up in my golden cradle on the forty-eighth story of a cement spindle on Wall Street. But the bottom dropped out of the latex bath towel market, as it does every few years, and so for six months I was a minstrel in the traveling courts of various kings and queens of my imagination.
But as it turned out I was destined for other things. When I came to, face down in a fountain, I was taken downtown and stripped both of my tights and my membership in the Minstrel's Union. A jury was convened, I was found guilty, and was told not to go within 500 metres of the lyrics to the Tragically Hip song, "The Rules."
Naked and sad, I was sent from the courthouse and ended up spending the better part of a season bumming around the west coast of Canada before I was captured by fur trappers and subsequently stuffed and mounted.
On a smoggy July morning I was purchased from a pawn shop by former Minister of Canadian Heritage, Bev Oda. After a brief tenure beside her fireplace I was given to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as what both I and the CBC considered to be shameful compensation for monies cut from the CBC's annual budget.
Fortunately for me, the CBC put me in storage rather than by the curb, and after a month or two it came to the attention of an intern that I was in fact still alive. I was soon un-stuffed and, to pay me back for my trouble, I was commissioned to write a new jingle for CBC Radio 3. Though the task was a daunting one, I persisted and wrote what I felt at the time was one of my strongest compositions to date. Sadly, the song never saw the light of day. Why, you ask? Because a team of greasy, money-grubbing lawyers representing that [splendid!] narcissist Leonard Cohen successfully sued me for copyright infringement.
Now, I admit that most of my composition was a direct rip off of "So Long, Marianne." And sure it was both pathetic and maybe a little naive of me to swap out the word 'Marianne,' replace it with 'CBC,' and expect no one to notice. And, yes, three minutes is too long for a radio jingle. I can see that now. But I will thumb wrestle to the death anyone else who tells me that my version (Now so long, CBC, again won’t you show to me / Jonovision and Degrassi High and Road to Avonlea) is inferior to Mr. Cohen's (Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began / To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again).
But I digress. After all of that legal stuff was cleared up between the CBC, Leonard Cohen, and me, I relocated to Halifax, and there I have remained for a year.
I write songs on occasion, and sometimes I record them and put them on the internet.
A Couple of Cover Videos
Back in December of 2007 during a break from recording my own music I thought I'd take a stab at doing some covers to put on YouTube. Not much thought was put into the whole thing. Aside from a few videos, the end result of the night's work was an informative mathematical equation that should come in handy if I were to decide to record some more videos: 2 am + black shirt + black background + black hat = videos of a floating head playing the guitar and singing poorly.
"None But the Rain" - Townes Van Zandt
"Hello in There" - John Prine
