‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s) are both ex-Londoners, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and actor Paul Odiase and song lyricist Paul Robert Thomas.
Their main website is https://www.paullyrics.com/les-pauls-the-pauls-official-homepage and their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/LesPaulsThePauls.
‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s) have just released their 21st album called ‘The Chelsea Hotel #1’ at https://www.paullyrics.com/album/the-chelsea-hotel
‘The Chelsea Hotel #1’ contains songs about famous artists that have stayed at, or have a strong connection to The Chelsea Hotel including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed.
In February we talked to you about your released triple album, ‘Now & Then’, what’s been happening with ‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s) since?
We spent the time since promoting ‘Now & Then’ and at the same time I started new writing lyrics for our next project, and we then both started working on our new and 21st album, The Chelsea Hotel#1, with our composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and producer, Paul Odiase over in Switzerland. In fact we are now continuing to work on the follow-up albums, The Chelsea Hotel#2 and The Chelsea Hotel#3 as we speak!
What is the theme of the Chelsea Hotel albums?
Our new Chelsea Hotel#1 album that was released on 26 August 2024, contains songs about famous artists that have stayed at the iconic New York hotel, or have a strong connection to the hotel, such as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed and Brian Jones, these artists lit up the 60’s and beyond! The Chelsea Hotel#2 will contain songs about Robbie Robertson. Club 27, Madonna, Patti Smith, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Edi Sedgwick, Marianne Faithful, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, and others.
These well known artists are all connected with the iconic Chelsea Hotel?
Yes, and thousands of people have already heard all of the songs from The Chelsea Hotel#1 as for each song we created a promo video that we posted on each artist’s Facebook fan page before the album was released that has all proved very popular with the artist’s fans!
So are the songs nostalgically looking back at these artists?
I would say they are more factual stories telling about the highlights and lowlights of their brief and often tragic lives. Four of the artists are coincidently members of so called ‘Club 27’ in that they died at the age of 27, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones. The first club member was Robert Johnson, whose grandson wrote me a letter once (https://www.paullyrics.com/letter-to-me-from-robert-johnsons-grandson), and the more recent ‘Club 27’ members are Kurt Cobain and Ami Winehouse.
Did you ever meet any of these artists that stayed at The Chelsea Hotel?
I used to sell hot-dogs in my early teens outside of the famous North London music venue, The Roundhouse that was a few hundred yards from my North London home, and I knowingly and unknowingly met many famous artists, including Andy Warhol (you can read about our meeting at https://www.paullyrics.com/my-15-seconds-with-andy-warhol), and Jim Morrison said ‘Hi’ but he didn’t want a hot-dog, as mentioned in our song about him. David Bowie, Ian Hunter and many more played there when I was outside but I wasn’t really aware of music artists so much then in my early teens as The Beatles mostly dominated the music scene, I actually went to school a stone’s throw from The Abbey Road Beatles Studios.
How do you release your music?
I use Distrokid to release our songs to the major music platforms through my net label, Swiss Cottage Recordz and we are always seeking publishing and licensing and promotional opportunities for our songs.
Where can we listen to the songs and download them?
The first place I would direct you to is to the album’s web-page at https://www.paullyrics.com/album/the-chelsea-hotel that contains the song player and all information and links to the individual songs. We started a Reverbnation album page and the album has gone straight to Number One on Tokyo’s song chart and is Number 3 of Japan’s National Song Chart at https://www.reverbnation.com/TheChelseaHotel.
To download from all the major download stores click on https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/lespauls/the-chelsea-hotel1. We also just started a Facebook group for The Chelsea Hotel#1 that everyone is welcome to join at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1018390739779555. The album can also be heard on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/paulrthomas/sets/the-chelsea-hotel1 and on Bandcamp, where it can also be downloaded at https://lespaulsthepauls.bandcamp.com/album/the-chelsea-hotel-1
Thank you,
Paul
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