“Paul Bergmann is a prize-fighter: sinuous, sinewy, a ballerina in a blood-spot arena.” L.A. Record For some time, Paul has been writing and singing as if from a vantage point far into the future; as though uncovering rather than composing his own body of work. Early folk-pop, recorded while signed with Fairfax Recordings, has found its way into TV and film, but to dip into Paul’s work at random is to discover many different versions of the same artist. This scruffy folk punk, electro-piano torch crooner, analog psychedelian, and, occasionally, strident Neil Young disciple par excellence has crisscrossed the country in concert in support of one project or another, opening for the likes of Angel Olsen and Lou Barlow, selling out the historic Cairo Jazz Club in Egypt. Such peregrinations have concretized Paul’s thematic obsessions of the years: the life, and death, of the creative type; human desire; aging; the follies and false promises of stature and fame. In his relentless oeuvre-building, Paul has amassed an especially articulate kind of existentialism: what it means to persist, and to create, in a world which dies in the near distance. In No Masters in Paradise, the form of the songwriter’s ballad, in the hands of an expert, is turned inward for comfort, resisting the base lure of worldly approval.