The Paperboys make music that is best described by founder Tom Landa as high energy music that is like a “Guinness with a tequilla chaser while listening to an Americana Jukebox.”
The Paperboys began in Vancouver in 1992. Landa, a young musician born in Mexico City, first got the taste for Celtic music when he heard Spirit of The West. Mixing his take on Celtic music with the music he had grown up with in Mexico seemed a natural direction for Tom to take.
By 1995, with a shifting group of players moving in and out of the band, a unique form of music was emerging–a mix of Celtic and latin folk with straightforward pop and a taste of bluegrass: Tom and his friends called it “stomp” and the first album, Late As Usual, was full of it. Their second album Molinos, however, was the breakthrough–and the title song, co-written with rocker Annette Ducharme, earned the band significant radio play.
Molinos not only won a Juno (Canadian Grammy) for “Roots and Traditional Album of the Year,” but it gave The Paperboys a strong following in the United States. Tom and the band have done more than 16 coast-to-coast tours in Canada, and have built huge followings in Seattle, Portland and other cities in the Northwest, throughout California, and in the North East. Along the way, the band racked up record sales and put more than 200,000 miles of interstate and back roads on dozens of rental cars.
In the fall of 2000 Red House released, Postcards and album full of irresistible grooves and the sights and sounds of seven years of nonstop touring that Landa called ” a soundtrack to the Global Village.”
On 2001’s A Nod to Bob The Paperboys rendition of “All Along the Watchtower” was a dizzying version that remains one of the cornerstones of the classic Dylan tribute record.
In 2006, Tom Landa and The Paperboys released The Road to Ellenside, an album recorded entirely at a country manor in rural England. The highly lauded album landed on Top Ten critics’ poll in The Village Voice.
The Paperboys continue an exhausting tour schedule playing nearly 150 shows a year around the world, selling out clubs at nearly every stop bringing their unique, high-energy music to their growing legions of fans.