Paul Archer releases new single

For more than three decades, Belfast-born musician and visual artist Paul Archer has built a creative life around the meeting point of sound, image and memory. His work has moved through alternative rock, cosmic soul and abstract expressionism, with personal storytelling providing the thread connecting each discipline. Formerly of Burning Codes and a collaborator with artists including Snow Patrol and Elbow, Paul has developed a practice that explores how different forms can express the same emotion.

His musical story began in Belfast’s alternative scene with Disreali Gears, a band he formed alongside his brother and Jonny Quinn. Early performances included gigs with Shrug at The Hercules Bar, followed by appearances in the Northern Ireland heats of the Hot Press competition at Mandela Hall and on UTV’s The Gerry Kelly Show. The band ultimately received the Hot Press Best Band award for Northern Ireland, marking an early achievement in Paul’s long relationship with music.

More recently, he stepped forward under his own name, releasing a trio of well-received singles last year before arriving at his debut solo album, Art. The record represents the first time Paul Archer has released music as a solo artist, bringing together euphoric rock and soul stylings while extending the visual dimension of his creative practice. Contributions from Duke Special, Janet Henry, Jim Lockhart of Horslips and Jonny Quinn, formerly of Snow Patrol, add further flair to an album already built around collaboration.

The relationship between art, memory and place is especially apparent in “Belfast (Place of My Soul),” a profoundly personal release lifted from the record. Penned from a place of homesickness, the song began during an overnight shift at a children’s home in Holbeach, Cambridgeshire; away from Belfast, Paul found himself thinking intensely about the city and the sense of belonging that returned whenever he came home.

The song is less a straightforward portrait of a place than an expression of what that place means to the person who left it. Belfast becomes memory, identity and emotional gravity and Paul’s focus is on the warmth, humour, creativity and enduring spirit of its people, offering an alternative to the way the city can so often be reduced to headlines surrounding division and unrest. Recorded at Start Together Studios inside Belfast’s Oh Yeah Music Centre, “Belfast (Place of My Soul)” brings together contributions from Good Vibrations founder Terri Hooley, Snow Patrol guitarist Nathan Connolly, Grammy-nominated songwriter and Ivor Novello Award winner Iain Archer, alongside students from Belfast Metropolitan College.

Set up by atmospheric piano notes, Paul’s soulful voice glides in above layers of backing vocals before the strike of drums injects a steady rock groove dashed with lightly gritty guitar tones. Flowing with stunning vocal performance carrying memorable melodic hooks and warm instrumentation, with “Belfast (Place of My Soul),” Paul Archer serves up an epic jam that’s catchy, energising and thoroughly transportive from start to finish.

Putting his songwriting talent and performance flair on full display, on the song, Paul’s personal experience becomes a shared expression, linking different generations and corners of Belfast’s creative community through a song about belonging. After decades of creating across music and art, Paul Archer’s latest work finds him looking back towards the place where his story began and perhaps that’s what home becomes with time, not somewhere you simply live, but somewhere that continues to live inside you.

Listen to Belfast (Place Of My Soul) below

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