We always take note when Eli “Paperboy” Reed comes back to town, and tonight the Brookline native rolls down Harvard Avenue for a homecoming gig at Allston’s Brighton Music Hall with Ruby Rose Fox.
The show is the last date on Reed’s current tour supporting new album My Way Home, and earlier this month dropped the album’s gritty first single, “Hold Out”. Listen to it below.
If the retro-soul track isn’t enough to get the taste buds burning, fear not — pre-orders of Reed’s new album, due June 10 via Yep Roc, come bundled with the musician’s own brand of hot sauce, Cut Ya Down. “A lifelong dream of mine has come true,” Reed wrote on Instagram, “my face is on a bottle of hot sauce.”
Of the new album, Reed offers the following: “When I wrote these new songs, I wasn’t planning on writing a record. I wrote these songs just because I wanted to write music that I liked and that moved me. There was no premeditation, no thought of what a label or anyone else might want. My intention was never to make a gospel album, just to make a collection of songs that were maybe more serious than the things I’d done before.”
Let’s hope the sauce shows up on a merch table tonight at Brighton.