Paul Shapera Continues The Story Of The Fictional City New Albion In His Latest Concept Album, 'Jill's Psychedelic Sunday'

Paul Shapera writes pulp operas. Just as pulp fiction covered everything from hard boiled detective stories to Buck Rogers, Tarzan to Flash Gordon, Paul's albums fantasy musicals cover a 180 year span of history in the fictional city of New Albion.

Albums can shift genres from steampunk to dieselpunk, atompunk to weird west, psychedelic to cyberpunk, depending on where in the timeline the story is taking place. These strange tales are full of morally ambiguous characters, high drama, intricate world building, and soaring melodies.

"My work is very much like an epic science fiction book series, but told in highly emotive music, like an opera cycle made with various forms of popular music," says Paul.

He just released the latest continuation of Jill's story, Jill's Psychedelic Sunday, from his previous albums, The Dolls Of New Albion and the Posthuman War series. "This album lays off the linear storytelling, however. It's just snapshots of different scenes as opposed to the flat out storylines present in the albums before this." The album explores different sides of psychedelic music ranging from 60 psych folk to Floyd, 90s rave to jam bands, and creepy tech to Space Rock. Much like how shifting genres in his different albums reveal different parts of New Albion's history, the different ways he uses the psychedelic genre is a way to tell the listener where Jill is in her journey.

Jill's Psychedelic Sunday explores Jill's journey through ritual induced psychedelia. The album opens with "Coming Up," which sets up the rest of the album. It depicts a ritual initiation, with the leader telling Jill to drink something to complete her induction. The rest of the album is her journey through ten scenes from her life which have not happened yet. The music of "Behind the Midnight Scene" lays out the recurring musical motif of the album which shows back up along Jill's wild and wandering journey. You are on this trip with Jill.

Each song contains spoken snippets which describe small scenes, around which the track is occurring. They are meant to ground you and keep you and Jill together. "This album more than any other in recent memory was made because it was the album I wanted to listen to," shares Paul. "Other albums are the story I want to tell right then, or the music that I feel I need to express, or the style I most want to explore. This one was the one I just simply wanted to listen to. I wanted to be able to play it on Spotify."

Listen here:

https://open.spotify.com/album/3MOhNtIfREt14wAVfm85kU?si=aQuzGZ1DTy-xYCpUAj5qNQ

Track List

Coming Up

Behind the Midnight Scene

The Maze The Mirror

Cerebral Deep

Isabela

Jill's Tattoo

Duel of the Tarot

Fae Wather Way

Michael

The B.A.I.R.N.S.

The Cosmic Hoedown

Coming Down

Originally from Pittsburgh, Paul is an American living in a small village in Serbia, having moved there straight from New York City, creating sci-fi musicals in an old, Balkan farming village. His work has grown steadily due to online word of mouth and has a very active and enthusiastic fanbase that creates art, cosplay, and animatics of the characters and songs.

"I worked furiously on music for years with nobody listening, unable to figure out how to attract an audience and resigning myself to the reality that I would spend my life at a craft I would remain unknown for," reveals Paul. "Once I made peace with this, I was free to create exactly what I wanted and not worry about what people might like, and so I went back to making weird, story albums, sci-fi musicals, and lo and behold, then I made it."