Alma Mater

At long last, the soundtrack to so many Princeton nights has finally been recorded for dissemination to the masses and careful study by future generations. Paul Cowgill, the pride of Munster, Indiana and a helluva college roommate, has just made his first EP "Secret Snow" available for digital purchase or to stream for free. The Cambridge, MA-based polymath has put together four brisk songs sprinkled with the deft wordplay and lyrical ingenuity one would expect from a Harvard PhD in systems biology (see: "The Right to Arm Bears"). But it's hardly all work and no play for Cowgill. His crisp guitar-and-vocals tracks evoke the carefree joys of a good jam session with your buddies on the quad - except unlike that annoying kid on your floor freshman year playing Dispatch, Cowgill is actually good at singing and guitar.

According to his Bandcamp website, the writing for these four tracks took place over four years between 2006-2010. As the four tracks only total 13 minutes and 8 seconds, that means that Cowgill devoted nearly two days of songwriting, practice, and tweaking for every second of audio recorded on the EP. Now that's attention to detail, people. 

The fruits of this labor of love, composed at a Brahms-like pace, are finally being served up for the listening public in take-out form on the website and in a sit-down venue at O'Brien's pub in Allston on May 10th. The crowd at Cowgill's last live performance - an open mic night at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge - was so taken with him that management had to make an "Elvis has left the building"-style announcement to get us to pipe down and let the other artists meekly attempt to follow his act. 

So check out the EP online and come to the show if you're in town. Cowgill's new release is just the kind of hot off-the-presses, quality singing and songwriting that's sure to please you, your mother, and that cute girl in econ 101 alike. 

*Full disclosure: no financial considerations were made to the Pursuit of Catchiness in exchange for this plug, unless you count the time that Mr. and Mrs. Cowgill let a bunch of us stay over and bought us all burritos even though Paul wasn't in town.