Growing up in New York City, Paul Foglino listened to Johnny Cash, The Clancy Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel, which was the entirety of his parents’ record collection. In junior high school he bought Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (the one with the poster). In college he heard John Prine, who knocked him sideways. In his thirties he took guitar lessons with Dave Van Ronk, who finished him off. Since then, Prine and Van Ronk have explicitly or implicitly informed pretty much everything he has done musically. The rest is all Paul.
In the 1990s, Foglino wrote, performed and toured with country rock stalwarts 5 Chinese Brothers, whose four acclaimed albums – Singer Songwriter Beggarman Thief, Stone Soup, Let’s Kill Saturday Night and A Window Shopper’s Christmas – remain revered by the alt-country cognoscenti more than three decades later.
Paul turned to theatre in the ‘00s, writing three musicals produced at LaMaMa E.T.C. and receiving the Jury Prize for Music & Lyrics at the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival for Hercules in High Suburbia. He collaborated with ragtime legend Terry Waldo on 2007’s Trophy Wife and with Mark Ettinger of the Flying Karamazov Brothers and Lucy Darling on 2009’s Coming, Aphrodite!, both of which were nominated for Best Musical Composition by The New York Innovative Theatre Awards.
In 2010, he began working with singer/actress Ellen Foley – famed for her work with Meat Loaf, The Clash and Stephen Sondheim – writing and producing her acclaimed comeback albums About Time (2013) and Fighting Words (2021), the latter of which won multiple honors from The Blue Railroad Awards for Excellence in Music including Best Rock Album and Songwriter of The Year. In 2016 Paul released his solo debut album Inside Another Side which was featured on several Year End/Best Of lists including Culture Catch, where it was ranked alongside albums by David Bowie, Childish Gambino and Metallica.
Paul’s 2026 album Monday Street – with its contemporary nods to legacy artists that include Tom Paxton and Laura Nyro – showcases such standout tracks as 'Our Band Could Be Your Life,' which examines a life lived in music forty years down the road; 'Did You Hear Dave Van Ronk', a tribute to the late Greenwich Village folk legend who became Paul’s teacher, mentor and friend; and the cautionary ditty 'When the Devil Calls Your Name', which spotlights Paul’s wry lyrics and deft fingerpicking along with a video animated by Foglino.
“It's very much an album about being a 63-year-old songwriter and realizing that I'm now writing age-appropriate songs,” says Paul. “For people my age, whether we’re musicians or just fans, music has been a formative part of our lives for at least 50 years. Some of us may have taken a long time to grow up. But even among the album’s darker moments, I find there’s an instinctive need to be positive.”