Paul Schalda - Anything For Your Love (Skylark Soul)

The Slow Music Movement
Aug 18
2 min read

This is the cover for Paul Schalda's, "Anything For Your Love" single showing Schalda with long hair gazing contemplatively into the distance, wearing a light jacket, against a tan background. Text reads "Anything for Your Love."

With his father being a member of a Brooklyn vocal group, Paul Schalda had a musical head start, he's even in a doo-wop band to this day with Schalda senior and his three brothers - The Sha La Das, but it wasn't long before he started blazing his own trail with his Paul and the Tall Trees project, as well as keeping his collaborative hand in providing guitar and backing vocals as part of the explosive soul outfit fronted by the late, ever so great Charles Bradley. He's got history and paid his dues in the studio and on the road, and you can hear that worldly wiseness, maybe even natural weariness in his voice that comes from somewhere deep within. He's a soul man.

Paul Schalda with long hair and a denim shirt performing on an outdoor stage, holding a microphone. The black and white photo gives the shot a vintage feel.

Schalda singing the track's title is the first thing you'll hear upon hitting play, and once heard it will probably be the last thing you hear before you go to bed, whether the music is playing or not. Affairs of the heart account for a ridiculously high percentage of the songs recorded in the last hundred years, but it's not what they're saying but how they're said that makes the difference, and boy does Schalda say it. As soon as those words are uttered I'm in no doubt he'd "climb the highest mountain and swim the seven seas" to make that love happen, and he makes me want to do the same.

If this was an a capella version I might well have been satisfied, but the vocal refrain is backed up by an irresistible groove that is as simple and deeply satisfying as the vocal. The drums are stripped back - more a spirit guide than driving force, the bass intertwining a similarly succinct but synergistic pattern, adding a bit of bump to this heartfelt message. Synths sit well back in the mix, elevating rather than distracting, leaving the precision keys to alternately add a twinkle to the blue eyed soul, some low key drama or subtle rays of jazzy sunshine depending on Schalda's needs. This is simple, heartfelt and deeply soulful music with a momentary lapse into AOR schmaltz for contrast that would have sounded great fifty years ago and which will still sound great in 2075, and beyond.