Why Christmas?

Blue Christmas

Life for Life

Christmastime Is Here (original)

Chestbox (Strings only)

Goodbye September

Orchestrated pop, written and arranged by me (strings, horns, backing vox).

Brave

Composed by Paula Kelley
Performed by the PKO
Recorded at QuailTop Studio, North Hollywood, CA

Everybody's On To Me

Written, arranged, and performed by Paula Kelley

You Gonna Make It

A New Time

Written by Andy Bell
arrangement by Paula Kelley
performed by the Paula Kelley Orchestra for Club AC30 compilation

Vapour Trail

from "The Trouble with Success or How You Fit into the World"
written and arranged by Paula Kelley

Night Racer

All orchestral and vocal arrangements by Paula Kelley* 
*except The Summer Crossing - string arrangement by Paula Kelley, trumpets by Dennis Cronin and Song Clerk - string arrangement by Paula Kelley, vocal arrangement by Tim Monger


String arrangement- The Summer Crossing - Vitamin D

String and flugelhorn arrangement  - Life for Life (The PKO)

String arrangement  - Love is Another Drug (Jesse Macht)

String arrangement - The Ol' College Try (L.E.O./Bleu)

Earth Oddity FNL

Pop auteur Paula Kelley began began playing piano at age three and was an orchestral harpsichordist by the time she was in high school. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy (where she taught herself guitar), then Boston University and Berklee College of Music.
 
While at BU Kelley joined American shoegaze group the Drop Nineteens. After riding a wave of college-press hype and European touring, she left them before their demise in 1994 to pursue vehicles for her own songwriting. Kelley fronted the indie-rock bands Hot Rod and Boy Wonder (whose sole full-length album was the subject of a recent episode of the Meep Meep Podcast), but by Y2K Paula was ready to fully indulge her pop muse in the less-confining role of solo performer. The album Nothing/Everything arrived in 2001, successfully leaving the bluster of alternative rock behind and demonstrating her drift into the more pristine waters of pop music. Then came the more fully-realized The Trouble with Success or How you Fit into the World on Kimchee Records.

With that release, Paula Kelley's music achieved infectious and elegant heights only hinted at before, with many of the tracks featuring a 32-piece orchestra augmenting her emotionally charged arrangements. Boston Herald music writer Brett Milano called The Trouble with Success the “best Boston pop album of the decade.” 

In 2005 Kelley relocated to Los Angeles and turned her attention to scoring films and doing orchestral arrangements for other artists. She’s worked with power-pop favorites L.E.O., indie-folk songwriter Timothy Monger, and platinum-selling singer-songwriter Matt Nathanson, for whom (among other things) she penned an a cappella arrangement performed by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir’s Homophones.

Her music has appeared in many TV and film productions, including Shrill, Fever Pitch, Fresh Off the Boat, and Steven Spielberg’s Taken.

Paula continues to write and release her own records, including the darkly orchestral Airports EP and an odds and sods collection entitled Some Sucker’s Life, Vol. 1. A new album is in progress which will feature songs about navigating sobriety as a cranky middle-aged lady in the end times.

The Paula Kelley Orchestra

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