Singer/songwriter Paul Metsa is a native of the same Minnesota Iron Range that produced Bob Dylan. His mother was a jazz singer; his father, a tavern owner, also played accordion professionally. In grade school, he had his own folk duo and later a rock band. In 1979, he moved from his home in Virginia, MN, to Minneapolis to pursue his musical career. Initially, he played in a band called Cats Under the Stars, which issued a single, "Blue Ghosts"/"Louie, Louie," in 1982. He went solo and self-released his debut solo album, Paper Tigers, on his own Raven Records label in 1984. (The album was reissued on CD with bonus tracks in 2001.) After a couple of singles ("59 Coal Mines"/"Stars Over the Pacific" [1986] and "Ferris Wheels on the Farm"/"Party to a Crime" [1987]), he came out with his second album, Slow Justice, in 1990. A concert recording, Live at the Guthrie, followed in 1991, and then two more studio releases, the retrospective Radio Motel (1992) and Whistling Past the Graveyard (1993), before a second live album, Mississippi Farewell, was issued in 1994. Metsa released an EP, Lincoln's Bedroom, in 1998. Meanwhile, Metsa performed in clubs extensively around the U.S. and overseas. In 2004, while casting around for something to mark his 25th anniversary as a performer, he came upon a recording he had made in Mars Studio in Austin, TX, in October 1990. Loud House Records picked it up for release and issued it under the title Texas in the Twilight in January 2005. ~ William Ruhlmann