Greg Jarvis

Location: Conception Bay South, Newfoundland – Canada

Paw Fan Since: 1993

Favorite Paw Album: Dragline, though they're all excellent!

Top 3 Paw Tracks:

  1. Naiad

  2. The Bridge

  3. One More Bottle

Favorite Paw Riffs:

  • The part just after the bridge in, ironically, "The Bridge", right before the chorus, where the steel meshes with the electric guitar, and it's like the clouds open up.

  • All of "Jessie" & "Swollen"

  • Hell, every song these guys recorded was pure riff heaven.

Favorite Paw Lyrics:

  • The kinship with the big fish (I always picture an Orca) in "Couldn't Know"

Favorite Paw Memories:

When I first discovered them, I was a college kid working at an alternative campus radio station, the great CHMR in St. John's, NL, Canada. In perusing the new CDs, I happened upon Dragline. I had recently seen the video for "Jessie" on City Limits, a Friday night 2-hour program of alternative music on Much Music, Canada's answer to MTV (when they played videos), and really dug it. I remember jumping into the rehearsal studio and putting it on for a listen, and my jaw dropping. I immediately visited my local indie record shop and ordered a CD copy (ah, those pre-internet days). I still remember sitting on the back patio of my mom's house, 19 yrs old, late August '93, listening to Dragline as the nights got longer and cooler.

Years later, summer 2000, and still a huge fan of the band (is there any other kind for Paw?), I was involved in a near-fatal car crash that laid me up for the second half of 2000. I got out of the hospital and returned home in early August 2000, feeling very much out of time and place, as shocks like that sometimes do, and discovering, via the internet, that Paw had just released a new EP, Home Is a Strange Place. It was exactly the sort of continuity and comfort that I needed, so needless to say I ordered it online immediately and waited patiently for it to arrive, where it took it's rightful place among Dragline & Death To Traitors.

Paw have always had a difficult-to-describe quality that I find intoxicating, and I've managed to turn a few younger people on to it in the ensuing years, having managed a record store for 15 years until 2017. The two words that always come together for me are a "wistful urgency" or a melancholic roar; something about the combination of snarling, sputtering electric guitar and aching steel and/or acoustic. They do it like no one else; it's a singular sound that's entirely their own. The only other band who have a similar feel, for me, are the great Buffalo Tom – they, like Paw, have a way of battering and bruising your body while making your heart ache. These guys are so magnificent, I love them dearly and always will.

Paw Wishlist:

NEW MUSIC PLEASE!!!! Anything! It's been 20 years since Home, and we're starving. These guys are too great to not record.