Paul Driscoll brings two classics to the Countertop
There’s a version of this night where it’s just another cover set. A couple Stones songs, a couple Paul Simon songs, some originals to close it out. In and out, nothing sticks.
This wasn’t that.
It was one of those quiet nights where everything feels a little more dialed in than it should. Sixty degrees, empty streets, cheap parking if you knew where to look. By the time the first chord hit inside Moka Pot, the room was already there. Not packed, but present. Twenty five or so, paying attention.
Paul Driscoll didn’t rush into anything. He started with Exile on Main St., easing into “Sweet Virginia,” and right away it was clear what kind of set this was going to be. The guitar stayed in its lane. The voice didn’t. It carried the weight of the room, and everything else followed it.
When I asked him ahead of the show why these two records, his answer wasn’t complicated. One of them just never left him.
“I chose Exile on Main Street simply because it is one of my favorite albums of all time. It is so chaotic and fun and a little sleazy. Just perfect.”
That word “sleazy” came back later, offhand, half-joking, when he set up “Rocks Off.” He knew exactly what kind of album it was, and he wasn’t trying to clean it up. Just translate it.
What surprised me was how little he tried to recreate anything directly. Instead of chasing the band, he leaned into the absence of one.
“It’s just me up there so I can’t deliver the same energy an entire band can. I like to let the lyrical writing guide how I shape the music.”
So “Rocks Off” didn’t explode. It sank a little. Slowed down, pulled into a lower register, stripped of that loose, staggering vocal that Mick Jagger hides behind the mix. Driscoll flipped that. He enunciated. Let the words sit out in the open. It changed the song more than any tempo shift could.
He didn’t separate the sets either. No Stones block, no Simon block. He moved between them like they belonged in the same conversation. “The Boy in the Bubble” landed early, sharp and rhythmic, before he swung back into Exile again. It kept the room from settling into anything predictable.
When he got to Graceland, he admitted it wasn’t as easy as it looked.
He called it difficult before he played it. Wordy. You could feel that tension in the way he approached it. Careful, but not stiff. Like he was still figuring out how to carry it on his own terms in real time.
That balance between the two records was intentional.
“Where the Stones album is more rowdy, loud, and half-drunk, Graceland is more dialed back and emotional. I thought it would be a good balance.”
It worked because he didn’t flatten them into the same thing. He let them pull against each other.
By the time he hit “Tumbling Dice,” the room had filled in. Closer to thirty five now. He leaned into the story of the song, gambling, women, all of it, then took a long pull of a High Life mid-setup and got one of the biggest reactions of the night. It wasn’t a bit. It just fit.
That’s the thing with him. Nothing feels overly arranged, but it’s not loose by accident either.
“I always make sure that I’m well practiced and rehearsed… but I think it is so important to keep a sense of spontaneity and even chaos in your music.”
You could see that in the way he handled the room. Joking about his tuning like he was constantly a step off, even when he wasn’t. Letting stories stretch a little longer than they needed to. Pulling people in instead of just playing through them.
He’s been doing this long enough to know how to read it.
“The lesson I am most grateful for is how to interact with other people… when I can read the room and know exactly what to play at the right time, it makes me a bit proud of how far I’ve come.”
And he did. Without making it obvious.
Once the covers were behind him, the set shifted but didn’t drop off. If anything, it got clearer. “To Stay Warm” came first, something he wrote at 22, tied to a version of himself he joked he never really left. Then “Lenny’s Song,” built out of conversations with an older guy at a coffee shop in Milford who sounded like he had lived ten different lives before breakfast.
Those songs sat differently. Less translation, more ownership.
You could hear where everything connects. Dylan, Simon, Joni Mitchell on one side. Blaze Foley and Colter Wall on the other. Not in a copycat way, just in how much he trusts a song to stand on its own without dressing it up.
He even nodded to that directly when we talked about influence.
“Bob Dylan was my introduction to the whole folk genre… and both Simon and Mitchell are some of my biggest influences in writing especially.”
There’s a moment late in the set where everything kind of locks in. A crowd participation song, “I Never Have a Bad Day,” that could’ve gone sideways if the room wasn’t with him. Instead it landed. People leaned in. Sang back. It felt earned, and it was.
He didn’t bother pretending he was done after that either. Stayed right there, rolled into the encore without leaving, played “Treatment,” then closed on “Whiskey in My Whiskey,” tying it back to a friend who had passed and introduced him to the song in the first place.
That last part stuck with me more than anything.
Not the covers. Not even the arrangements.
Just the idea that learning these songs again, really learning them, changed how he heard them.
“As many times as you can listen to a great song, nothing will immerse you in the original artist’s head space like learning it and performing it yourself.”
That’s what this set felt like. Not a tribute or a showcase.
Just someone stepping inside songs that already meant something to him, turning them over, and letting people watch what came out the other side.
And by the end of it, those songs didn’t feel like borrowed material anymore. They felt lived in again. A little darker in spots. A little more exposed. Like they had been pulled apart and put back together in a smaller room, right in front of you.
The crowd didn’t rush out when it was over. People hung around, talked a little longer than usual. That kind of quiet after a set where no one really wants to break it just yet.
You got the sense that the next time someone in that room hears Exile or Graceland, it won’t sound exactly the same as it did before.
And that’s probably the whole point.