Stephen Frost is a musical man of many hats. The first song on his website, “Fire & Ice,” is an electronic dance-pop song that hits on par with any top 40 radio hit of today. This may throw some listeners astray, but if you decide to skip to the next song in hopes of something different, you will be gladly rewarded with “This Is A Cry For Help”, a folky, poppy song about trying to take a girl home. However, this song sounds a lot less like a Top 40 radio hit, and a lot more like a jazzy song you’d here at a café on a sunny afternoon (think John Mayer, but more self-aware).
If you continue down Stephen’s playlist, you will soon realize that not one song sounds like it came from the same artist. At this point, you are immersed in The Paris Metro Project, Frost’s musical endeavor in which he intends to create a song for every one of the 245 metro stops in the City of Lights. An ambitious project? Certainly, but if anyone seems dedicated to doing it, it’s Frost. While he's not really a household name in the local scene, Frost has devoted a lot of energy to music over the past several years, from his work soundtracking plays, films, and advertisements to his bewigged appearances as the bass player for local Led Zeppelin tribute act Zep Replica.
To look up the Paris Metro is to be met with 245 pieces of Parisian past, as each stop is named after something significant to Paris’s history in that particular area. This has been Frost’s focus over the past few months. He launched the Paris Metro Project in January of 2013, so as of right now, the end is nowhere in sight. His plan is to associate each song with a particular metro stop, with all of the songs from similar genres on the same line. “I spend half my time reading Wikipedia following links from the Paris metro station anyway,” says Frost. “You can basically find anything in the universe that’s part of the encyclopedia of human emotion in there, and that’s why I gravitate toward it,” he explains.
So far, he’s managed to keep a consistent song-every-three-weeks release timeline, and almost every song sounds distinctly different. Frost explains that the project works well for his songwriting style. “That’s my solution to having a pretty diverse style of making music. People give me a ton of shit about not being completely consistent from song to song and I’ve spent ages trying to figure out how I could make it okay.” Making each song its own separate release helps in this department. “I don’t want to do EPs, I don’t want to do albums at all, so it’s switched into a singles project, and I’m having a lot of fun with that,” he says.
Frost studied William Blake in college, and has since had romantic thoughts about Europe, eventually falling in love with Paris’s dark history under Napoleon’s rule. “Napoleon was a bad guy, I mean, he did crazy shit!” exclaims Frost. “He shot his own troops when they got sick. He was a nasty guy, but all over the place, all these subway stops are dedicated to his different battles, and you start looking into these things. These are human beings, who had very human lives and still went through the exact same things you and I do every day.” He explains that each Metro stop is living history, which one can connect with even across continents. “It’s all right there, and it’s part of their city’s geography,” Frost says of the Metro. “Like, they have made it permanent right there in a place that a gazillion people travel through every single day.”
For each of the songs Frost has released thus far, he has also released a YouTube video, which takes one of two forms--either a music video, or a (usually humorous) explanation in which he gives a little history or the song (or Paris). For the release of his most recent song, "Fire And Ice," he also held a brief release party at Balliceaux, which only lasted an hour and culminated in a listening party for the new song. Frost may or may not continue to do these listening parties for future releases, but regardless, the Paris Metro Project continues to gain steam. "Fire And Ice" reached the top 30 most played songs on internet music streaming service Rdio, definitely the strongest showing yet for one of Frost's singles. Another is scheduled for release within the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that, and hear all of the previous songs in the Paris Metro Project, by checking out Frost's website, at stephenfrostmusic.com. He's also on facebook at facebook.com/stephenfrostmusic.