About
Hunter Paye is a New Englander who made most of his music living out West in Santa Barbara and Portland OR. for the better part of 20yrs, recording 5 studio albums and touring extensively opening for acts like Train, Michelle Shocked, Ronnie Montrose (Van Morrison, Herbie Hancock) and countless others, until moving back to Bradford Vermont in 2018 to be closer to his mother to help out more: She had a health scare and with one month's notice he left his band, packed his life, and grabbed a straight job to quickly restart a new life back there, still always writing songs but just not performing.
But when his mother passed away unexpectedly in 2021, such prolonged darkness required an extreme antidote, so there at the heart of the pandemic he took most of his life’s savings and set out on a 4-month 13-flight journey slowly circling the Mediterranean, never getting Covid, traversing the lands of Morocco, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, fully submerging into each culture, experiencing every great wonder of our world that any might have on their bucket list, sewing himself back together, from camel rides in the Sahara to the Vatican Museum, from the Colosseum to Pompeii and all the great ruins of the region, even tunneling into the Great Pyramid of Giza, all the while writing parts and laying out the blueprint for most aspects of his 6th studio album “Blueprints For Flight”, as the loss helped him know he'd return to being a full-time musician.
After the trip he returned to Vermont in 2022 and instantly built the home studio he’d only talked of, then took a year to work on the album; becoming a full-time petsitter to get paid 40-80+ hrs/week to work on the album, recording, engineering and producing it himself, and utilizing the great talents the Northeast has to offer while also utilizing some of the talents he’d formed bonds with around the country-- like his old band-mate Gil Assayas (Todd Rundgren’s current keyboard player).
Raised by his single mother along the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River until 7th grade, then along the Vermont side of the river for the rest, always able to see the other state from the side they lived on; Hunter picked up guitar late in life, beginning to learn chords on a borrowed guitar while attending Champlain College in Burlington VT.
“Blueprints For Flight” will be Hunter’s 6th full-length album, taking everything learned from its predecessors to create the most lush, diverse, sweeping, and cinematic listening experience yet; each song covering each emotion that comes during and after the great loss of one’s life, yet the album soars thanks to the depths and gifts of so much time in the hearts of foreign lands. “If I’ve done what I set out to do then the listener will hear their own life in these songs, and the sound of our times too."