Paul Woolner is a contemporary folk artist whose music draws from a lifetime of rich experience as a songwriter, business founder, community builder, and lifelong learner. Based in Ontario’s Beaver Valley, Paul blends fingerstyle acoustic guitar with introspective storytelling to create timeless songs that explore life’s seasons, memories, and quiet revelations. His music pays homage to the 1960s and 70s era that shaped him when genres were fluid and the line between artist and audience was beautifully thin.

Woolner came of age playing the coffeehouse circuit as a teenager, hitchhiking to Toronto’s Yorkville Village and performing in venues from Montreal to Banff. His poetic sensibility was shaped early by a hardworking, blue-collar upbringing, supporting himself from the age of 14 while his parents worked to keep their family afloat in a modest gravel-road house at the edge of town. The neighbourhood was as rough as it was formative, with a local bootlegger at one end of the street and a house shrouded in rumours of a tragic, suspicious death at the other. Woolner later became the frontman for the Canadian folk-rock band Kit Carson, sharing stages with icons like Jerry Jeff Walker and Melanie. In his mid-twenties, he stepped away from full-time music to pursue a parallel path in entrepreneurship, ultimately helping companies scale with integrity, guided by a masters and doctorate in Learning Theory from the University of Toronto.

Music never left him. As a recent empty-nester, Paul returned to songwriting with renewed purpose, releasing music under the banner Live the Dash, a project with an evolving cast of Grey-Bruce County’s touring musicians including Roger Williams on guitar, Victoria Yeh on electric violin, Joel Dawson on bass and vocals, and Michael Balfe on drums and vocals. His latest project marks a return to his roots: spare yet full-sounding arrangements built around acoustic guitar, with added bass, drums, keys, and rich textures from guest instruments. Recorded largely in his home studio in Beaver Valley with producer Thomas McKay, the songs are united by warmth and immersed in the natural environment. 

The EP explores themes of change, memory, and reflection, from the climate-aware “The Winter That Never Was” to the family epic “Isaac’s Lament,” rooted in his ancestors’ emigration to Ontario in 1832, to the introspective ponderings before major heart reconstruction surgery in “No Turning Back”. Other songs like “Blue Morning” and “Moving On” offer deeply personal sentiments of love, letting go, and life’s inevitable movement forward. 

Outside of music, Paul is an avid surfer, skier, and community advocate, serving as founding chair of Toronto’s Centre for Mindfulness Studies and an active member of the Escarpment Corridor Alliance. Whether in business or song, his guiding force is a love of learning, connection, and the ever-evolving nature of the human experience.