Paleo

Music career Beginnings Strackany was born in 1981. He graduated from college but was dissatisfied with service-level jobs and so he decided to become a songwriter. He chose the moniker Paleo after seeing a paleontology exhibit of butterflies in Prague. He performed, and continues to perform, extensively; according to one account, he has played about 150 shows per year since 2005. He did this while touring the United States nationally and driving more than 50,000 miles from Easter Day on April 16, 2006 to April 15, 2007 and playing more than 200 concerts. for himself:

The Song Diary would end if he skipped even one day. Each song had to be recorded before sunrise. No songs could be re-recorded. 'Sunday Prayer' songs were new lyrics sung with the same melody every Sunday.

Paleo received a letter of congratulations from VP Dick Cheney after completing his marathon yearlong song-a-day project. He refused to sleep "until he had completely documented a new song for that day regardless of the circumstances," according to his recollection. Paste Magazine described it as "a streetfight of freakish prolificacy." Cheney wrote:

Strackany described the project as psychoanalytically transformative in a personal way:

I feel like a completely different person than when I started out. It was grace, like I died and came back. My perspective on my relationship to love and to art and to my family has totally changed. You have to consider that I spent every second of every day of a whole year in a sort of constant state of catharsis, what seemed like never-ending auto-psychoanalysis. I walked into the Diary maybe a little desperate, certainly insecure, and I walked out on a cloud. -- Paleo, 2007 He helped Elliott develop the band's first album, and acted primarily as the band's producer as well as playing a majority of the instruments on the band's "psychotropic debut record." The Village Voice described Strackany's arrangements as "psychedelic" and noted that instruments he played included the "vibes, glockenspiel, mandolin, and lots of off-kilter keyboards."

Elliott described Strackany as a songwriter who has "stared almost directly at the human soul." Bloodletter (2014)