There’s a particular kind of compliment that doubles as an occupational hazard: crowds who hear Paulino front The Great Escape have been known to ask, mid-set, whether the real band snuck in through the back door. For seventeen years, Paulino has made a career out of sounding indistinguishable from Steve Perry — fronting New England’s top-voted Journey tribute act with a vibrato and range so exact that fans occasionally forget they’re watching a tribute at all. It’s the kind of gift that could easily become a cage. Paulino has spent just as much energy making sure it doesn’t.
The Great Escape formed in 2008 out of Massachusetts, and Paulino has fronted it ever since — twice voted New England’s Best Tribute Band at the Limelight Magazine Awards, a regular headliner at rooms like the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Biloxi and Mohegan Sun, and, this past July, the band’s first-ever Nashville appearance at The Troubadour. Nearly two decades in, the demand for the show hasn’t cooled; if anything, Nashville audiences unfamiliar with the band gave The Great Escape one of its biggest welcomes yet.
But the tribute stage has never been the whole story. Back home in Hudson, Massachusetts — a town Paulino has described as being half-Portuguese and entirely his heart — he’s spent those same years building a parallel career as a solo artist, releasing original pop-rock material under his own name. “I’d like to branch out, do my own thing and have my own identity,” he said, with a candor that cuts right past the usual tribute-act sales pitch. “It’s getting kind of weird when people call me Steve.”
That original material is what earned Paulino his latest recognition: an official nomination for Song of the Year – Rock Artist at the 12th Annual Josie Music Awards for “Don’t Give Up on Me,” set for September 20 at the Grand Ole Opry House. It’s a distinction that belongs entirely to Paulino the songwriter, not Paulino the Steve Perry stand-in — recognition for a voice that, after seventeen years of channeling someone else’s, is finally being judged on its own songs.
It would be easy to read the two sides of Paulino’s career as being in tension — the tribute frontman drawing the bigger crowds, the solo artist chasing his own identity in the gaps between Great Escape dates. The more accurate read is that each side sharpens the other. Nearly two decades of nightly Steve Perry-caliber vocal demands is not a small technical feat, and it shows up in the control and range on Paulino’s own recordings. The Josie nomination isn’t a pivot away from the tribute circuit. It’s proof of what that circuit was quietly building the whole time.