Born in Oregon and raised in Pennsylvania, Paul Benshoof kicked off his music career in Upstate New York and worked his way through Los Angeles before settling in the high-altitude mountains of New Mexico in 1995. His songs and recordings have garnered critical praise in many publications, including Keyboard Magazine, Indie Review, The Scene, Music Reviewer, Southwest Musician, The Minstrel Avenue Record, New Times, and No Cover.

Paul first gained attention in Syracuse, New York's independent music scene of the mid-1980s. He got his start as an opening act for a regional traveling folk festival before releasing his first solo album, A Bit Too Close on his newly formed record label TMPB Recordings in 1986. Lightly sprinkled with the folk vibe for which he had become known, that album featured both acoustic and electric material recorded in his Syracuse apartment on a little Tascam Porta-Studio with a couple of guitars and whatever other instrumentation he could find, often synthesized through a cheap Casio keyboard. It also included a cover designed, laid-out, cut-out, folded, and inserted by the artist himself. Despite its shoestring production, this self-produced one-man opus sold well and garnered sufficient acclaim to pave the way for new music on subsequent albums.

Thanks to growing album sales, each new project was met with an increasing production budget (affording improved recording equipment and better instruments); yet Paul continued to play all of the instruments and handle album sleeve design himself. For many artists, this would be a risky venture, but for Paul it was an avenue to complete artistic freedom, which he cherishes deeply to this day. Through this approach, he somehow managed to please a whole spectrum of listeners from acoustic folk purists to rock junkies, without offending or disappointing anyone along the way.

Over the next eight years, Paul would release four more albums, culminating in his 1994 release Won't You Leave Me Alone? which featured his most commercially successful single, One Guitar. During this era, this song and other Benshoof originals appeared on several singer-songwriter compilation albums, including those released in Mexico and Europe. He then took a 12-year recording and performing hiatus to help raise a family, during which time he put his musical energy into producing a number of musicians varying in styles from folk to rock to blues to country, many of which were released on his TMPB Recordings label. All the while, he longed to record original material again, and in 2006, his pent-up creativity exploded into his critically acclaimed sixth studio album, Still I Sing, which included fan favorites Another Rainy Day and Can't Say Goodbye.

During the course of his musical expedition, Paul has played coffeehouses, clubs, and the occasional festival, both as a soloist and as the front man for his sporadic touring ensemble, The Benchmarks, a group through which he started introducing non-original music into his performance repertoire. An early incarnation of this group backed him on his live acoustic concert in 1995 which was finally released as an official bootleg entitled Unplugged and Unshaved in 2015. It included tasty live versions of songs from all of his studio albums to date, returning him to the acoustic sounds that first brought attention to his music back in the 1980s.