The first paper Nate Martel chases is newsprint. “The Paper Chase” opens on a narrator working at eight years old, throwing newspapers after school and on weekends while some friends laugh and others ask why, so the title’s slang for money starts out as a literal bundle on a bike.

From there the résumé keeps growing. There are burger shifts at fourteen, selling weed at fifteen, close calls in a courtroom, and eventually every job under the sky, as a builder, a breaker, a teacher and a learner. Each stage pays out the same way, and the song names the exchange rate in its sharpest line: “I had a pocket full of change, I traded it for all my time.”

Martel, a singer and guitarist from Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, sets that ledger to bright retro soul with a funk backbone and a bluesy bite in the guitar, and the horn arrangements push every chorus toward celebration. A song about losing a childhood to work could easily have gone mournful. Martel makes it move, and the groove sounds like the free afternoon the narrator keeps wishing for.

That wish arrives in the bridge. Given a rewind, the narrator would trade the whole grind for more time sitting in the sun, writing songs and making something beautiful out of nothing. The outro then repeats the word running five times in a row, a treadmill in miniature. “The Paper Chase” is the song from that sunny afternoon, written at last, and Martel spends it on something fun enough to dance to.