St. Paul & The Broken Bones: Liberation of the Spirit
photo credit: Bobbi Rich
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First, there is the swell of a reverent and arresting church organ, its oscillating chords offering a solitary light amid the darkness. Then, an electrified voice calls out, humbly appealing to the spiritual almighty, “Lord, can you hear me up there in the sky?” The voice grows, now possessed, summoning fire and brimstone manifested by a piercing chorus of distortion-soaked guitar and the thunderous downbeat of drums. This is St. Paul & The Broken Bones, opening their fourth album with a searing, 80-second invocation as they make landfall on The Alien Coast.
The voice of the preacher belongs to the band’s singer and lyricist, Paul Janeway—who’s not yet convinced that this new territory is the promised land. “It’s yet to be determined,” Janeway says with a laugh, from his home in Birmingham, Ala. Yet, for him and The Broken Bones, the 11-song set already represents something very special: a truly collaborative effort, challenged and resisted within the 10-year-old group’s own camp.
On this Friday in January, the release date for the album still sits two weeks away. But, in fact, the band has already kept the record on the shelf for nearly two years. By the fall of 2019, St. Paul & The Broken Bones had become free agents, no longer beholden to a record company. After completing another exhaustive cycle of touring—in support of its third LP, Young Sick Camellia—the band members began to contemplate a follow-up.
To foster a more inclusive and democratic creative process for the writing of a new album, the band began sharing music through an online Dropbox—where the members placed over 70 ideas, song fragments and demos. Janeway served as curator, sifting through the assortment, listening for potential tracks. Immediately, the uncharacteristic nature of the submissions, many of which had darker tonalities—synth riffs, looping beats and heavier, deeper grooves—told him that this record could be different.
The singer leaned into the prospect of a stark departure from the band’s previous work, and winnowed the 70 pieces down to a working assortment of about 20 possible songs. The band’s co-founder, bassist Jesse Phillips, for one, appreciated the freedom. “We ended up with a super[1]wide variety of things,” Phillips says. “[The band members] followed their own tales into the sonic wilderness. We let them do that rather than force them back into the realm of what our band would traditionally do.”
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Janeway and Phillips first met in the mid-2000s, performing together briefly in a Birmingham alternative soul group, The Secret Dangers. In 2012, the pair reconnected and started writing together. Centered around Janeway’s unmistakably powerful pipes and sermon-like command, they started cooking up their blend of Muscle Shoals-styled throwback soul and putting together an expanded ensemble that included a three-piece horn section.
St. Paul & The Broken Bones worked through some lineup changes—issuing two EPs before releasing their debut LP, 2014’s Half the City. The album was a winner, peaking at 56 on the Billboard 200, scoring the band slots on late-night TV programs like Letterman, Conan and Kimmel, and earning them a coveted opening slot for The Rolling Stones. Their 2016 follow-up, Sea of Noise, climbed higher than its predecessor, up to 44 on the charts. It also established the group as one willing to push itself creatively, take risks and stave off complacency.
Boasting a summer-festival sound tailored as well as their suits, the group also quickly became known as one of the most dynamic and entertaining acts on the live-music circuit. Over the years, Janeway has made a habit out of leaving the stage and venturing out into the mass of bodies standing before him— singing to, with and among his sunburnt, swaying congregation. It is this sense of benevolence—this need to connect, even through the more emotionally intimate material of Young Sick Camellia—that has always buoyed St. Paul & The Broken Bones. Janeway worried that the demos for the new album, while inspiring, needed some breath, some life. So they turned to noted producer Matt Ross[1]Spang to guide the sessions.
“I knew from the demos that we weren’t going to go in and do a throwback soul record. They wanted to do something they had not done before,” Ross-Spang says.
Rather than choosing industry magnets such as Nashville, Memphis or Los Angeles for studio time, the band elected to record at home in Birmingham—a Deep South tinderbox during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s that has more recently served as a fairly accurate mirror of American life. “I do live here in Alabama,” Janeway says. “A lot of artists that are from here move away. I do feel like, at times, living here has helped me gauge the pulse a little bit, for some strange reason.”
In early 2020, Janeway put his ear to the railroad tracks, ahead of a tumultuous election season and the emergence of COVID-19. “There’s no way in hell I knew we were about to have a global pandemic,” he says. “But, it didn’t feel like there was a whole lot of hope.”
The lyrical narrative of any St. Paul & The Broken Bones song belongs almost exclusively to Janeway. But, even after composing the lyrics to nearly two dozen tracks, he still wasn’t entirely sure which ones would find their way onto the new record. However, he had a sense of the project’s overall shape.
The frontman knew early on that he wanted the album to open with “3000 AD Mass,” the combustible invocation where he channels Futurama’s animated pastor, Reverend Lionel Preacherbot. And he decided to conclude the 35-minute record with the hazy drift of “Love Letter From a Red Roof Inn.” In between the bookends, Janeway says, “I knew I wanted it to be kind of a fever dream sequence. And I wanted it to make sense.”
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In the historic Woodlawn district of Birmingham, there is a recording studio and record label known as Communicating Vessels. Its motto—“revolution of the mind, liberation of the spirit”—could just as easily have doubled as a mantra for St. Paul & The Broken Bones’ Alien Coast session. CommVess built its success around regional artists, particularly with the hip-hop collective, The Green Seed. And when the Bones and Ross-Spang started rolling tape on their liberating revolution of a record, they turned to The Green Seed’s Randall “R-Tist” Turner for assistance, coaching the group’s deployment of samples and beats.
“I’ve been listening the The Green Seed for years,” Phillips says. “I think having Randall in the studio helped to give [the tracks] a darker, late-night vibe on the rhythm side.” CommVess, too, had a vibe—intimate and cozy, with shaded, low lighting. It felt more like a lounge than a studio, which perfectly matched the music being made. Rainy, gray February days only added to the mood.
By no means a melancholy collection, the album lives more comfortably in the shadows, out of the spotlight, after midnight at the club. With each song, and the united contributions of the ensemble, the challenge of once again successfully reinventing their own brand of R&B became less of a concern.
Janeway viewed this fourth LP as pivotal. He drew the title from a note he’d tucked away years before in his cellphone. It was a phrase he’d read about; how Spanish explorers referred to the land outlining what became the Gulf of Mexico: the alien coast. The octet held an excited, if guarded, optimism about taking on its own new sonic terrain.
In the process, they decided to forgo a new record deal and self-finance the new album. Ross-Spang calls it a punk-rock attitude, tempered with a musical conscience. “You don’t want to get weird just for weird’s sake. You want to serve the song and the mood. Whatever is there is there for a reason.”
St. Paul & The Broken Bones had their reasons. And, whether right or wrong, Janeway was confident of the direction he wanted to band to go in. “I’m hoping to prove some folks wrong. I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a part of me that wants that.”
After a decade on the wheel, turning out albums and rolling across the world on tour, Janeway’s still a bespectacled, cherubic frontman with an enormous voice that somehow still sneaks up on people. Within it, there is the power. And there’s the range—not only in pitch but also in dynamic. With this record, he added restraint to his repertoire.
“Restraint is not a bad thing. It’s a really great thing if you use it properly,” Janeway says. “This is the hardest album I had to sing because there are delicate moments. They have to be delicate.” There is one of those moments, in the bridge of the title cut, that Janeway reveals is his favorite. It’s not a dramatic flourish or resolving crescendo, but rather a section evoking a certain loneliness, like coming upon something in the peace and quiet. It’s ironic that a singer eager to extend himself into an audience has actually found that these darker pieces are drawing his audience even closer to him.
In response to COVID-19, the singer has acknowledged that he may need to curtail his visits from the stage out into the crowd. Never a self-aggrandizing gimmick, Janeway simply views his signature move as a means of connection.
“Honestly, it’s a great debate for me. [Going into the audience] is part of my experience for a show,” Janeway says. “I don’t know if I could do a big tour without doing the show I want to do. But, if I have to stay onstage, I have to.” As for the band’s concert wardrobe, he says that, too, will change. “Nobody’s wearing a suit anymore.”
They had talks with a lot of prospective labels, armed with the contingency that whomever signed St. Paul & The Broken Bones had to deal with the album, one way or the other. “Every band that I know that kind of does the same thing every record— most of them are miserable,” Janeway says. “Not that they’re not successful, but they’re miserable.”
They ultimately decided to release the album through ATO Records, which embraced The Alien Coast. They’ve also road-tested most of the new songs and are feeling the love. “It was a little bit harder to know if this was actually good,” Phillips says. “It’s probably one of the most creative things we’ve done. We’re going to trust that people will be interested in it.”
Janeway and Phillips agree that the band is in a great place these days—maybe even peaking. “I hope not,” Janeway says, laughing. “If it all goes away one day, it was a nice ride. So I want to do something that I’m proud of. And, I can say with absolute certainty that the next record we put out will not sound like this one. And I got to leave it there.”
And will it also sound unlike any of their other albums?
“100 percent.”
