St. Paul & the Broken Bones offer throwback soul with new album, tour

St. Paul & the Broken Bones are six albums into a 14-year career that started in 2012 when vocalist Paul Janeway and bassist Jesse Phillips started recording what became the EP “Greetings from St. Paul and the Broken Bones.”

When the octet released its self-titled studio effort on its own imprint, Oasis Pizza Records, last fall, it represented the next step forward for the band after hitting a bit of a crossroads, according to the group’s namesake.

“We’ve hit this point in the band, it’s kind of where you wind up as part of your career,” Janeway said in an early February interview. “You have kind of explored every kind of musical territory the band is capable of doing. We hit this point where a lot of bands break up. What else do we have to offer? We’ve kind of been through it all now.

“Plus, it’s been really exciting starting our own label. We’ve been with big labels, small labels, and now we have our own label and a good partner with Thirty Tigers. I would say it’s been a success.”

They’ll play songs from the new album and the rest of their output as part of the Birmingham, Alabama, band’s Atlanta tour stop Friday at the Eastern.

Part of what helped shake things up in the St. Paul & the Broken Bones camp was producer Eg White, a collaborator Janeway had been working with for an ongoing solo project. White, who has producedAdele, Florence + The Machine and Sam Smith, started working with the Alabama vocalist in 2022.

When the Broken Bones found their way back to Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to work on their new material, Phillips asked to hear some of the songs White and Janeway had been writing together. While the latter was reluctant, the members of the Broken Bones were intrigued and insisted the London-based studio maven be brought into the creative mix.

“After the band started hearing some of the songs we’d written, they thought it was pretty good and that kind of reinvigorated everything,” Janeway said. “The great thing about Eg is that he always cares about the song. And while there are eight band members, everyone was really humble and it ended up working out really well.

“As for the band, we got together and wrote the songs. It was kind of a bit of a reset in a lot of ways and kind of brought new life into the whole situation.”

The 11 songs that make up this latest platter are a true soul throwback starting from the opener, “I Saw the Light,” with its combination of fuzz guitar and female harmonies wrapped around Janeway’s growl. From there, “I Think You Should Know” finds the Alabama eight-piece’s thumping beat and sharp organ runs punctuated by the front man’s lilting falsetto, while “Seagulls” languidly rolls out over a percolating rhythm goosed along by punchy horn charts.

For Janeway, the band’s synergy was recaptured thanks to the combination of White’s contributions and the group’s return to recording together in the same space they cut their full-length debut instead of assembling takes from parts recorded remotely by each band member — a process that shaped the Broken Bones’ most recent releases.

Janeway sees the live vibe carrying over to the shows the band will play for both new and old fans.

“I think this show has great energy and folks are going to hear a lot of the new songs,” Janeway said. “What I think is really great is that on this (recent) European tour, we kind of honed in on these shows and I’m really surprised at how it’s come together. It’s much better than when we first started (in 2012) and had 38 minutes of material, where we had to throw some covers in there if we wanted to play an hour-and-a-half show.”

Janeway has come a long way from the kid who grew up singing in church and whose exposure to popular music came later on. He didn’t see his first secular live show until he saw U2 in Atlanta when he was 22. But it was Tom Waits’ 1999 album “Mule Variations” that really blew the young gospel singer’s mind.

“I remember hearing that, and it ended up changing my life,” Janeway said. “It was very left of center, and I think that opened up the floodgates where I was devouring everything — anything that made my ears kind of twitch. I wasn’t really into pop stuff or anything like that. There’s an elderly woman in our church that would play piano and (Waits) played similar to her on the piano. Every time I hear him play, I think about her.”

St. Paul and the Broken Bones worked with producer Eg White on their most recent self-titled album. (Courtesy of Matthew Daniel Siskin)

The seeds for Janeway’s secular crossover were planted in Birmingham, Alabama, when he was playing in an alternative soul outfit called tThe Secret Dangers with Phillips. For the singer, the music scene they came up in provided an interesting background for the duo to experiment and shape what became the St. Paul & the Broken Bones’ sound.

“It was the first band I’d ever been in outside of church,” Janeway said. “We initially started with six, then we added keyboards, which is seven, and we’ve been at eight with the saxophone. Our approach has been and continues to be pretty open. When I look back at the first EP, the whole idea was for me and Jesse to make a record and be good friends, but (then) go our separate ways.

“When I think back to when I was a kid, I never really thought of myself as a vocalist. I like being a performer. And now we’re getting ready to do a lot of touring this year and maybe even release some new music, although it hasn’t been yet confirmed. It’s a nice place to be.”

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