St. Paul & the Broken Bones’ Janeway grew up feeling ‘alien’
On their last trip to Pittsburgh, St. Paul & the Broken Bones stepped right into a celebration.
Not only were the soul rockers playing to the festive crowd at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Point State Park on that June night in 2017 with The Commonheart, the Penguins won the Stanley Cup.
“It was an outside show, and there was a bunch of craziness in the streets that night,” recalls singer Paul Janeway.
Being from Alabama, a hockey celebration was a rare, confusing sight.
“It’s more football or college football down here,” he says, “but one of our guys who does our monitors, he lives in Pittsburgh, so we get all the updates on Pittsburgh.”
This city will be a bit more subdued when the band returns on a winter Tuesday night to play its first show at Stage AE on the North Shore. St. Paul, which formed in 2012 and started breaking nationally in 2014 with a debut album, “Half the City,” produced by Ben Tanner of the Alabama Shakes, is touring behind its third album. “Young Sick Camellia” finds the band working with R&B/hip-hop producer Jack Splash (Solange, Kendrick Lamar, Diplo, Alicia Keys) to add more electronic texture to the songs.
“I think you always have to keep yourself open to whatever musical territory you touch,” Mr. Janeway says. “Working with Jack Splash gave us the opportunity to expand the sound. We’re into all sorts of music. You can’t grow up nowadays and not be into all sorts of music. We have access to so much. There’s a lot more synth, a lot of low frequency bass on there. Still, for us, we want to have a good rhythm section, good bass, but it was important to try to shake it up.”
The focus remains the vocals of the 35-year-old Janeway, who brings the soul fire of having been preached to in a Southern church as a teenager and seems to be well-schooled in the ways of Al Green and Otis Redding.
“I grew up singing in church since I was 4 and the only music I could listen to was religious music or a little bit of soul music and that was it,” he says. “That’s what’s so bizarre. I grew up in an 800-person town in Alabama, and the church was the social epicenter, and it was one of those things where I thought that was how it was, and I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know about Nirvana or Radiohead or anything else. I feel like I missed out. That’s how I grew up, and I didn’t know any different.”
It turns out he was only so indoctrinated in Southern evangelical culture, and those differences he felt with his family and neighbors surface, somewhat abstractly, in certain lyrics on “Young Sick Camellia.”
“I think after the second record, it was something I wanted to tackle and I thought maybe that would be off limits for me, but I thought any time you say that’s off limits, that’s probably where you need to go,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, I always feel very alien here, because I have completely different political beliefs than a lot of family. In the South, there is a certain culture that is problematic at times. Those are not light subjects to tackle.”
In coming up with the album concept, he related that subject matter with his interest in Italian artist Caravaggio, who painted “Young Sick Bacchus” in 1593. The camellia is the state flower of Alabama.
“I got really obsessed with Caravaggio, and it’s a very self-reflective painting,” he says. “That’s where the title came from and in the painting, he’s sickly. And sometimes you feel like that way, like you’re wounded or why are you different and feel a bit alien,
and I explored that. I liked that idea, and, lyrically, it can be a bit heavy and obtuse and labels don’t love that.
“Initially, when I sent in the title they were like, ‘What the hell is this?’ They didn’t know. Any time you put ‘sick’ in it.”
It works decidedly better if you’re, say, Disturbed.
“Exactly!” he says, laughing. “Disturbed. That’s really what our main musical objective is.”
In truth, he says of the label RECORDS, “They’re very kind with us. Because there were enough songs on this record that they could push. We’re not writing noise rock or anything. We like to write good melody. There’s something there, maybe not in the package that you prefer it.”
Far from Disturbed or noise rock is a song like “GotItBad,” an authentic-sounding throwback to ’70s funk.
“I think for us, you go to your sensibilities, a lot of us love that style of music and our sensibilities kind of take us there. A lot of the guys come from Muscle Shoals, which was very much ’60s and ’70s soul, that’s the background they have. It’s a
blast. I never know if we get the vibe right or not, but we’re a live band, so we can do it live and it works, so I think that’s really important.”
Along with the fans who come to the show, St. Paul & the Broken Bones have won some friends in high places, like Elton John who invited them to play his Oscar party, an AIDS benefit, in 2017.
“It was bizarre. Surreal is a good word to use,” Mr. Janeway says. “We got introduced by Rosanne Cash to Elton. He’s a fan of music and loves old soul stuff, so we bonded over that. He came out and sang with us and it was amazing. With those moments, it’s not even on the stage. It was going to the back and rehearsing with him and me and the guitar player. That’s the kind of stuff that just doesn’t happen.”
A different kind of surreal was opening for The Rolling Stones on a stadium tour in 2015.
“That’s one of the things that’s written on famous band’s gravestones, that they opened for the Stones,” the singer says. “To me, opening up for them was like getting married or having a child or something. You know it’s a big deal and you can’t really prepare yourself for it, and you know it’s something you’re never going to forget. And it was very much like that. You played stadiums, and no one was there to see you, and no one could care less, and that’s always a challenge to me, like I’m going to get the audience one way or another, if I have to set myself on fire. That’s kind of my approach. I didn’t have to set myself on fire, but we did get them — every night.”