Church is normally held on Sundays, but St. Paul and the Broken Bones brought the sanctuary to St. Petersburg, Florida on Friday night. Arriving in support of their 2016 LP, Sea Of Noise, frontman Paul Janeway — backed by a three piece horn section, drummer, guitarist and birthday boy Jesse Phillips on bass — put on a nearly 90 minute spectacle for an oiled up crowd ready to let loose at the feet of their bespeckled, sorta balding soul savior.
Janeway’s look — something between a banker and the last guy your sister in-law dated before getting engaged — is famous, but it takes a back seat to the Birmingham boys pipes which are reared on his adoration of singers like Etta James, Al Green and Otis Redding. Janeway, whose father was a preacher, didn’t set out to sound so soulful — it just happened that way.
Read: Paul Janeway talks Elton John, cultural appropriation and Clemson before St. Petersburg show
“This is how I sound,” he said in a recent interview with CL. “What would you have me do? What would you have me sing, bluegrass?”
Please God, no. A million times, no.
Janeway was made to belt out soul-searching R&B ballads (“Brian Matter), muscular, working class love stories (“Like A Mighty River”) and gender-bending siren songs (“I’ll Be Your Woman”) with the fire of preacher at a tent revival. His stage antics are largely unrivaled in today’s live music landscape, and at one point he was completely draped in the floor rug. Shit, it looked like someone took a phone call on Janeway’s shoe during “Call Me” from the band’s 2014 breakout Half The City. The man’s attire — a floral suit, perfectly pressed pants and shoes that could make Liberace blush — looks like it remarkably natural.
Stream / download a playlist of every song St. Paul & the Broken Bones played at Jannus Live
All of it — even the band’s odes to Radiohead (“The National Anthem), Same Cooke ("Shake") and Van Morrison (“I’ve Been Working”) — seemed so natural, but there’s a sense that Janeway — with all his hootin, hollerin,’ shimmy and shake — is still looking for more. You could see glimpses of it on the classic soul of “Broken Bones & Pocket Change.” It was obvious on the pleading of “Sanctify” and it screamed in your face on encore closer “Burning Rome,” where Janeway sings:
Where’d you go my sweet devotion?
Can I find you in that sea of those old gravel highways?
You’re stronger cause I’m weak, you’re wiser cause I seek.
Lord I know that you can hear my same sad songs.
But the numbness that grows in my heart on those ole southern nights.
You're hurting when I cry. I'm screaming, “why oh why?”
Janeway and his band are onto something — Sea of Noise, with its subtle social commentary and bleak outlook was a sleeper album of 2016 and a statement album that year sorely needed — but there is so much more inside of the man who left it all on stage on Friday night. As he continues to find his voice, and hit the road to show fans how it’s going, it’s hard not to believe that this man — with an ability to turn his love for soul and the people who surround him into straight up gospel — could be the voice of a nation one day.
Setlist — St. Paul & the Broken Bones at Jannus Live on March 24, 2017
Stream/download
Crumbling Light Posts, Pt. 1
Flow With It (You Got Me Feeling Like)
Light A Mighty River
I’ll Be Your Woman
Tears in the Diamond
All I Ever Wonder
I’m Torn Up
The National Anthem (Radiohead)
Brain Matter
Waves
Midnight on the Earth
I’ve Been Working (Van Morrison)
Broken Bones & Pocket Change
Call Me
Sanctify
—
Is It Me
Half The city
Shake (Sam Cooke)
Burning Rome
This article appears in Mar 23-30, 2017.