St. Paul & the Broken Bones Risked It All To Do Something Different
When St. Paul & The Broken Bones arrived on the national scene, they did so with raw, dizzying, hands-in-the-air retro-soul. Their recorded product was warm and welcoming; their potent live show knocked audiences on their ass. The recipe worked for two albums-2014's Half the City and 2016's Sea of Noise-landing them ever-growing gigs, including festivals like Coachella and Bonnaroo.
It's no longer just more of the same. Instead, for Young Sick Camellia, their vibrant third LP, out Friday, they stamped out any pressure to maintain a throwback tag-something they bonded with Leon Bridges about-and broadened their sonic horizons, experimenting with funk, psych, and pop, all under the laser sharp gaze of Kendrick Lamar cohort Jack Splash. And when Columbia Records decided they no longer wanted to be distributing partners during the process (frontman Paul Janeway cites the difference in artistic vision) they doubled down to make a totally out there record, which they happen to love.
"This album is as much influenced by Radiohead as it is throwback R&B," says Janeway. "Some people didn't feel comfortable with it. We were told it didn't have many hits ... that it wasn't marketable." The band didn't care. "It doesn't have [the label's] name on it," he adds. "It has our name on it. That's the one thing I've realized more than anything else: It doesn't have their name on it."
The outfit began work on the record, a concept LP that marks the first in what will eventually be a three-part series, almost immediately following the release of Noise. "I wanted to represent me, my father, and my grandfather, and the complicated relationships between us," Janeway explains of the project's ambitions.
The singer and songwriter hails from the small town of Chelsea, Alabama, and it wasn't too far into his life, he says, that he realized he thinks about the world differently than the crowd he grew up with. He wanted to take stock of that experience, here. "The state of the world," he says, when asked why the time for this reflection is now. "It feels like there are things that are out of [our] control on a massive level-and the only thing you can control is within yourself and your personal relationships."
Occasionally, the songwriter felt himself pulling back, lyrically, from the harshest memories. It became an exercise in denying that instinct, he says. "Sometimes there are things that feel off limits," he adds. "[These relationships] always felt like something that was off limits because it does hurt. But I felt like if I wanted to make good art, I needed to be really vulnerable. It was a challenge."
He's glad he did, for reasons other than just creating an album he and his band love. Near the end of the recording process, Janeway's grandfather died from complications due to lung cancer. Recordings of the patriarch serve as interludes across Cameilla. He speaks of things as mundane as local weather and as heavy as mortality and family loyalty. "[The album] is definitely not as easy to listen to," Janeway says of the aftermath of his passing, adding that performing some of these parts live still feels overwhelming. "I don't know how I'm going to react, emotionally."
To spearhead their new sound and direction, the band teamed up with Grammy-nominated producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys). And despite their surface-level differences-he, an uber L.A. producer; they, a rustic Southern eight-piece-Janeway says they got along famously.
"Jack's wardrobe, when he comes into the studio-not when he goes out, when he comes into the studio, when it's just us and him-is probably worth more than any of our car's combined," Janeway says, recalling his first impression of Splash. "I'm there with a t-shirt, jeans, and sandals on and this guy comes in with this amazing attire. [But] it took five minutes of us talking before we were sold."
In fact, the singer grows animated, and occasionally emotional, discussing the partnership. "When we recorded the last song, 'Bruised Fruit,' I was having a hard time getting through it. [After], we're sitting in the control room listening to it and I get emotional again. I'm sitting there crying and Jack just stands up and hugs me and says, 'This is really beautiful-I want you to know that it's appreciated.' You become family after that."
Splash also helped them shed any expectations of staying "retro-soul," a label Janeway says he never felt fit his group comfortably. "When we started, we were more like garage-soul; we were never a well-oiled machine doing James Brown covers. It was a lot more unhinged than that." On Cameilla-cut "Convex," he stares down the term plastic soul, a phrase from the 1960s that describes soul music made by white musicians. "People want to put you in a certain box," Janeway cautions. "But we don't think of ourselves as this or that."
St. Paul & the Broken Bones are hardly the only act to enjoy a buzzy few years under the retro-soul headline this decade, though. Janeway says they bonded with Leon Bridges, who also spoke to Esquire.com about about struggling to escape the confines of those conventions. It was likely easier, the singer admits, for them to pivot than Bridges; the difference in the hue of their skin also yields far less by way of an audience's expectation, it turns out.
"That's the issue with difference," he says. "It shouldn't be that way. We met Leon Bridges at a festival [several years ago] and he asked us about what we were going to do with our second album. I was like, 'Man, we don't give a shit. We did what we wanted' But I could tell the pressure was different on him."
What's on the other side of that pressure-or rather, that moment that pressure is abandoned, forever? "This is the first record that felt like, 'That's us,'" says Janeway. "It feels like the band has come to its full realization."
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