Courtesy: St. Paul and the Broken Bones
Tomorrow evening, at a benefit event for the recently formed nonprofit foundation Move on Up Mississippi, up-and-coming progressive R&B band St. Paul and the Broken Bones will perform at the Lyric Theater.
“I want people to really like what we do and I want people to have a good time, and walk away and kind of have a 90 minutes of somewhat of an escape,” lead singer Paul Janeway said. “You know, you’ve got a lot of sh*t going on out there, and to bring joy is a really important thing.”
Janeway and his bandmates have been providing a unique spin on the old-school gospel and R&B sound since 2012, and now they are bringing their newfound success to Oxford for the first time to support a cause that strikes close to home for all Mississippians.
The group from Birmingham, Alabama, formed after Janeway and bassist Jesse Phillips left a band they both previously played in and decided to record an EP together. Phillips called in favors from friends to help record the project, all of whom eventually became members of St. Paul and the Broken Bones after the music they recorded took off.
“We found out that we were actually forming a band, it looked like,” Janeway said. “That’s kind of how it started and we have just been rolling ever since.”
Since the it’s humble beginnings, the group has gone on to attain large amounts of success, touring around the world and garnering millions of plays on music streaming platforms such as Spotify.
“It’s luck, timing, and hard work,” Janeway said. “When we were given opportunities, we didn’t squander them. A lot of bands, they don’t get opportunities. So, we are very lucky in that.”
Perhaps one of the biggest contributors to the band’s success is their truly unique style that echoes back to a sort of jazzy-gospel era of sound with R&B infused all about. However, according to Janeway, the band’s reach goes even farther than that.
“It’s not slick enough, or whatever, to be straight R&B,” Janeway said. “It’s got sort of a punk-garage element to it, and, so does our show. It’s a weird combination of stuff. To me, it has always been this sort of punk-soul type thing. We are just not cool enough to do a straight retro thing. We’re just not cool enough to do that, and, we don’t really want to.”
Currently coming off a run of shows in Australia, the band is making their first stop after a week-long break here in Oxford for a show that can only be described as absolutely hectic.
“It’s going to be loud. I sweat a lot. We get into it. It’s kind of a take no prisoners kind of attitude for us,” Janeway said. “I like to keep the shows interesting for myself. In Australia – I get kind of in this weird zone – and I got down in the crowd and rolled in the mud. I’m just bizarre.”
All this madness is being used to support recently founded nonprofit foundation Move on Up Mississippi, which is all about furthering the state in many of the areas where it falls short.
“These lists come out every year that we are the fattest, we have the worst literacy rate, we have the highest teen pregnancy, and people kind of just chuckle about it every year,” chef John Currence, founder of Move on Up Mississippi, said. “To me, that is nothing short of terminally embarrassing, and it’s something that we can do something about.”
The money raised from the concert will be distributed to different projects and granted to individuals making a difference across the state in hopes of moving Mississippi up on the lists that it so often falls to the bottom on.
“There are few acts that I have seen get up on the stage and are capable of whipping everybody into a frenzy,” Currence said about St. Paul and the Broken Bones. “Their music is so invigorating, it’s so fun, it crosses so many racial lines, nobody cannot want to get up and dance to them.”
The concert will take place tomorrow evening at 8:30. Ticket prices range from $25 to $85.
