St. Paul and the Broken Bones

From The Secret Dangers to the Zip Code Tour

Paul Janeway and Jesse Phillips had already been in a band together — an alternative soul group called The Secret Dangers — before they regrouped in Birmingham, Alabama in 2012 as St. Paul and the Broken Bones. The format settled quickly into eight players: Janeway on vocals, Phillips on bass, Browan Lollar on guitar, Kevin Leon on drums, Al Gamble on keys, and a three-man horn line of Allen Branstetter on trumpet, Amari Ansari on saxophone and Chad Fisher on trombone.

A Greetings EP arrived in April 2013, and the debut album Half the City followed on 18 February 2014. It reached number 56 on the Billboard 200, which for a horn-heavy retro-soul record from Birmingham was enough to move the band out of clubs fast. In 2015 they opened for the Rolling Stones on the Zip Code Tour, and the festival bookings that followed covered Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and Glastonbury. Elton John invited them to play his Oscar party; later on they shared bills with Lizzo.

The television slots stacked up alongside the touring — Late Night with David Letterman, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live — and the music turned up in Grey's Anatomy and Suits. By the middle of the decade the band had the problem that tends to follow a debut this well-received: what to do that was not simply Half the City again.

Four albums spent getting further from soul

Their answer was to keep moving away from it. Sea of Noise in 2016 brought strings and a wider political frame. Young Sick Camellia in 2018 was built around recorded conversations with Janeway's grandfather and father. The Alien Coast, in 2022, pushed into psych-funk and distortion. Each record was more conceptual than the last, and each put more distance between the band and the horn-driven sound audiences were buying tickets for.

Two things then changed the calculation. The pandemic shut the touring down, and Janeway became a father. Angels in Science Fiction, released on 21 April 2023, came out of both: an interior, quiet record addressed in part to his daughter. It was the furthest the band had travelled from the debut, and in an interview published on 24 February 2026 Janeway was blunt about what the period cost them. "A lot of bands would have probably broken up," he said of the years after that album.

He also described a changed relationship with the work itself. Touring, with a small child at home, now sat "more in a job category" — not a loss of appetite for the stage, but a different accounting of what each night away was for.

Muscle Shoals, Eg White and the best-song-wins rule

The reset came through a side door. Eg White — a producer whose credits run through Adele, Sam Smith and Florence Welch — had been writing with Janeway on solo material. The band heard the songs and took them, and the whole group went to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the room Aretha Franklin cut in, to record them with White producing.

The result was the self-titled St. Paul & The Broken Bones, ten tracks released on 10 October 2025 through the band's own Oasis Pizza Records, distributed by Thirty Tigers. The working rule, by Janeway's account, was "best song wins" — no concept, no frame. "Just write a great song," he put it, "instead of working within boundaries." He described the ambition behind the new approach in deliberately modest terms: "We want to be the great barbecue joint down the road."

Reviews read it as a return rather than a reinvention. Glide Magazine judged the record a move back to what the band does best, singling out the bass-and-horn swing of "Sushi and Coca-Cola", the seventies warmth of "Fall Moon", and the arrangement work on "Seagulls", while finding a run of mid-tempo tracks — "Sitting In The Corner", "Ooo-Wee", "Nothing More Lonely" — "professional, if tame". The band took "Fall Moon" to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on 12 December 2025.

A live album and a 10-inch, eleven months apart

Rather than sit on the self-titled record for two years, the band kept releasing. Live At Southern Grooves arrived in February 2026: ten songs, thirty-seven minutes, the new album played through in a room with the tape running, including live takes of "Sushi and Coca-Cola", "Fall Moon", "Stars Above" and "Change a Life".

Then came Proxy on 18 September 2026 — four songs, thirteen minutes, cut at FAME with Eg White again producing and Matt Ross-Spang mixing. The tracks are "Proxy", "Loving Wrong", "Pretty With A Chance Of Rain" and "Mess I Made". A limited 10-inch vinyl pressing went out through Rough Trade on 9 October 2026.

Janeway kept the framing small on this one too. "Each song carries its own story. I am really proud of this collection," he said at release. The title track, he explained, works through things he has watched rather than lived — the seed of it being a memory of trying to sneak out of a house fitted with motion-sensor flood lights.

Where the band stands in October 2026

The touring year behind the self-titled album has been the heaviest in some time. Tickets went on general sale on 17 October 2025 for a seventeen-stop UK and European run that ran from 22 January to 12 February 2026, followed by twenty-eight North American headline dates from 24 March to 9 May, opening at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa. Support across that leg rotated between Tyler Ballgame, Brother Wallace, Thee Sinseers and MT Jones.

Through October 2026 the band has been working arenas rather than theatres, second on the bill to Teddy Swims on The Ugly Tour with MarcLo opening — TD Garden in Boston on 9 October, Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia on 10 October, Capital One Arena in Washington on 13 October, Bridgestone Arena in Nashville on 16 October, State Farm Arena in Atlanta on 20 October.

Their own European headline tour starts three days later: 22 October at The Academy in Dublin, then the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain, closing at the Afundación theatre in Vigo on 15 November. Announced on 15 October 2026, an Australian and New Zealand run follows in May 2027 — Perth's Astor Theatre on 5 May, The Tivoli in Brisbane on 7 May, the Forum in Melbourne on 8 May, Adelaide on 10 May, the Enmore in Sydney on 12 May, Wellington on 14 May and Auckland's Powerstation on 15 May, with general sale from 22 October 2026.

The show as it is now

The current set opens instrumental. "Opening Marvin Jam" gives the horns the room before Janeway appears, and "Nothing More Lonely" and "Flow With It (You Got Me Feeling Like)" follow almost every night, which puts three songs from the 2025 album at the front of the show. From there the set reaches back across the catalogue — "Call Me" remains the most-performed song in the band's history at over 270 outings, with "Like a Mighty River" and "Grass Is Greener" close behind — and "Sanctify" has been doing the closing work.

Lengths vary with the billing. A full headline show runs around an hour and a half; the band's documented set at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 8 October 2026 ran 8.30pm to 10pm for thirteen songs, while their Bourbon & Beyond festival slot in Louisville on 25 September 2026 was cut to ten. Across sixty-eight aggregated critic reviews the band sits at 82 per cent, with the consensus settling on Janeway's command of a room rather than on production values.