St. Paul and the Broken Bones are currently writing their sophomore album, the follow-up to 2014’s Half the City, with plans to record in December for a spring or summer 2016 release.
“The sound is going to be different, and that’s about all I can say right now,” says lead singer Paul Janeway. “We’re still going to use real instruments and real musicians, but I think the musical palette is going to be a little more modern and a little more adventurous musically than I think our first record was. I don’t want to [expletive] on our first record, because it’s done a lot of great things for us, but I think that’s kind of where we’re headed right now.”
Fans who managed to purchase tickets to the band’s back-to-back sold-out shows at the Alabama Theatre on Thursday, Nov. 19 and Friday, Nov. 20 won’t need to wait until next spring to hear some of the band’s new material, Janeway says.
“We thought, ‘We’re home, let’s play a few new songs,’” he says. “If there’s a crowd that’s going to forgive us if the songs suck, it’s our hometown crowd. And that makes it special, because we haven’t done any of these live. We’re going to do a song or two, probably. It’s funny, practicing stuff in front of 2,000 people. [But] we thought we’d test drive some new material and reveal it to our hometown crowd.”
But Janeway is adamant that those works-in-progress are for Birmingham eyes only. “We’re going to ask the people in the theatre to put down their phones,” he says. “We’re not quite ready for it to be revealed to the world yet.”