On Thursday Paul Thorn and company will take the stage at Rick’s Caf. The show will kick off at 10 p.m., giving the crowd enough time to settle with their drinks. Special guests “Jeff & Jeff” will perform before Thorn at 9 p.m.
Thorn will be playing the Starkville show between stops in Birmingham, Ala. and Fayetteville, Ark. during the North American leg of his current tour. Following his run on the mainland he will take his act aboard a series of cruise ships destined for “Somewhere in the Pacific,” as his tour schedule indicates. Thorn’s style revolves around the bare bone elements of an up-down drum beat, a poker-faced rhythm, and a simple four-line rhyme scheme.
Softer songs that are not carried by guitar riffs are often kept occupied with a pipe organ heard behind the progression of the bass line and percussion. Thorn and his bandmates are minimalists.
Each band member performs with a controlled efficiency. The resulting cleanliess of Thorn’s music effectively frees up more room for his storyteller-type songwriting.
“My songs are like hand-sanitizer,” Thorn said in a biography. “They are 99.9% true. I have yet to meet a person who isn’t a bald-faced liar.”
His lyrics reflect someone battle-scarred but with a good attitude – sort of like the blues tamed.
His “Hammer and Nail” projects a twangy, persevering story of a man browbeaten and cheated on, then pummeled by “a dozen hard uppercuts” courtesy of junior middleweight world champion Roberto Durán. Most if not all of Thorn’s songwriting material is a reflection of his past.
Before his career took off as a musician, Thorn battled it out in the boxing ring to pay the rent. He credits his uncle for his training which eventually landed Thorn a shot at Roberto “Hands of Stone” Durán, an event chronicled in his “Hammer and Nail.” The aforementioned Sunday morning-style pipe organs prevalent in a number of his songs should allude to Thorn’s evangelical Christian upbringing in Tupelo. Thorn’s father is a Pentecostal preacher in the area.
The personal quality experienced with his songs comes from years of playing to his audience; as a weathered three-year-old, his first “gig” was during one of his father’s revivals where “everybody came around and put money in [his] tambourine.”
Thorn states in his biography, “You get to know how to get along with almost anybody. You just have to sit down and start getting to know one another.” His pious youth has a definite draw in his music, but Thorn also makes it obvious that his lyrical scope is not limited by it as he states, “I got a lot from growing up in church, but as a young man I left organized religion and went out to experience the broader world.”
Surprisingly, Thorn’s fanbase is strongest in an area some are not familiar with. Rick Welch, owner of Rick’s Caf, said that Thorn gets more attention out West than he does in his own backyard.
Thorn sees this peculiarity as a repeating phenomenon.
“The farther I go from home the bigger the crowds are at my shows,” he said. “When Elvis became famous … he did a homecoming performance [in] Tupelo … there were about 3,000 people in the crowd, but only a small portion of the people were actually from Tupelo.”
Thorn again displays the positive disposition found in many of his songs as he shrugs. “A prophet is never heard in his hometown,” he said.
Thorn attributes his artistic influences to the late Dean Martin, the comical big-band swooner and member of the Rat Pack. He shows a glimpse of Martin’s comical honesty as he says that the crowd can expect “90 minutes of original songs sung by an insecure guy who failed the 6th grade.”
“My songs are like going to church with a six-pack,” Thorn said.