Music

Song Premiere: St. Paul & the Broken Bones Debut “Lonely Love Song”

Listen to the tender new single off the Alabama band’s forthcoming album, Angels in Science Fiction

Photo: Paige Sara

Paul Janeway (center) and bandmates.

In early 2020, as the world stood on hold at the start of the pandemic, Paul Janeway, the front man of the boundary-pushing Alabama band St. Paul & the Broken Bones, and his wife, Caroline, had just learned they were expecting their first child. “We had just gotten done with a record, but I knew I had to write another one,” Janeway says of Angels in Science Fiction, the group’s upcoming fifth studio album, which doubles as a compilation of letters to his then-unborn daughter. “It felt like divine inspiration.” 

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Today, G&G is proud to premiere the first song Janeway wrote for the new record, “Lonely Love Song,” which dives headfirst into the emotional complexities of fatherhood and how the boundless love he feels for his daughter is inextricable from life’s brevity. “From a songwriting perspective, it came almost instantly,” he says. “There was so much death and dying in the air, and so everyone was really thinking about mortality. I was thinking about legacy and what I am leaving behind.” The finished track is a prayerful and powerful lullaby that layers a soft guitar melody and purring keyboard beneath Janeway’s soul-cracking lyrics. 

Angels in Science Fiction.

“The first verse is denial, the second verse is fear and anxiety about death, and the third verse is acceptance of the inevitable,” he says. “I love that it’s a fairly simple song, but there’s simultaneously so much complexity to it. If there’s one song that people will really connect to on the album, I think it’s going to be this one.” 

Listen to “Lonely Love Song” below. Angels in Science Fiction is out April 21 and available for preorder now. St. Paul and the Broken Bones will also be touring this spring, with gigs throughout the South


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