St. Paul & The Broken Bones returned on Tuesday with a new single, “Love Letter From A Red Roof Inn”. The track will appear on the band’s upcoming album, The Alien Coast, out on January 28th via ATO Records.
The song arrived as a one-two punch with the official audio hitting streaming services in addition to a live, in-studio performance landing on YouTube. The airy, slow-burning track puts a laid-back tone on SPBB’s signature vintage soul aesthetic. Intensely literal and honest, frontman Paul Janeway opens, “I’m trapped in a hotel writing shitty songs/I know you want me to use another word/But I’m not quite the poet that you think I am.” The motif of writing lousy songs and crying oneself to sleep in a one-and-a-half-star hotel is familiar to anyone remotely artistic who has spent any time on the road.
“I remember writing sketches for this song on some hotel notepad,” Janeway recalled in a press release. “I was lost in thought while looking at the ceiling and just missing home. I was trying not to write in cliches but ended up doing it anyway. The song is meant to sound like someone talking softly over a telephone call. A very hard song to sing because it has to be so delicately done.”
The live video for the song finds St. Paul & The Broken Bones at Ol Elegante studios in Birmingham, AL. The hometown studio was where the ensemble made some of its earliest recordings.
“The album was birthed through the idea of falling asleep in a hotel and having a sequence of nightmares, then waking up and missing home so badly,” Janeway said of The Alien Coast.
Listen to either version of St. Paul & The Broken Bones’ latest single “Love Letter From A Red Roof Inn” via the players below. The Alien Coast is available here for pre-order.
St. Paul & The Broken Bones – “Love Letter From A Red Roof Inn” (Official Audio)
St. Paul & The Broken Bones – “Love Letter From A Red Roof Inn” (Official Live Session)