“It’s been two and a half years since I’ve been able to be with an audience,” Paul Janeway, the venerable saint of the soul band St. Paul and the Broken Bones, told the crowd at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington Tuesday.
He wasn’t talking about performing; the band had played dozens of shows since the pandemic hit, getting back on the road in August 2020.
He was talking about really being with the audience, plunging down in it and walking among them as he performed.
So he gingerly stepped down from the stage and strolled up an aisle unmolested as he sang another one of his songs that blended gospel feel with soul yearning, “Sanctify.” Up to the back of the hall, up the back stairs across the balcony, singing down to where the first floor crowd was turned around and looking back, the seven-piece Broken Bones churning away on stage.
Accompanied by a roadie who wasn’t so much providing security as he was being pressed to do lighting — shining a flashlight on the singer’s face, Janeway made his way finally to the boxes overhanging the stage — a nice perch for him to sing and reach out at the climax of the song.
He was only a few songs into their set — one of two nights in D.C. that would conclude at the nearby 9:30 Club Wednesday. But that was also the extent of his performance outreach, at least until he high fives a toddler on her dad’s shoulders in the encore.