The first thing you notice is the voice, which is a good thing because a singer needs a distinctive voice. And this voice sounds like someone who has walked a long, hot, span over a dusty, Mississippi country road. By turns, soulful, raw, melancholy, brazen, funky, circumspect, serene, brooding and mutinous, the voice expresses the range of human emotions from forlorn grimness to incandescent optimism. And after listening repeatedly, you realize it is not only the voice of a poet, but also of some kind of merciful prophet, a summation entirely justified because those who have followed the career of Paul Thorn believe he is both.

His newest CD is A LONG WAY FROM TUPELO, a collection of songs which once again illustrates Thorn’s versatility and authentic connection to the music of the Mississippi heartland: blues, country, gospel, rhythm and blues, and rock n’ roll. Given his background, maybe Thorn just can’t help it, but he excels as a musical storyteller. His songs are a conduit for that gritty part of the South where beleaguered wisdom is as likely from the bottom of a bottle of Johnny Walker Red as it is from the pulpit of an old country church- minus the steeple, of course, which was blown down by the skirts of a tornado last spring. And his latest CD is no exception.

From “Everybody Wishes”, an ode to the complexities of finding the right one, to “I’m Still Here” an anthem to human endurance, to “What Have You Done To Lift Somebody Up”, a rousing gospel number, challenging the listener to step outside his or her own life and simply help someone, to the softly beautiful, “When the Long Road Ends,” with its Appalachian undertones, asking the listener to contemplate what he or she has done with life. Of his new CD, Thorn simply says, “I'm a little older now, and all the songs are about what's going on in my life. I'm 43 years old, and it's about what's going on in Paul Thorn's life at 43, pretty much.”

www.paulthorn.com

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