Paul Thorn, "A Long Way from Tupelo" (2008)

NICK DERISO: Paul Thorn's music works like a fried-seafood basket -- uniquely Southern but never the same, bite after heart-quickening bite.

That plays out on Thorn's long-delayed masterwork, "A Long Way from Tupelo," this thickly battered synthesis of down-home soul, greasy guitar riffs, passages from a discarded back-woods hymnal and then some Bruce Springsteen -- if he was hopelessly lost on some farm road.

Pretenders to the saloon-song aesthetic, even guys from Mississippi, have long been shamed by the lives Paul Thorn once led. In fact, the singer's resume is its own self-perpetuating lyric: He's the son of a Pentecostal preacher (that was him, performing at age 3 during his father's tent revivals), a former professional boxer (that was him, going 7 rounds with Roberto Duran), and a one-time factory worker.

The blues would have to make this guy up, if he didn't already exist. Thorn then stirs in some rootsy, countrified rock, and a goodly amount of front-porch storytelling -- with some of them tall, indeed.

Start with "I'm Still Here," a wicked but fun fable of survival featuring Huey Lewis on harmonica. Then there's "Everybody Wishes," with its knowing rumination on kissing the wrong one goodbye.

Thorn's frank sense of longing on both "A Woman To Love" and "Starvin' for Your Kisses" -- which like "I'm Still Here" (praise the Lord!) feature a soaring female chorus straight out of the Skynyrd playbook -- balance Thorn's hard-eyed realism on both the slow-turning mid-tempo number "Burnin' Blue" and a lap-steel shuffle like the Lyle Lovett-ish "What Have You Done To Lift Somebody Up."

Somehow, though, this is already the criminally underappreciated Thorn's fifth album
-- and it wouldn't have been a surprise if "A Long Way" ended up as the capstone on a period of wrong-headed ambivalence from the buying public. Any lesser artist, by now, might have considered giving it all up for a return to, say, the factory.

But the very label this thing is on speaks to the kind of hard-scrabble rural stick-to-it-iveness that makes Thorn's stuff resonate: It's called "Perpetual Obscurity."

Not anymore. Thorn, a simple yet disarming yarn-spinner in the style of the remarkable Mississippi writer Larry Brown, is finally finding long-awaited wider notice through this triumphal record.

"A Long Way from Tupelo" made its debut at No. 7 on Billboard's Heatseeker chart, No. 28 on the Independent albums chart and on the Top 200 albums chart -- and that was before Thorn appears on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, a date set for March 19.



Purchase: Paul Thorn - A Long Way From Tupelo