Paul Thorn | blacktopGYPSY April 9, 2011

Born in Tupelo, Mississippi and raised among the same spirits (and some of the actual people) who nurtured a young Elvis generations before, Paul Thorn has rambled down back roads and jumped out of airplanes, worked for years in a furniture factory, battled four-time world champion boxer Roberto Durán on national television, signed with and been dropped by a major label, opened for Bonnie Raitt, Mark Knopfler, and John Prine among many other headliners, and made some of the most emotionally restless yet fully accessible music of our time.

Still, Thorn's story has never been complete. If you follow it back through his songs, at some point near the beginning the mysteries gather like a mist, obscuring the picture and leaving unanswered the question of how he acquired his ability to find brilliance buried in shadows, darkness in daylight, poetry in the mundane, and truth in the brutal beauties of life.

Andie Kay Joyner and Heather Stalling (blacktopGYPSY) had to experience life before they felt ready to write and sing about it. After meeting in 1992, both were already accomplished musicians/vocalists, having grown up in musical families that exposed them to bluegrass festivals and folk scenes at an early age. For the next decade, the girls further groomed themselves for their own band by playing in several other bands, backing dozens of Texas artists like Mark David Manders, Bob Schneider, Ed Burleson, Johnny Lee, and Max Stalling.