Big Voice, Bruised Songs: Aaron Golay's "Songs for Sad Folks Like Me" Ahead of His Center Stage Slot

Some records are built for the mountains whether or not they were written there. Aaron Golay's Songs for Sad Folks Like Me is one of them — an Americana-soul set carried by a voice that sounds like it's been arguing with a bar's last-call lights for years. On Wednesday, August 12, Golay and his band The Original Sin open for St. Paul & The Broken Bones at the Center for the Arts, which makes this a good week to sit with the album that got him the slot.

First, the honest framing: Golay is an Idaho-born, regionally-touring artist rather than a Jackson native, and Songs for Sad Folks Like Me is his most recent full-length, released in 2023 — the follow-up to 2020's Love Lust Heartache and his 2018 EP Down in Hell. The Original Sin — the rhythm section that gives his live show its spine — is a band, not an album, so anyone hunting for a record by that name will come up empty.

What the record does well is refuse to be tasteful about heartbreak. Golay's a belter in an era of murmurers, and he leans into it: the big soulful voice, the hell-raising-and-regret lyrics, arrangements that give him room to actually sing rather than mumble into a reverb pedal. It is the kind of album that plays better loud, in a room, with a drink — which is precisely the setting August 12 will provide.

Pairing him with St. Paul & The Broken Bones is inspired matchmaking by the Center for the Arts. Paul Janeway's Birmingham crew built a career on the same bet Golay is making — that a full-throated soul voice, deployed without irony, still stops a room cold. An opener who shares the headliner's DNA but hasn't yet had the headliner's break is exactly what a good undercard should be. If you only know Golay as a name on a Concerts-on-the-Commons-adjacent bill, this is the night he stops being a footnote.

Why this matters: a healthy scene needs regional artists who orbit through town often enough to feel local, and it needs venues willing to give them a marquee slot instead of a Tuesday graveyard. The Center handing Golay the opener's spot on a sold-adjacent soul bill is the small, unglamorous machinery of an artist's career actually working — the step between the clubs and the theaters, happening in real time on Cache Street.

Cue up Songs for Sad Folks Like Me this week. Then go watch it get louder.

Sources: Aaron Golay & The Original Sin — official site; Center for the Arts — Live Music; Aaron Golay — Spotify