Nick Shoulders brings Refugia Blues to Paper Tiger this Saturday

The Arkansas songwriter's Apocalypse, Never! tour rolls onto the St. Mary's Strip on Saturday, Nov 7.

Saturday night on the St. Mary's Strip, the biggest room on the block gets handed to a songwriter whose new record is steeped in old Southern music.

Nick Shoulders plays Paper Tiger on Saturday, Nov 7, at 7 p.m. Tickets are on sale through See Tickets. Paper Tiger holds 1,000, and the early start means the night is wide open afterward for the rest of the Strip.

The show is a stop on Shoulders' Apocalypse, Never! tour, which has been on the road since summer, with dates this year including the Boulder Theater in August and the Belly Up. His most recent stops before San Antonio run through Florida, then New Orleans on Nov 4, so he arrives in town fresh off a week in the Gulf South.

The record he is carrying is Refugia Blues, his fifth album, described in its own notes as a record of big ideas and small, intimate moments: nine songs rooted in the stylings of Southern traditional music. It follows All Bad, released on Gar Hole Records, the label Shoulders founded and co-owns, per his Wikipedia entry. He is enough of a fixture back home that the Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives him an entry of his own, a rare thing for a working musician born in 1989.

That combination, traditional roots and a do-it-yourself label, is a good fit for this part of town. The Strip has always been where San Antonio goes to see music that does not fit neatly in one box, and Paper Tiger is its anchor. The club took over the former White Rabbit, a landmark St. Mary's Street venue that had closed the year before, and reopened under a new name in March 2015, KSAT reported. Frommer's calls it the largest and most ambitious of the North St. Mary's clubs, with two performance spaces holding from 200 to 1,000 people, and the San Antonio Current has praised its booking across hip-hop, indie rock and post-punk. A country-and-folk songwriter on the big stage is a slightly different look for the room, and that is part of the appeal.

What to know before you go: the 7 p.m. start is early for the Strip, so plan dinner around it rather than after it. Paper Tiger sits at 2410 N. St. Mary's St., with neighbors like The Mix and Amp Room within a block if you want to keep going afterward. Saturday parking on the Strip fills up, so give yourself extra time.

Shoulders has spent months taking these songs from town to town. Saturday is San Antonio's turn to hear them.

Sources: Nick Shoulders - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Nick Shoulders (1989–) - Encyclopedia of Arkansas (encyclopediaofarkansas.net); Nick Shoulders Brings Apocalypse, Never! Tour to Boulder Theater (Grateful Web) (gratefulweb.com); Nick Shoulders: Apocalypse, Never! Tour - Belly Up (bellyup.com); White Rabbit reopens as Paper Tiger (KSAT) (ksat.com); Paper Tiger - Frommer's (frommers.com); Taking back the night: Boom ups the ante on St. Mary's Strip (San Antonio Current) (sacurrent.com); See Tickets - Nick Shoulders at Paper Tiger (prod-nts-api.seeticketsusa.us)