St. Thomas

Although the designation of Norway's foremost alt-country artist may strike some as questionable, St. Thomas has built a substantial audience across his homeland, where his ragged yet fervent stories of romance and loss reached the pop charts' upper tier. At the same time, reviewers throughout Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States took notice, praising him as a fresh, singular talent probing the boundaries of roots music.

Born Thomas Hansen in Oslo, Norway, in 1976, he first turned toward music in his early twenties, absorbing the output of Elliott Smith and Will Oldham. He soon acquired a guitar and a four-track cassette recorder, then began composing his own material. In 1998 he relocated to Bergen, Norway, for studies and assembled his initial group, Emily Lang. The band cut a demo that drew favorable notice, and its occasional concerts cultivated a modest yet devoted local following. Before long, however, Thomas concluded that a fixed five-piece lineup limited his options, so he dissolved Emily Lang in 2000. Shortly before that decision, he had settled in Kristianland, Norway, where he started laying down home demos for fresh songs.

Adopting the name St. Thomas after a friend addressed him that way in jest within a letter, he issued a 7" vinyl single and a full-length CD-R that circulated only unevenly. His situation changed when a staff member at the fledgling Norwegian imprint Racing Junior caught a radio performance and urged the label to issue Thomas's next project. Cut largely in his bedroom with the artist managing nearly every part himself, the resulting Mysterious Walks marked St. Thomas's first official album and sold briskly inside Norway.

He soon began performing live, yet instead of reconstituting a conventional band he assembled a shifting roster of players whose numbers fluctuated between two and ten per show. Billed as St. Thomas & the Magic Club, several of those musicians joined him in the studio in April 2000 to cut the EP The Cornerman. Still employed as a letter carrier at the time of its release, Thomas resigned after the record entered the Norwegian charts at number eight. He then embarked on his first European tour, earning enthusiastic notices in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Upon returning, he and members of the Magic Club circle began work on the follow-up full-length I'm Coming Home. In Norway the album more than doubled the sales of its predecessor and became his first release to appear in the United States. After additional dates throughout Scandinavia and Europe, Thomas scheduled an initial American tour for autumn 2002, to be followed by sessions for a third album in Nashville, Tennessee, produced by Mark Nevers of Lambchop, who had previously accompanied him on the road in Europe.