Paul Thorn. October 27. The Marisa Funk Theater, Grass Valley. He's been called one of the finest troubadours working today. He opened for John Prine more times than he can count. He turned their last real conversation — ice cream, a hotel room, a post that almost got Prine killed by his own wife — into the centerpiece song of his new album. What do a professional boxer, a Pentecostal preacher's kid from Tupelo, and a ventriloquist dummy named Ricky have in common? They're all part of the origin story of one of America's most irresistible storyteller-songwriters. Paul Thorn grew up in the pews (his dad a minister, his earliest performances in church at age three) but somewhere between the boxing ring and a late-night hotel room ice cream session with John Prine, he became something harder to categorize. His music lands in the sweet spot where Southern soul, blues, and Americana collide: think smoky grooves, gospel-dipped harmonies, and lyrics that swing between belly laughs and gut punches, sometimes in the same verse. His new album Life Is Just a Vapor is built on that formula. Joe Bonamassa guests on a funky, slow-burn track about relationship insecurity. Luther Dickinson's guitar snakes through a story about a traveling evangelist who couldn't reach kids until she started working a hickory-headed dummy. Muscle Shoals session singers add honey to the title track, a phrase Thorn lifted from scripture and from a stolen moment with his late friend Prine, who ate ice cream he absolutely wasn't supposed to eat and inspired a song that'll make you laugh, then quietly wreck you. Thorn writes the way he used to fight: precise, economical, and with serious power behind every swing.