Nicholas St. James knows how to fill a stage all by himself

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When Nicholas St. James slides into a booth inside Lawrence’s Harbor Lights one Friday night, he jokes that he’s wearing one of two outfits he owns. This one is thoughtfully put together: denim jacket; cowboy boots; bright-colored, plaid flannel. Tousled yellow curls frame his cheerful face, and his beard flows down to about midchest. It begs for someone to weave a garland of flowers into it.

Later that night, St. James changes into his other outfit, the one he wears onstage: charcoal slacks, butter-yellow button-up, suspenders, a tie that looks like it came from the 4 p.m. free bin at a garage sale. When he performs this night at the Replay Lounge, beard unfurled over his guitar, his monster-sized folk songs barreling forth, he’s hard to ignore, a friendly lion bounding around a small stage. Were the Royals not making history on the same evening, St. James would undoubtedly be working a much larger crowd.

Still, the 28-year-old St. Louis native likely doesn’t mind. These days, he’s just happy to play at all.

“I’ve only been singing for just over a year,” he tells me at Harbor Lights, over the noise of the baseball game. He recalls the date that he played his first show in public: August 17, 2013, at a little joint in Manhattan, Kansas. “I’ve been playing guitar for seven years, but singing is new, and I’d had songs over the past year or so that I’d wanted to play for more than just me and my dog.”

A few of those tunes made it onto St. James’ debut EP, Honeysuckle, a four-song batch of gruff, high-drama folk that arrived in July.

“I listen to it now, and I’ve changed this and that on those songs,” St. James says. “But what I like about it is that it captured a moment in time. It’s not something I’m going to go back and change — I’m not going to rerecord those songs. I’ve changed a lot of how they sound live, but I’m proud of what they were.”

He has indeed made some changes. The St. James on the Honeysuckle EP is a world away from the artist who stormed the Replay that Friday night. On record, he is calmer, his songs sadder, his voice lined with delicate grain. Live, his singing is powerful and disruptive, the volume surprising, despite his being a solo performer.

“What I get a lot from booking agents for venues is, ‘Oh, it would be great if you had a band,’ and then they’ll have me come open for bluegrass acts,” he tells me. “I don’t have a problem with that, but I don’t think that’s what I do at all. One of the things I’m very proud of in my live show is that I’ve put a lot of work into making my live show not your usual singer-songwriter live show. There’s a lot of noise coming from the stage — it’s not just me and an acoustic guitar.”

St. James tears up his instrument to fill a room with sound, and you worry a little when you watch. You wonder whether his life might be a little easier if he had another musician up there with him. But if St. James isn’t worried, we shouldn’t be, either.

“I realize I’ve made more work for myself by playing alone, but there’s more freedom,” he says. “You can do so much more spontaneously when you’re by yourself. I was always looking for a way to do that. I don’t have to turn to someone and say, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking right now. Slow down to the tempo I’m thinking of and do it this way next. I want to throw a solo in here, too.’ It’s not one of those things where I don’t play anything the same way twice, but I do a lot of messing around onstage.”

St. James likens his setup to local one-man-band operations such as Tyler Gregory, with whom he shares a bill Saturday at the Lawrence Arts Center, and A.J. Gaither. Though he is without a stomp box, St. James focuses — like his compatriots — on sounding bigger than he really is. The difference, he says, comes in the songwriting.

“I play with people who are great storytellers, and they’ll say, ‘This song is about … whatever,’ and I try to write personally,” he says. “But then it gets too personal. I want to squeeze in every little detail about the situation and how I felt. It just becomes a terrible song.”

St. James laughs. He’s more comfortable with chords than he is with the words that accompany them. Despite wanting to remain impersonal, though, St. James writes lyrics that touch on death and heartbreak. Those motifs seem at odds with his jolly nature. Then again, St. James is a different man onstage.