“The more I love, the less I trust in money / The more I get to know the soul of my fellow man,” sings New Orleans’s prodigal Americana son Andrew Duhon in the opening song of his new album Emerald Blue. Empowered by a wealth of songs crafted and collected throughout the great shutdown and inspired by adventures well-beyond his home in Orleans Parish, Duhon put his poetry in motion and nailed down eleven tunes representative of his view of the world in its current state; politically, socially, and personally. “The more I travel, the more I feel that I’m a man without a country / Is there truth in the story of the promised land?” But Duhon’s deep well of influences—from John Prine and Jim Croce to his city’s greats like Dr. John and Allen Touissant and beyond—and his sense of songwriter self-awareness keep what could’ve been a sad recollection of his forced time-off impressively light and grooving, a skill that his Louisiana predecessors have been refining for centuries.
Duhon released a music video for Emerald Blue’s first single, “Castle On Irish Bayou,” a thumping, bottleneck slide guitar-carried ode to escaping Midcity living for an actual, albeit modestly-sized, castle outside of New Orleans; one of Emerald Blue’s lighter commentaries. Admittedly more clever than true, “Castle On Irish Bayou” is infectious enough to convince even the most discerning real estate investor to uproot and move into the majestically out of place dwelling (which is actually for sale at the moment of this writing). “As I’m getting old enough to consider graduating from living under a landlord, the real estate prices just about everywhere in town scare me to the outskirts, and get me thinking about what’d be like to be ‘king of the Irish Bayou,’” jokes Duhon, but the resulting song will surely plant the same idea in the heads of listeners worldwide. Fans can now watch the “Castle On Irish Bayou” music video at this link and pre-order or pre-save Emerald Blue ahead of its July 29th release right here.
Duhon is gearing up to take his new music on tour this Spring and Summer, but before that, he’s set to make appearances at New Orleans’ renown French Quarter Festival on April 24th and New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Festival on May 7th. Amidst the annual Jazz Fest craziness, Duhon will be playing a couple of sets at BreakFest!, an annual mini-festival of his own creation in the brunch time hours during New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Festival. The rest of May finds Duhon in the Southeast and Texas before his tour takes him from Washington state to New York City and beyond in July and August. A full list of tour dates can be found below or at andrewduhon.com/upcoming-shows along with ticket information and more.
More About Emerald Blue: Joined by Jano Rix on drums, percussion, and harmonies; Myles Weeks on upright and electric basses and harmonies; and Dan Walker on keys and accordion, Duhon headed into Maurice, Louisiana’s storied Dockside Studios with GRAMMY-award winning engineer and longtime collaborator of Andrew’s, Trina Shoemaker, to capture every inch of vibe and beauty and texture each song had to offer.
The tracks on Emerald Blue show serious time spent in listening mode—both to himself, and to the world around him. From the rich Americana twang and propulsive, clacking percussion of “Promised Land” to the vintage rhythm-and-blues grooves of “Digging Deep Down,” Duhon meditates on what it means to be present and true, whether that’s to yourself and your ambition (“Down From The Mountain” and “As Good As It Gets”) to a lover (“Southpaw” and “Plans”) or to a wider world whose fraught and violent track record demands meaningful acknowledgement, reckoning and change. The meditative “Everybody Colored Their Own Jesus,” is an appreciation of some basic wisdom from his church-school days: that faith, respect and love are boundless and have no particular colors, traits or rules. These are songs that come from a very particular time and place, when so many of us—often alone with our flaws and feelings, with few of our regular, dependable distractions—were forced to face hard truths. And yet, using the time-tested language of folk, of the blues, storytelling and soul-searching, voice and keys and strings, Andrew Duhon proves himself worthy of heroes like John Prine—who makes a fantasy cameo in “As Good As It Gets,” the album’s closer—by similarly crafting four-minute worlds in song, that feel purely timeless, as old or as young as the chronic condition of stumbling across Earth with a human heart.
That’s true as well of less weighty songs, like the ambling, satisfied title track—or the aforementioned slide-blues love-song romp, “Castle on Irish Bayou,” an ode to a delightfully weird piece of architecture that’ll be warmly familiar to anyone who ever drove East toward the deep blue expanse of Lake Pontchartrain on Interstate 10 out of New Orleans. Emerald Blue shows us the vast worlds that can be discovered and traveled when we sit still, and the breathtaking vistas on view when we look within—or at the people right beside us.
Catch Andrew Duhon On Tour:
4.21 - New Orleans, LA - The Church at Hotel Peter & Paul
4.22 - Baton Rouge, LA - Manship Theater
4.24 - New Orleans, LA - French Quarter Fest
5.1 - New Orleans, LA - BreakFest
5.3 - New Orleans, LA - Carrollton Station
5.7 - New Orleans, LA - Jazz & Heritage Festival
5.8 - New Orleans, LA - BreakFest
5.11 - New Orleans, LA - Wednesdays at The Square
5.12 - Beaumont, TX - Courville's
5.14 - Cherokee, TX - Cherokee Creek Fest
5.15 - Dallas, TX - Sundown at Grenada
5.19 - Columbus, MS - Barn Concert Series
5.20 - Franklin, TN - Kimbro's
5.21 - Dunlap, TN - Concerts on the Rocks
5.22 - Chattanooga, TN - The Woodshop
7.7 - Cambridge, MA - Club Passim
7.15 - Pueblo, CO - Brues Alehouse
7.16 - Winter Park, CO - Cooper Creek Square
7.17 - Boulder, CO - Gold Hill Inn
8.10 - Port Townsend, WA - Wheeler Theater
8.11 - Seattle, WA - Tractor Tavern
8.12 - Portland, OR - Doug Fir
8.13 - Kingston, WA - Concerts in the Barn
8.14 - Nine Mile Falls, WA - Live at Andre's
8.17 - New York, NY - Cafe Wha?
8.18 - Wayne, PA - 118 North
8.21 - Exeter, NH - The Word Barn
