Andrew Duhon and Early James

Andrew Duhon

There’s a mystical allure to the road. Innately literal and figurative, it is both the blacktop and the connective tissue between people, places, and cultures. The opportunity to venture beyond what’s known and comfortable into what’s possible. A rugged romanticism of packing up a standard issue Chevy Express tour van with instruments, scuffed amps, overflowing merch boxes, and a trio of musicians setting sail to share Duhon's songs with anyone who will listen. For a young Andrew Duhon, the road was the connection from “No Man’s Land” to the “Promised Land.” A chance to truly connect with former strangers through song. To feel equal kinship with the good ol’ boys in Beaumont, TX and the hippies and artists in Bellingham, WA. But with that comes a weight. Duhon has a knack for telling the kind of stories that clearly cost the writer something to tell, the kind of honesty that feels noble and never half hearted. Entertaining? Sure, but when a song written by a stranger heals you, even in the smallest way, that's a connection beyond entertainment, and that is the journey Andrew Duhon sets out on from his home in Louisiana.  His songs are about recognizing our story as much as they are about telling his, and his coast to coast pursuits have given him a clearer view of the American Landscape than most are privy to. 

But after years of voyaging off to every corner of the country, a new sensation arises with each return to New Orleans. The fondness for home returns and, for the moment, forgives the potholes and the incompetence of local politics to focus on those familiar sights, sounds, and singular culture of Louisiana from the old European feeling of The French Quarter to the rural cane fields of Cajun country where his father’s side resides, now noticing the changes after every stretch of time spent away. And from that familiar return comes The Parish Record, a snapshot of life venturing from and returning to one of America’s purest cultural vignettes, and the beauty, conflict, and stories that come with it.

The Parish Record was recorded at Dockside Studios in Maurice, LA, where deep in Cajun country sits a wood-panel barn engulfed in oak and cypress trees along the slow butterscotch bayou pace of the Vermillion River. In this isolated hub of Acadiana, Andrew Duhon embarked with his trio of most trusted musicians – Myles Weeks (James Hunter Six, Eric Lindell) on Bass, Jim Kolacek (Feufollet) on Drums, and Daniel Walker (Heart, Ann Wilson, Amy Ray) on Keys – to harness of the sound and feeling of their surroundings. Justin Tockett, the house engineer at Dockside is also, as Duhon claims, his secret weapon.  From Duhon, “Justin’s production is the most underrated thing in the room, and his spirit is peaceful and literally at home at that studio.  There’s a cat on his lap most of the time he’s mixing. I mean, come on...  That’s the feeling I wanted to feel when making this record from what felt like home to me. It wasn’t time to hit Nashville or try out something new on this one.  It was about believing in the songs from where the songs came from.”  This new collection speaks of Louisiana and carries the weight synonymous with Duhon records: deep, evocative narratives that take listeners on a journey through a character’s skin, heart-wrenching ballads which bare the songwriter’s soul, and hard-driving bluesy rockers that rise in counterbalance to the weight of the lyric.

The Parish record begins, both on Side A and Side B, with a new flavor to Duhon’s repertoire. On either side of the record, a drop of the needle will bring on a grimy, distorted guitar intro. On side A, this leads into “Waco Kool Aid,” a biting look into the groupthink nature of today’s political landscape where “the truth is, the truth is obsolete,” and culminating in an ‘aha!’ moment putting the joke squarely on us, the listener. On side B, “Shotgun Religion” pulls from Duhon’s Catholic suburbia upbringing that seemed to have claimed the nature of love for itself, only managing to create militant division that enforced the world view of the entitled.  As he tells it “Pride is a monkey on a young boy’s back and he’s leaving the safety of the cul de sac with an itchy trigger finger and a split second decision. Shotgun religion...”

The album proceeds on softer notes with a selection of romantic ballads including “Hand Me Down Love,” “Girl From Plaquemine,” “Almost Forever,” and the deep-hearted farewell of “Just In Case.” All with a twinge of nostalgia and a truer, more complicated love than fairytale would claim. Sonically, each ballad takes on a role in comprising the musical landscape of Louisiana, through the jazz inspired piano fills of “Hand Me Down Love,” to the back porch cajun country guitar picking in “Girl From Plaquemine” and the old school country western  heartstrings of “Almost Forever.”

No closer can you get to home than Duhon’s song about his mother, “Another House.” The song tells the story of Duhon’s mother’s journey with Dementia, a journey first evident to Duhon when his mother began feeling not at home and insisting they go to ‘the other house’ that didn’t exist.  In the song he is speaking with his father, “the only thing that matters now, is she believes there’s another house,” a sorrowful and brutally honest admission from son to father, neither of which shared their mother’s faith, but resolving in the end “We know better these days than to correct her.  We just walk with her together.”  Departing from the band accompaniment, the song was recorded with Duhon alone on his acoustic guitar.  On the third morning of recording at Dockside in Maurice, LA, while the band stayed sleeping, Duhon and the engineer went in to track this most intimate and bittersweet story of the collection. 

Another unique flavor to The Parish Record is the presence of a cover, the first Duhon has ever recorded. “Bayou La Batre,” a song originally written and performed by Jimmy Louis, a Florida Country-Blues crooner, whose album, “The Best Of This Deal” (1977), Andrew found buried in the dollar bin of his favorite Alabama record shop. The song encapsulates the journey home to New Orleans in such a way that feels like it was written for this album, despite the writer preceding this record’s release by nearly half a century.

Smack in the middle of the album is “Man On The Marquee,” a story from Andrew’s college years of stumbling into a local dive to see a seasoned songsmith perform his wares, and detailing every aspect of the performance in romantic fashion, from the signage on the walls, to the majesty of seeing him walking onto the stage under the spotlight, to the humanity of the emotions conveyed through the songs, and the beautiful yet bittersweet monotony of traveling alone to the next town while leaving behind an audience for whom the experience was just a blip of joyous distraction. Reminiscent of Jackson Brown’s “The Load Out,” the song takes on a semi-autobiographical tone as Andrew himself has taken on that role as the traveling troubadour, moving from town to town, sharing his deepest emotions through song, and moving on to “that distant light that spelled it right. Somewhere else tomorrow night, he’ll be the man on the marquee.” 

Wherever the winding roads of America’s highways take him, New Orleans follows. With all of its cultural idiosyncrasies, political turmoil, and all of the harsh memories associated with the place he’s most intimately familiar, comes a beauty from the holistically honest stories able to be told and the collection of sonic of influences that can only be forged from immersing himself in such a rich a culture. The Parish Record serves as the latest vehicle through which Andrew can spread the gospel to every new place he ventures of a life lived in the flawed, divergent, singularly magnificent bayou he’s called home.

Early James

“It’s a house with a lot of character,” Auerbach says. “I’ve always loved it. I always felt inspired when I was there. I knew it would be a fun place to do something. It’s over a hundred years old. It’s got the old plaster on the walls, plaster ceilings, old wallpaper. There are big oak floors and an oak stairwell. The first floor has twelve-and-a-half-foot ceilings. It’s pretty awesome. But it’s not a recording studio by any means.”

“We had to drag all the gear in there. We set the little mixing console upstairs — this crazy, wild old ’50s Universal Audio tube console that I’d just gotten and fixed up, which was built by FAME Studios’ Rick Hall for his studio in Memphis  — in a spare bedroom, and we ran the wires down the stairs. We set up James and everyone in separate little rooms downstairs. James’ little Princeton amp was right behind him, there were no baffles or anything, and so when he was Early James recorded his first two Easy Eye Sound albums, Singing For My Supper (2020) and Strange Time To Be Alive (2022), at the studio inside the vaunted label’s Nashville headquarters. But for James’ third release, Medium Raw, producer and Easy Eye Sound label head Dan Auerbach envisioned something quite different for the Alabama-bred singer-songwriter-guitarist’s rawboned, sometimes scarifying music.

“Day of the first session, I had my GPS routed to Easy Eye,” James recalls. “We ran into some traffic, and I texted [engineer M.] Allen [Parker] — ‘Hey man, sorry, we’re gonna be about 15 minutes late.’ And he said, ‘It’s OK, we’re still getting set up at the house.’ And I was like, ‘What house?’ ‘We’re recording at this house, it’s really cool.’ It was news to me! It felt unusual in the moment, which I think makes you play the songs differently. But I’m really happy with and proud of the results.”

“I wanted to try to find that power of when I first saw him, when it was just him and his guitar,” Auerbach explains. “After working with him a couple of times in the studio, I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to do it in the same kind of way. The comforts and luxuries of the studio, where you’re able to hear everything and make adjustments and changes, wasn’t right for this project.”

“Some of my favorite albums are those Arhoolie records produced by Chris Strachwitz that were recorded in houses, by Fred McDowell, Lightnin’ Hopkins. I felt like we might get better results if we did it in a house.”

The house in question, known as “Honky Chateau,” was an old Nashville property owned by photographer and artist Buddy Jackson.

soloing it was all bleeding into his vocal mic. Adrian Marmolejo, James’ bassist since the beginning, was in the hallway, peeking around the corner. We had these beautiful microphones sucking up the soul of the house. It sounded fucking amazing. When you have headphones on, you can hear that room. You can even see the room when you close your eyes.”

James notes that pretty much everything you hear on Medium Raw was, as its title suggests, cut au naturel.

“There are just two overdubs, on ‘Rag Doll’ and ‘Nothing Surprises Me Anymore,’” he says. “We had intended to get a violin solo on ‘Nothing Surprises Me Anymore,’ and Dan said, ‘Ah, I came up with something.’ On the trio tracks, it was a challenge. Jeff Clemens, who drummed, was two rooms away — I couldn’t see him. We didn’t have in-ear monitors, and it was the first time for him hearing any of those songs. I love his drumming with G. Love [&  Special Sauce] and Kenny Vaughan so much. You can hear Jeff kind of tiptoeing through it, and it makes the song move in a really cool way. It’s not hyper-polished, but it has Jeff’s confidence, and you can’t teach that.”

In many ways, the approach harkened back to James’ very first recording, a four-song EP he cut in Birmingham and released in 2017. “Someone said, ‘You should just release an EP,’” he recalls. “So me and Adrian, on his lunch break, recorded those four songs. There was construction outside of the studio, so we had to do it in the console room, which is not unlike this new record. If you listen closely, you can hear power saws next door.”

Like that first quartet of recordings, Medium Raw lives up to its name, presenting its brace of smart, playful, and often fiercely rocking original songs to intimate life with a stunningly vital sound that thrives on its lived-in real-world ambiance.

Beyond seven James originals — six previously unrecorded numbers and the fan favorite “Dig To China,” which dates back to that first EP — the new album includes songs co-written with Auerbach and top Nashville songwriter Pat McLaughlin (“I Got This Problem”); Sheryl Crow’s frequent collaborator Jeff Trott (“Nothing Surprises Me Anymore”); roots singer-songwriter Langhorne Slim (“Go Down Swinging”); Irish songwriter Mick Flannery (“Upside Down Umbrella”); and James’ former Birmingham roommate Ryan Sobb (“Unspeakable Thing”).

The writing continues to display the hallmarks of James’ distinctive, one-of-a-kind style: whip-smart wordplay, upended clichés, humor both light and dark, and a deep intelligence that frequently reflects a literary sensibility.

The self-deprecating musician says, “I’m really good about picking up books and getting what I need from ’em. I’m really bad about picking up something and getting what I need and putting them back down again. I am a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. Some of his books are very hard to read, just because of the way they make you feel. I’m working on Blood Meridian now for the third time.”

His musical sensibility has leaned toward the hard stuff from an early age: “I remember getting obsessed with the blues and getting obsessed with old country. My first favorite musician was Hank Williams. There was something about how dark that music was. I could listen to Hank Williams on repeat and never get tired of it. Hank Williams, Jr., lives in my hometown of Troy, Alabama, and he and my dad were hunting buddies. They still run into each other at Julia’s Restaurant in Troy. I listened to a lot of Howlin’ Wolf, and his guitarist Hubert Sumlin — I thought that was Howlin’ Wolf playing the guitar.”

With Medium Raw now ready to be served, James is embarking on touring (backed by Marmolejo and drummer Joey Rudisell) that will take him through the U.S. and return him to Europe, where he has developed an enthusiastic fan base, for dates in the Netherlands, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, and Denmark.

Like the rambling bluesmen of old, whose repertoires would mutate from night to night, James says audiences should expect him to work some new wrinkles into his songs on stage: “I’m trying to play dress-up with this record on the road. You never know what it’s going to be wearing. It depends on what thrift store we get to.”