Friday November 1, 2024

Emerald blue. There's something soothing and sustaining about the words, the way they evoke the lushness of nature: the depths of calm water, a leafy and oxygen-rich forest, the expansive sky above, unpolluted air to breathe. Singer-songwriter Andrew Duhon chose them for the title of his fourth album, eleven songs he wrote and recorded during the turbulence, uncertainty, and confinement of 2020 and 2021 in part because of those poetic properties. Under COVID quarantine, amid political turmoil, they represented places he’d found beauty, solace and possibilities in recent years: The blue-green land and waterscapes of the Pacific Northwest, and the eyes of the woman he followed there from his native New Orleans. “It was a revelation to a muddy Mississippi dweller,” he said. Duhon first picked up the guitar as a teenaged Catholic schoolkid, playing praise and worship music for the campus ministry. That was a secondary pursuit for a while – his priority was serving as his high school baseball team’s first-string southpaw pitcher – until a torn rotator cuff took him off the field and opened up a lot more free time for him to hone his musical chops. He devoured old music that packed an emotional punch and told a story, like the warm melancholy of Delta bluesmen Lightnin' Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt, the vivid detail and narrative artistry of John Prine and Jim Croce, and of course, the skill of master New Orleanian songwriters and bandleaders like Allen Toussaint and Dave Bartholomew. Brass bands, trad jazz and funk all loom large in the image of New Orleans music, of course, but Duhon’s city also has a storied history of producing or nourishing folkies, acoustic blues pickers and guitar-slinging storytellers, too. In college, he followed in the footsteps of artists like Snooks Eaglin, Jimmy Buffett and Jerry Jeff Walker and moved to the edge of the French Quarter, where he plied his craft at open mic nights and worked as a janitor in a former convent house in exchange for his room and board. The open mics led to his first weekly paid gig, at a downtown New Orleans bar whose owner wanted to invest in putting his songs on tape. The two did some research and wrote, out of the blue, to Trina Shoemaker, a Gulf Coast producer and engineer Duhon admired for her work with artists like Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris. That partnership led to three albums together, and the second of those, 2013’s The Moorings, brought Shoemaker her second Grammy nomination for best engineered album, non-classical. (She’d made history in 1998 as the first woman to win that honor.) The 11 tracks on Emerald Blue were recorded with Shoemaker at Dockside Studios in Maurice, Louisiana, deep in Cajun country, a storied retreat on the edge of the Vermilion Bayou whose alumni include Dr. John, B.B. King and Arcade Fire.