The New Hampshire-based band The Soggy Po Boys has been playing together for over a decade. Their mix of horns, keys, drums and guitar brings the spirit of New Orleans to New England, and they’re out next month with a new album, “Leave The Light On.”
NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa spoke with guitarist and singer Stu Dias about the new album, music’s comeback from the pandemic and why some music is meant to be experienced live.
Transcript
So, the name of the album, ‘Leave the Light On,’ is a reflection on the pandemic. Can you give us some insight on that?
Sure. I think when the pandemic happened, music was one of the first things to go away, and it was one of the last things to come back. Some of us kind of felt like it was not a hopeful landscape, and as we went through the pandemic, we went through our own set of changes as a band. So, we came through the pandemic, a kind of a changed band. And we wanted to put out a record that reflected that sort of new optimism, that new feeling of hope. And I think the title ‘Leave the Light On’ is a good reflection of that.
I had a chance to preview the album and picked a few tracks that spoke to me. Let’s play one of them. This is track seven: ‘Get Out Of My Head.’ Can you tell us more about this one?
I’m glad that you chose that one, actually. So… the music was written by Mike Effenberger, our piano player, and I wrote the lyrics to that one. And I think that song, in a sense, is a really good encapsulation of the band writ large, because we are a band of introverts and —
Wait, you’re introverts and yet you’re performing on stage in front of lots of people?
I know, it’s a really strange mix of things. And I’m not joking. We actually have discussions about how to look more like we’re having fun in front of an audience, because there’s no question that we adore the music and love playing it and play it with passion and enthusiasm. But sometimes I think that focus can make it difficult to visually look like you’re having fun. And we’re getting better at it. It’s something that we’re working on all the time, but it is something that we have historically struggled with.
You’ve described the music of the Soggy Po Boys, not as jazz, or not as the American songbook, but as ‘New Orleans music.’ So what is New Orleans music and how do you emulate it in your work?
So, New Orleans music, it isn’t one thing because there’s such a rich history of music in New Orleans. And if you ask me, all American music came out of there because that’s where jazz came out of. And to me, New Orleans music is jazz, it’s blues, it’s gospel, it’s soul, it’s rock n roll, it’s Calypso music. There’s many socio economic and historical reasons why that’s the case. But you could pick any one of those genres and there’s a famous person who played that music from New Orleans. So I think that’s why we embrace the sort of moniker of New Orleans music over anything else, because it allows us to play a much wider range of genres while keeping that element of improvisation and, sort of, horn interplay and like a dynamic rhythm section while keeping all of those elements together. It still allows us to do a lot of different things.
You covered ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ on this new album. Many people will recognize this song. Can you tell us what inspired you to choose this song?
It’s really good. Honestly, it is as simple as that. I think part of it is that all of us have had some relationship or other to a church. It also is such a joyful song that it’s a nice way to start or end anything, and the band is uniquely set up to deliver on it like we are our horn section, they play their absolute butts off, and the rhythm section also, just, they hold everything down. And so it was really, really fun to do this. And I think this was one where in the studio we had so many fun takes of it that choosing one that we loved was kind of challenging.
So, of course, you’re coming out with this album, but you’ve said that really, at the end of the day, your music is meant to be experienced live. So what’s the difference between me playing this on my speaker at home and seeing it performed in person?
Our music is very, very, very, very improvised. So, each song that you hear on this album is just a snapshot of what the music can look like. We could play the entire album start to finish, back to back, and they could sound totally different. And in New Orleans music specifically, that interaction between people in the band, and the band and the audience, is what drives the energy of the performance. For an album, you get to listen to it and you can listen to that moment over and over. But one of the beautiful things about performing with this band in a live setting is when you have a good audience, you and the band are experiencing a singular moment that can never exist again.
All right, so I’d like to close out with where y’all actually started on this album. This is the first song, it’s called ‘Weary Blues.’ May or may not have been dancing to this this morning while I was doing my skincare. Even though this song The Soggy Po Boys bring New Orleans to NH with their new album has the word ‘Blues’ in it, it’s pretty joyful.
Yeah. It’s also the least weary song. It’s a terrible title for a song. It’s very joyful. It’s very upbeat. Yeah, this one’s a really, really old New Orleans tune. But ultimately after sort of going through the iterative process, the song was just so much fun that we couldn’t not put it on the album. And as we were talking about, ‘How do we want to kick this album off?’ It just felt like the most fun way to start a listening experience. So that’s why it’s a first. And I do think it’s really funny that the song’s called ‘Weary Blues.’
Yeah, it certainly isn’t weary. I really enjoyed that one. Well, Stu Dias, it’s always a joy to talk to you.
You as well, Julia. Thank you for having me.
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Publish date : 2024-09-25 10:27:00
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