biograph

What happened was…

You are someone’s monster. But don’t freak out: according to the New Orleans country-rock ensemble Loose Cattle, everyone is. It depends on your point of view, and what you decide to do about it.

Loose Cattle, whose latest album Someone’s Monster is out November 1, is led in tandem by Michael Cerveris and Kimberly Kaye - a onetime couple, enduring friends and lifelong working artists. Kaye is a native Jerseyite, conservatory-trained in trumpet, jazz vocals and musical theater; she also has a checkered past as a teenaged ska punk, touring on the Warped Tour circuit in the late ‘90s with her first bands. Cerveris, who grew up in Appalachian West Virginia, garnered his first Tony Award nomination originating the title role in the Who’s Tommy on Broadway under the mentorship of Pete Townshend and later stepped into the lead character’s iconic platform boots for off-Broadway and West End runs of Hedwig and the Angry Inch; he also played guitar on tour with Husker Du’s Bob Mould. He received a Grammy for the Tommy cast album, and later won a matched pair of Tonys for the musicals Assassins and Fun Home.

So the pair shares a long resume of glam flash and punk sweat, logged under the stage lights before and during their tenure in this particular herd. But as Loose Cattle, they’re also inheritors of the progressive politics and compassionate humanity of the folk and country truth-tellers, past and present, who wrote songs like “Sam Stone,” “Co’dine,” “Down from Dover” and “Behind the Wall.” A couple of those more recent purveyors of radical twang – tight Loose Cattle friends Lucinda Williams and Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers – appear on Someone’s Monster. So does Louis Michot of the multi-Grammy-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers, who packed fried boudin balls along with his fiddle when he stopped by the album sessions at Dockside Studios in rural Maurice, Louisiana, an institution on the cypress-lined banks of Vermilion Bayou where luminaries like Dr. John and Bobby Charles once waxed hits and communed with herons and alligators. It’s a place that evokes that famous old, weird America of Greil Marcus’s almost-ancient musings - and this newer, weirder one that Loose Cattle’s music is perfectly poised to chronicle and contend with.

Cerveris has also spent his career on stage and screen playing an assortment of oddballs, eccentrics and fascinating total weirdos, from Sweeney Todd opposite Patti LuPone on Broadway to September in Fox’s Fringe to the mysterious Watson in HBO’s The Gilded Age. “Part of the reason why we gravitated towards Americana and country music was that the tradition was so full of complicated characters, and storytelling,’ he says.

New Orleans was where Kaye and Cerveris’ romance broke up, but their band came together. They found powerhouse rhythm section Rene Coman (bass) and Doug Garrison (drums)—who in their own forty-odd years together, have held down Alex Chilton and the Latin-tinged Americana rockers the Iguanas—and roped in versatile fiddler and vocalist Rurik Nunan who spent time in The Whiskey Gentry and on the road with chart-topping rock band Cracker. The situation in New Orleans, for Kaye and Cerveris, was less a matter of convincing fellow musicians to come on board and more like being allowed to join the mutual fun.

 “Somebody says you’re a competent musician, come on up. And someone up there will feed you the chords and the lyrics and say let’s just share it, now pass the ball and pass the ball and pass the ball like that,” explains Kaye. “It’s very unique to this music scene, and it’s exactly what we needed.” They were invited onstage at more established local artists' gigs, and started returning the favor as soon as they began to have stages of their own. A band, and a community, was formed. Cerveris, who’s worked on Broadway with composers ranging from Townshend, T Bone Burnett, and Elton John to Steven Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, says, “I think music can occupy the central place in your life here more than it can in New York… centering creativity, music-making in particular, is more understandable and natural and people just get it here.”

Someone’s Monster is Loose Cattle’s third long-player following up 2021’s Heavy Lifting and the 2017 holiday album Seasonal Affective Disorder, which No Depression noted “might be the best album of the season” and Rolling Stone Country declared its single, “Don’t Make Your Mama Cry On Christmas Day” to be “joyfully tongue-in-cheek” and a “delightful nod to the Cajun musical tradition.” Those previous projects, which had their geneses as far back as Loose Cattle’s loose formation in NYC in 2011, featured carefully chosen, under-the-radar covers of songs by low-key Americana favorites like the late Vic Chesnutt and New Orleanian Paul Sanchez, with whom Kaye worked on the post-Katrina song suite and stage show “Nine Lives.” But on Someone’s Monster, the band’s debut offering from the small but mighty indie Single Lock Records – which diligently both honors and redefines Southern music from the home base of legendary interracial country-soul label FAME records in Florence, Alabama and its new HQ in New Orleans - original writing takes center stage.

 “We may have started as a very casual cover band, but that’s not where we’ve landed,” says Kimberly Kaye. “We landed in the place where you take everything you’ve been practicing for decades and make something that isn’t practice.”

 We’re living in times that are no dress rehearsal, and Loose Cattle is up for the challenge. Consider: the lilting two-step “Cheneyville,” named for a Cajun-country town about an hour due north of Dockside Studios, which rolls with the gentle inevitability of the Mississippi River toward a tragic end wrought by the cruelty and indifference of 21st-century lawmakers. Consider also Rurik Nunan’s minor-key fiddle and the pall it casts on the hard-rocking, REM-influenced (more Southern weirdoes!) opener “Further On,” whose title’s two words do double duty as an exhortation and, when expanded on in the lyrics, a lament. “God’s Teeth” is a grungily somber, creeping rocker spangled with spooky chimes and crooning violin, let loose and egged on to rampage by producer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Dream Syndicate, Son Volt) and honorary Loose Cattle member Jay Gonzalez, the Drive-By Truckers multi-instrumentalist making, as Michael Cerveris said, “an appropriately unholy din of feedback wails.” “Here we are again, trying to save the world from little men,” Cerveris moans, as so many have moaned in similar words before.

 Someone’s Monster recognizes the tragedy, disturbance and uncertainty of this particular point in the uninspiring beginning of our new century. But like Cerveris and Kaye’s newfound community, it also inspires and comforts: Lucinda Williams guests not on Loose Cattle’s take on her own classic “Crescent City,” a song as comfortable and charming as a broken-in cowboy boot, which Kaye’s lead vocals inhabit lovingly, but on a cover of Lady Gaga’s aching family story “Joanne,” reimagined to feel as timeless as an Appalachian ballad. The tender waltz “Antiversary” had its genesis in a note from Cerveris to Kaye after her divorce, acknowledging that sometimes you can’t make it all better, but you can at least try to make a beloved friend feel seen.

“Here’s The Attention That You Ordered” is an intense whirl of venting and revenge/accountability fantasy about the tiresome constancy of sexual predation, propelled by background vocals from The Coven Choir—Debbie Davis, Arséne Delay, and Meschiya Lake—and fiery guitar solo from New Orleans’s own Alex McMurray. The crunchy, low-slung country-soul guitar blaster “Not Over Yet” is an anthem for a late, sticky neon-lit night in a dollar-beer special kind of bar, dedicated to its namechecked “weirdoes, witches, lonely hearts, cowboys and queers” who took yet another punch today but won’t ever let that fuck up their joy. And “Before We Begin” is a heartfelt and hushed eulogy to the fighters and the deeply felt and mourned casualties of our time, in a still-simmering war against pointless hate.

 Everyone, as Loose Cattle says in the album’s mellow, hopeful coda “Tender Mercy,” is someone’s monster. Everyone, it also reassures, could also be someone’s answer. It doesn’t have to just be you; remember, all your friends, and their friends, are there, too.

—Alison Fensterstock