October 22, 2024 Hannah Means Shannon
New Orleans-based band Loose Cattle will be releasing their third full-length album, Someone’s Monster, on November 1st, 2024, via their new label home of Muscle Shoals-based Single Lock. The album is notable for several reasons, including Loose Cattle moving into focusing on original songs more fully, broadening their sound into more eclectic territory, and having some exciting guests on certain tracks, like Patterson Hood posing as a kind of river demon on “The Shoals” and Lucinda Williams providing extra vocals on their cover of Lady Gaga’s “Joanne.” Evident throughout is the way in which they’ve grown together as a band over their time together and the resultant confidence that makes them more daring in their self-expression.
Fronted by Kimberly Kaye, who has a background in jazz, theater, and punk music, and Michael Cerveris, who’s a Tony and Grammy Award-winner currently starring in the Tammy Faye musical, Loose Cattle has been built upon a community of musical interests and musical support in New Orleans in quite a profound way. Originally welcomed by local musicians in a humbling and kind way, Loose Cattle, and Kaye herself have found that sustaining relationships have made their ongoing musical journey possible. I spoke with Kimberly Kaye about this next step in songwriting, community, and collaboration.
Americana Highways: What sort of time period do these songs hail from? Are you a band who tends to work on songs over a long period of time, or are they from a more recent collaboration?
Kimberly Kaye: It’s a little bit of both in a way that I wouldn’t have predicted. A lot of the writing took place during pandemic lockdown and because of where people are located, and Michael splitting time between New York and New Orleans, he got stuck up North, while the rest of us were in New Orleans. Everybody in the band was in their little bubbles. During that time, we did have extra time to write, which was great, but the problem was that we couldn’t get together as a group and play through them.
Lyrically, and as far as putting together new material, had a lot of time for Michael and I to pass notes back and forth, but then things opened up, although we weren’t still playing shows at that time. When we went into the studio, we had these songs that we’d kind of been working on for two years, but no one had actually worked on together as a unit.
Typically, we would take new material into the studio after playing it live for a bit. But this time we recorded the album, but didn’t get to play it live, really, for another six months. I joked to Michael recently, “Now that we’ve figured it out for the last year, I would really like to go in and re-record it…” [Laughs] And he said, “Absolutely not! Shut it down!” Which is absolutely the right answer.
AH: I’m relieved that you at least allowed yourself to play the songs for the last year, because it has been such a long road to release for you. If you had continued to sit on the songs, that would have been just unfair.
KK: The album itself feels somewhat like a relic, though the songs haven’t changed that much.
AH: I think the liner notes for the album are a kind of “secret handbook” to the album, with so many rich stories behind the songs that you all share. I did see it occasionally mentioned that during recording, “The band had never heard the song before.”
KK: Yes! [Laughs] That happened.
AH: I do feel like that’s kind of exciting, that estuary-like moment when everyone’s finally together for the first time to do this, but also requires a lot of flexibility, and maybe even compassion. It’s difficult to jump on something really fast.
KK: You couldn’t have picked a better word for it, too, “estuary,” because we were in the swamps of Southern Louisiana, literally watching barges go down the river from the studio. Dockside is right on the water in the heart of bayou country. We had the rivers of different people coming in and converging on this Lafayette-area studio. We had to figure the songs out, and we had five days, but it was really thrilling. It may sound corny, but there is something thrilling about watching extremely smart, capable artists make something together.
“Tender Mercy” is my favorite example on the album. I said to Michael, “We need something that is uplifting, but also we’re clearly angry about some stuff. I hear this as a punk, driving thing.” He said, “That’s great.” And we left it with the band, since they were figuring out the orchestrations, and I went to take a nap. We’d been in the studio all day, so I laid down for an hour, then I came back. They were playing this soft, groovy thing. They said, “We’ve got this thing!” It was a completely different animal, and it was so much better. I’ve always thought the best way to get a fantastic tattoo is to go to a great tattoo artist and say, “Do whatever you’re the best at. I’m not going to bother you.” I feel like that’s sometimes what you do when you’re making songs. We handed these sketches over to the band, and they made something completely different than we expected, but I think it’s better for it.
AH: I’m so glad that you mentioned “Tender Mercy.” I listened to the album in order, so I didn’t hear that one until the end. I was knocked over by it, but also kind of washed away by it. It arrives and settles over all the emotions and journeys on these other songs. It’s so calm but it says so much.
KK: I’m happy that you feel that way. I feel like what it’s trying to say is heard better at the tempo, and with the mood there. If it had been that original punkier sound, I don’t think it would have had that impact. I think how we said it on the album is better.
AH: It feels like it’s coming from a place where all the energy has been spent, and that’s a very convincing tone. It makes the argument best. It’s like the last few conversations before dawn when you’ve been up all night.
KK: That song really is supposed to be the end of the conversation when you’ve been up all night. For us, it typically comes back to, “All of this stuff is really bad, but I love you, and let’s take care of each other. See you soon.”
AH: Have you all played that one?
KK: Yes, we have, as a trio, and as a full band. It’s been great to watch people during that bridge section, which we pull the title from, “We’re all someone’s monster.” Watching that line being absorbed and people saying, “Ohhhh,” is awesome.
AH: Geography really affects people and lives, and it’s something that some people are drifting away from, but some are beginning to realize again. I think that geography is something that’s shaped not only your band, but this album.
KK: It’s very fortunate, and it’s also a by-product of New Orleans, which is a quintessential and essential music city, but it’s not known for the type of music that we’re doing. You think of brass bands, you think of Funk. There is a thriving and incredibly competent Americana scene, with some of the best songwriters working together, but what people are looking for when they come to New Orleans is not Americana. I would say that people go to Nashville or Austin interested in seeing Americana music.
Here, you have to work hard to cultivate and keep the Americana scene alive, because it’s not as organic. The way to support the scene here is to be incredibly supportive of each other, to be champions of each other’s work, and to work together. We work to put together festivals. We don’t have a New Orleans Americana festival, so we have to work together to make sure our opportunities aren’t limited. That’s some of what you’ll see in the liner notes, that sense of community.
AH: When you need each other, you are more accepting of each other. It’s probably good for people to be in that situation because it breaks down things we think of as dividing differences. You start to see things differently.
KK: Yes. It’s also understanding that the scarcity mindset is not a healthy mindset anywhere. There are places and times where that’s bred into you that competition is good. But is it? But at least in New Orleans, there’s a centuries-long legacy of people who are self-taught. They didn’t go to Berklee. They learned music because that’s what you generally do. Then a community elder, without being paid, stepped in and said, “Hey, I’ve learned a lot of stuff, here’s something you might not know.”
Something that was really important to the foundation of Loose Cattle is that with the band that you hear now, Paul Sanchez, who was one of the songwriters of Cowboy Mouth for years and is very cherished in New Orleans, welcomed us. I was just in my twenties when I got to New Orleans, and Michael was a Broadway guy, which was a lethal label if you want to make music and have anybody take you seriously. A Tony Award is very bad, giving you that actor-musician label! Paul, however, came from that New Orleans model of, “No, you share the stage, you share your knowledge. That’s the only way that there’s a scene that continues to exist.” He invited us to sing and play with him a lot, and he started promoting our shows. It helped us meet a lot of people. It gave us a seat at the table. We owe a lot to that long history in New Orleans of, “Y’all, we gotta share these resources! If you keep competing, this won’t work!”
AH: I can definitely see how helping other bands out, playing for them as needed, comes back as support for you. That’s a big statement of mutual support. You are what you choose to do.
KK: For me, personally, it gets even deeper, because I spent the better part of 2016 and 2017 in organ failure and was tremendously ill, in and out of hospitals. I lost my home and lost my job. What you’re talking about, for me, and for Michael, was something where the New Orleans musical community and the fanbase that supports music down here, heard that I was very sick and made a GoFundMe for me go viral.
The only reason that I’m alive today, and the only reason that I get to make music with these guys is because a bunch of generous, most of whom were not affluent, pooled their resources. I was a stranger to most of them, but they made sure someone else had to medical care to survive. Michael has always been generous, but I now feel a lifetime of indebtedness, that when people need help, you help. The more that you give, authentically, without expecting anything back, the better it is for everyone. It’s not transactional for us.
AH: The story about Louis Michot in the liner notes is a good example of that, how he came to play on the album. I saw that he just happened to be in town that day and turned up with a bunch of food for you.
KK: Yes! There’s nothing quite like having a born-and-bred Cajun burst through the door of your swamp studio with a whole armful of food. This is just what happens! Louis is one of those people who was very welcoming and kind to us when we arrived in New Orleans. In the spirit of talking about communities, Rurick [Nunan] is also a very sought-after fiddler here who plays with a couple groups. Part of being a New Orleans band is that you can’t all gig on Friday nights, because you share members. Louis is someone who has been kind enough to step in our songs and replace Rurick on the nights when he’s out touring with someone else. That’s part of the same thing, which is that it takes a community to keep this scene alive.
Thanks very much for chatting with us, Kimberly. You can find more information here on the Loose Cattle website: http://www.loosecattleband.com/
You can find the album here: https://link.singlelock.com/loosecattle
GAMBIT WEEKLY
27 October 2024
New Orleans Americana band Loose Cattle centers its own songwriting on 'Someone's Monster'
photo by Joseph Vidrine
Loose Cattle releases 'Someone's Monster' on Nov. 1.
Loose Cattle has done everything backwards, vocalist and guitarist Michael Cerveris says, only half-jokingly.
It usually takes a while for bands to record outside of the studio or to tackle holiday music. But the New Orleans-based Americana band started out with a live album in 2013 and followed it up a few years later with a well-received Christmas record.
Finally in 2021, more than 10 years after Cerveris and vocalist Kimberly Kaye started Loose Cattle while living in New York, the band released “Heavy Lifting,” a studio-recorded full-length more representative of the band’s barnstorming alt-country ethos.
Still, while “Heavy Lifting” included a few tracks written by Cerveris and Kaye, Loose Cattle leaned into putting their spin on favorite songs by other artists, like Vic Chesnutt’s “Aunt Avis,” “Gasoline and Matches” by Buddy and Julie Miller, and a boisterous mash-up of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and CeeLo Green’s “Fuck You.”
Now, “Someone’s Monster,” Loose Cattle’s newest studio album, finds the band centering its own songwriting. The album, which is out Nov. 1 on Single Lock Records, mostly includes originals written by Cerveris and Kaye — alongside a trio of interesting covers.
After “Heavy Lifting,” “Kim and I said to each other, ‘We want to write the next record,’” Cerveris says. “And we felt confident that we could and would.”
During the pandemic shutdowns, Cerveris and Kaye found themselves with a lot more time on their hands and trying to process the heaviness of 2020. Many of the songs on “Someone’s Monster” began to develop during that time, Cerveris says.
In late 2022, the band — Cerveris, Kaye, bassist Rene Coman, drummer Doug Garrison and fiddler Rurik Nunan — spent time at Dockside Studio in Maurice recording with producer John Agnello, who has worked with Dinosaur Jr., Son Volt and Waxahatchee.
“When we were in the studio at Dockside together, it kind of dawned on me that I hadn’t been with a group of people for a period of time in almost two years at that point. It felt very special to me,” Kaye says. “Community really does matter.”
The album’s title, “Someone’s Monster,” nods to the fact that everyone is capable of hurting someone else. But it depends on how we handle that reality. And throughout the album Loose Cattle takes an empathetic, humanity-focused lens and leans into its progressive worldview.
Alongside their originals, Loose Cattle put their stamp on Lady Gaga’s “Joanne,” with guest vocals by acclaimed singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. And later on the album, Loose Cattle cover Williams’ “Crescent City.”
The band also includes Lafayette musician Johanna Divine’s “Big Night Out,” an “evocative, wry and boozy tribute to the reality of waking up middle-aged,” Kaye wrote about the tune. Divine also plays lap steel on the track.
Williams isn’t the only prominent Americana artist to appear on “Someone’s Monster.” Patterson Hood, co-founder of the Drive-By Truckers, lends his voice to “The Shoals,” a Southern rock track written by Cerveris about Muscle Shoals, Alabama. And a number of great musicians guest on the album, including Jay Gonzalez, Alex McMurray, Jon Graboff and vocalists Debbie Davis, Arsène DeLay and Meschiya Lake — billed here as The Coven Choir in a nod to their witchy New Orleans supergroup with Kaye.
Cerveris and Kaye are music veterans. Kaye is a trained vocalist and trumpeter, who played in her own ska bands on the Warped Tour circuit. Cerveris toured as a guitarist with Husker Du’s Bob Mould — and he’s a Tony Award-winning actor who is currently portraying Jerry Falwell in the Broadway production “Tammy Faye.”
The two were once in a romantic relationship and formed Loose Cattle for casual gigs around New York. The duo moved to New Orleans, and although the relationship didn’t last, they remained close friends and grew Loose Cattle. The band has become a steady part of New Orleans’ inclusive Americana community.
“When it started, Michael and I were a couple, I was in my 20s, and we were just trying to be a backyard party band,” Kaye says. “It’s now clearly something different. But we didn’t force it to become that … I’m in my 40s now, and a lot has happened to the world and to all of us. The way we communicate that has changed as we’ve gotten older and wiser.”
Find “Someone’s Monster” and more about Loose Cattle at loosecattleband.com.
RIFF MAGAZINE
15 October 2024
Loose Cattle featuring Patterson Hood, “The Shoals” — New Orleans’ Loose Cattle and Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers got together to make this ode to music mecca Muscle Shoals, in Alabama. It’s also a spooky Southern gothic tale that involves Hood singing the part of a river demon. Cool!
Hood duets with Loose Cattle cofounder Kimberly Kaye and the two play off each other wonderfully, as if sparring with each other. It’s dark, simmering and waiting to explode. Even cooler is that the band released the song on Muscle Shoals label Single Lock Records, started by John Paul White (The Civil Wars) and Ben Tanner of Alabama Shakes. The new album, Someone’s Monster, is out Nov. 1.
Loose Cattle’s other cofounder, Michael Cerveris, is preparing for his role in “Tammy Faye,” a Broadway production with music by Elton John and lyrics by Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, which begins preview performances this week and opens on Nov 14.
OFFBEAT MAGAZINE- COVER STORY
RECLAIMING ROOTS: LOOSE CATTLE TOOK TEN YEARS, TWO CITIES, AND ONE PANDEMIC TO LOCK INTO PLACE
photo by Noé Cugny
OFFBEAT MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 28, 2023
BY: MARK GUARINO
The New Orleans band’s earliest roots are in New York City where the two principals—Kimberly Kaye and Michael Cerveris—got together to play cover songs to blow off steam and keep the flame of their relationship burning. An album of cover songs and a Christmas record followed. It only took a breakup, a personal health crisis, an eventual relocation to New Orleans, a new rhythm section, a pandemic, and a lot more confidence writing original songs for Loose Cattle to emerge wholly new. The band’s forthcoming self-titled album of largely all originals marks the occasion.
For Kaye, the new record feels like “a quantum leap.”
“You can hear in it what living in New Orleans and being part of a community of musicians does to your brain,” she said.
Loose Cattle is winding down what became a breakout year for the band. It played its first show at the Jazz and Heritage Festival at the Lagniappe stage, a performance that also debuted “Crescent City,” the band’s dancefloor-driven cover by Lucinda Williams. The song, firmly in the canon of unofficial anthems for the city, was a way of declaring the band’s determination to thrive in Kaye and Cerveris’ adopted home. The song originated from sessions recorded at Dockside Studio, the retreat-like recording operation in Maurice, about 150 miles west of New Orleans in the heart of Cajun Country. There, along with fiddler Rurik Nunan, drummer Doug Garrison, bassist René Coman, and special guests, the band gained greater confidence about its strengths and why New Orleans plays such an important role in its newly- evolved sound.
“We wanted some place rooted in the soil of Louisiana,” said Cerveris. “And there is something magical about that place down in the bayou. The gear is top-notch, and the vibe is what you’d expect for a place where Dr. John spent a lot of time.”
Now is a good time to be an Americana band, but it’s also good to be one in New Orleans, a city defined by funk, R&B, brass bands and traditional jazz. But in recent years, the rejuvenated interest in country and folk music nationwide has seeped into New Orleans. Bands and singer-songwriters like the Deslondes, the Lostines, the Scamp Walkers, Silver Synthetic, Chris Acker, and Heather Littlefield, among others, have helped drive attention to acoustic music and to music more influenced by The Band than the Meters.
For Cerveris, Loose Cattle is a fundamental New Orleans band for how it “fuses together all sorts of different styles.” It may not have a brass section punching its way over the choruses of these songs, but the phrasing and rhythms are there. “So much of New Orleans music exists to get people moving, which is fantastic, but there’s a long tradition of New Orleans music that has stories to tell too,” he said, starting with “St. James Infirmary” which Cerveris called a “quintessential” example of the city’s songbook.
Summer Camp in the Swamp
The architect for the heavier guitar sound of “Loose Cattle” is John Agnello, a producer Cerveris chose for his work with guitar-driven bands like Dinosaur Jr., the Hold Steady, Sonic Youth, the Drive-By Truckers and Kurt Vile. To round out the sound, he brought in Jay Gonzalez, the Athens, Georgia-based multi-instrumentalist with the Drive-By Truckers, who became a sixth member of the band over the nearly two weeks of sessions.
At that point, Cerveris and Kaye had both demos that were fully-formed and others that wouldn’t take shape until all the musicians collected themselves in one place. An example of the latter is “God’s Teeth”—a brooding nocturnal tune accented by the open-ended sonic noise Gonzalez coaxed from his guitar. Gonzalez said the band’s balance of straightforward roots songs and heavier, more angular guitar rock was familiar territory. The difference, he said, were the duet sensibilities in the vocals.
“I love harmony bands. The Everly Brothers might be one of my favorite duos, ever,” he said. “And when it’s a male-female thing, it opens up a new perspective. Michael may sing something [dark] like ‘God’s Teeth’ but Kim has a different personality. It’s not Michael’s band or Kim’s band, it’s very much a combination of the two. That changes the timbre—the band’s sound is the same, but it can be a whole different thing.”
Recording at Dockside was like going “to summer camp” he said—Cast into the swamps of Vermilion Parish, the musicians worked together, ate together, and drank together with little interaction with the outside world. Storytelling dominated the dinner table, with Coman and Garrison telling stories of working with legends like Alex Chilton earlier in their career, or Agnello casting spells with his memories of working in the 1980s at the legendary Record Plant in New York with hitmakers like Cyndi Lauper and John Mellencamp.
“I was taken aback but immediately put at ease because everyone was so low-key. Outside of the Truckers, it was one of the most positive recording experiences in a really long time,” Gonzalez said.
Guests like Lucinda Williams (who lent vocals to “Joanne” by Lady Gaga and Mark Ronson, the record’s only cover) and Drive-by Truckers’ Patterson Hood (guitarist and voice of the “river demon” on “The Shoals”) appear as do New Orleans luminaries like songwriter Alex McMurray and a vocal choir consisting of Debbie Davis, Arsène Delay, and Meschiya Lake. Gonzalez said the natural environment played a role in forcing the musicians to become more of a whole, just as they would during a live show.
While recording “Crescent City,” he held back on the organ until Louis Michot—guesting on fiddle—gave him the signal to open up his playing, so eventually everyone’s playing was swirling together. “You could tell he was listening to everything,” Gonzalez said. “With Cajun music, you don’t play anything tentatively, it’s very much acoustic instruments at top volume.”
Blood Harmonies
What makes the best harmony singers work is often their differences. Cerveris and Kaye—a soft-spoken West Virginian and a brassy Jerseyite from Springsteen country—discovered they shared “blood harmonies” from the start. “She and I always had that from day one,” he said.
Singing is what kept the couple together during a relationship, which started in 2009 and lasted about four years, and it continues to draw them together in the resulting friendship. “I know fantastic singers who can’t sing harmony—they are amazing solo lead performers, but singing harmony is a real talent. Kimberly has both those things in spades,” Cerveris said.
Cerveris grew up with a mother—a Juilliard-trained dancer—and a father—a Juilliard-trained classical pianist—who taught music at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Like any kid growing up in the 1970s, the sounds blaring from his FM radio—Kiss, Rush, Mott the Hoople—drew him in and moved him to pick up the guitar in junior high. An acting career intervened. Eventually, Cerveris ended up—most improbably for a budding rock star—on Broadway where he ended up collaborating with a real rock star, Pete Townshend, when originating the title role in The Who’s Tommy in 1992. That produced a flourishing acting career that continues today where Cerveris veers between roles in stage musicals, television and film.
The story could have stayed put that way. Broadway’s enthusiastic and loyal audience could have easily sustained Cerveris’ income through an early retirement. But he changed lanes and committed to building an independent music career from scratch. There were first-rate stints of apprenticeship—playing rhythm guitar in Bob Mould’s touring band for one—but otherwise, Cerveris carved out a path where two worlds—A Tony Award winner who plays original Americana music in clubs—can exist. “Nobody ever told me I wouldn’t do it. Or if they were trying to tell me I couldn’t do it, I just didn’t pay attention,” he said. Oftentimes, he discovered, the audiences from either side of his world are not aware the other side exists.
“I do love and cherish when people meet me now as a musician because they heard the band and then have no clue that I do anything else,” he said. Like most of us, the dynamic of not being defined by one scene was formed back in high school. “I didn’t fit in any one place or clique…That carried over in my life too. I’m still trying to figure out who to sit with in the lunchroom,” he said, laughing.
Like him, Kaye also came from a family that influenced her direction in life. Growing up in Freehold, New Jersey (yes, hometown to Bruce), she attended Wagner College, a performing arts school in Staten Island, New York, the same school her father—a theater technician for Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters—attended. Both parents cheered her interest in the arts, starting her with trumpet lessons when she was seven and following her career playing in a ska band in the 1990s. She met Cerveris when she was working for a Broadway industry website as a writer.
Why Kaye was writing about singers on stage and not singing on the stage herself can be traced back to a single moment: when one of her instructors told her efforts to sing were “terrible.”
“That dashed my confidence,” Kaye said more than 20 years later. “I had unhinged non-functional stage fright.”
Drinking helped get her in front of a microphone over the years, but it wasn’t enough. She credits being in New Orleans to work on the “Nine Lives: A Musical Story of New Orleans” by songwriter Paul Sanchez, to ultimately help her turn a page. “He was generous,” she said of Sanchez. “He said, ‘Kim do you sing?’ I told him I had a terrible voice. He said, ‘You’re wrong’.” Days later she was onstage with Cerveris. It would take time, and his coaxing, to regain her confidence after 15 years away from the stage.
“One of the reasons I have tremendous love for Michael is that he took someone with crippling stage fright who couldn’t get onstage in front of 10 people and was very patient about that. He told me ‘Your voice teacher was wrong. Music is not for people who sound one kind of way’,” she said. “I wish I could get those years back, but it’s really lovely to have them back now.”
New Orleans played another role in helping her confront the second greatest challenge in her life: Confronting, and then learning how to live with, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) a group of rare genetic connective tissue disorders that affects the skin, joints, and blood vessels, and caused her to suffer organ failure and autoimmunity. After being misdiagnosed for 20 years, which inflamed her health condition more, Kaye was properly diagnosed in 2017 at the Cleveland Clinic’s Chronic Pain Rehabilitation program in Ohio—an achievement funded by the nearly $100,000 raised online the year prior.
“The love that I have for the larger music community, meaning not just musicians but people who are music fans, is limitless and something I don’t know how even to reciprocate,” she said. “Music literally saved my life.”
And the songwriting deepened. “Sometimes writing down the thing you’re going through is the best thing to do,” she said. “The songs on Loose Cattle are not love songs—no one was in love—but instead, they’re survivor songs.”
“When we started the band, Michael and I were a kind of childish couple trying on the personas and words of other artists because we didn’t know what we were doing,” she said. “Then life happened, and our relationship changed, and the world changed, and the way we felt inside changed and we had a better idea of what we were trying to say. Now we’re 10 years into being a band and this is just where we happened to land.”
The Right Chemistry
Assembling the line-up that would become Loose Cattle today took years. The New York incarnation started to fade once Kaye and Cerveris relocated to New Orleans as coordinating rehearsals and shows became difficult and expensive. Enter Rurik Nunan, a fiddler and harmony singer whose resume as a sideman includes stings with Dave Jordan, Lynn Drury, Andrew Duhon, and many others. He fell into the band in preparation for a 2016 holiday show Kaye and Cerveris were rehearsing for, and which required a fiddle. His Americana background can be traced directly back to Whiskey Gentry, an Atlanta-based band Nunan has played with since 2014. In Loose Cattle, his instrument often takes the lead solo role. “It’s on me to take us in any musical direction apart from the bare bones of the song,” he said. The freedom Kaye and Cerveris have given him is unique: “We just trust each other.”
Nunan also helped develop Loose Cattle as a true harmony band, becoming the third voice to blend with Kaye and Cerveris. “We had no idea he could sing,” said Kaye. “To us, he was just a wonderful fiddler.” Over time, singing became one of his favorite roles in the band. “I just love singing with people who can sing well and finding those harmonies I can blend with,” he said.
The pivotal moment for the band was when drummer Doug Garrison and bassist René Coman locked in as its rhythm section. The two men represent one of the powerhouse units in New Orleans music for their four-decade tenure in the Iguanas. Coman said the country and folk music in Loose Cattle’s DNA overlaps with the signature Latin and R&B grooves of the Iguanas. “These are all blue-collar kinds of music. There’s a garage element to all of it,” he said.
When the Iguanas had a tour stop in New York City in 2012, Cerveris, who was starring in Evita on Broadway at the time, invited them to a performance. Afterward, he gave them a tour of the Marquis Theatre, the subterranean space for the pit orchestra and the backstage. “It was very interesting to see that world. I had never been to a Broadway show and here I was sitting in the star’s dressing room,” said Garrison. “At that point I knew he had a band” but he had no idea he’d join it one day.
After Cerveris moved to New Orleans, the invitation came. The decision to join Loose Cattle, said Coman, felt right. Both Cerveris and Kaye’s relationship seemed grounded, much like his own with Garrison. “They have a unified point of view and were very copacetic in terms of values,” he said. For Garrison, it took playing together one time to see how “it just clicked.”
“Michael is a very accomplished guitarist and has good musical instincts. Between tune-smithing and good performance, it’s just good chemistry,” he said.
Their addition helped elevate the core fundamentals—songwriting, harmonies—that Nunan, Kaye, and Cerveris were already building. At Dockside, Garrison remembers a situation reminiscent of how the Iguanas operate: rough demos introduced to the band to flesh into “something that felt good.” In the hands of Garrison and Coman, that meant bringing “a New Orleans vibe to it in certain ways.” “We have a sensibility of New Orleans rhythms…all the time I was thinking, ‘How can we put a little Latin tinge on this beat and not just make it sound like a country tune?’” he said.
One example is “Here’s That Attention You Asked For,” a new song from Kaye that tracks the downfall of a womanizer. The natural rhythm of a vocal felt like an up-tempo “train beat,” but instead he “put a little New Orleans twist on it and put a clave feel on it.” Suddenly, Kaye’s denunciation in the song’s chorus—“Why are you like that?”—is sung from the street during a second line parade. Coman said that while not all the themes of the record are exclusively about New Orleans, one of them—the rocker “Not Over Yet”—is “completely about what it’s like to live in New Orleans and deal with the dysfunction of this place that we all love.” With Nunan’s searing fiddle throughout, Kaye and Cerveris sing of potholes and power outages, but also the celebratory “Weirdos, witches, lonely hearts, cowboys, and queers.”
“This town will kill you and yet, it’s not over yet,” they sing.
Garrison said what Loose Cattle has in common with all the great New Orleans bands is that it is a “labor of love.”
“If you go back in history with New Orleans musicians, that’s the way it is. You had the Meters, the Neville Brothers, the Radiators—all bands that came together to play music as a fun activity as opposed to having a gig and calling musicians to see who’s available,” he said. “This is something we have to do. We play because we enjoy it.”
Reclaiming Roots
Despite his long tenure on both coasts as an actor, Cerveris is Southern-bred, and now realizes how Loose Cattle and the collective of musicians that have entered his life have allowed him to return to those roots. He lives in the Tremé, but long before that he was commuting to New Orleans for music and film roles. One long solo drive through the South in 2007 to film “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant” gave him greater self-awareness of the connections he had growing up in West Virginia to the landscape.
“I had forgotten I had been raised in the South. That drive was beginning of me reclaiming my southern roots and the realization that it was so much a part of who I am,” he said. The readjustment also drove him back to the music he was originally drawn to growing up. “I had grown up and was surrounded by it, but never realized I was a part of it… that is what reopened the door. When Kimberly started the band, I wanted to play that music.”
Loose Cattle the album does not yet have a label, which is something Loose Cattle the band hopes will resolve itself in 2024. The delay is partly because of the machinations of the record industry—“the worst time than ever to put out records,” Cerveris discovered is now due to dwindling label support for bands that don’t fit a million-selling formula.
But waiting until the time is right seems to perfectly fit the band’s playbook to date. “We did not get out a map,” said Kaye. “This album is the one I am so excited for people to hear what the band is capable of. Lyric-driven folk is not for everybody, but for me, this is my jam.”
Listen exclusively to Loose Cattle's new single, their rendition featuring special guests Louis Michot of the Grammy-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers and Drive By Truckers’ Jay Gonzalez!
April 19, 2023
Loose Cattle take their name from those bullet-riddled yellow signs that warn motorists about the “Loose Livestock” on Southern backroads. Led by the double-barreled frontperson duo of Kaye and Cerveris, this five-piece roots-rock outfit is as passionate about stampeding through Southern rock barn-burners as it is ambling through gentler, harmony-drenched ballads.
Native West Virginian Michael Cerveris served as a sideman for Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould, and shared stages with Pete Townshend, The Breeders, The Pixies’ Frank Black, Teenage Fanclub, and more. A two-time Tony and Grammy Award-winner, he’s co-starred in Broadway shows from The Who’s Tommy to Sweeney Todd as well as Hedwig and the Angry Inch off-Broadway, in L.A. and London’s West End. Michael also co-starred in films with Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, and John C. Reilly and the TV series Mindhunter, Gotham, Fringe, Treme, and HBO’s current hit The Gilded Age.
New Jersey-born Kimberly Kaye—an arts journalist, functional medicine practitioner, and LGBTQ activist—first cut her musical teeth on the road, traveling the Warped Tour circuit as a member of a ska band before shifting her attention to roots music. NOLA locals know her as the Big Easy Award-winning director/co-star of a wildly successful revival of, and co-host of The Best of New Orleans-winning podcast Human F*ckery.
Bass player and native New Orleanian René Coman, and Memphis-raised drummer Doug Garrison, are both members of beloved, genre-crossing group The Iguanas as well as the late Alex Chilton’s band. Georgia-raised fiddler and vocalist Rurik Nunan tours with Crackerand Dave Jordan and is a former member of roots rockers The Whisky Gentry.
Premiering exclusively on American Blues Scene is “Crescent City,” the new single from Loose Cattle and a Lucinda Williams classic. A double fiddler-driven reading, their rendition features special guests Louis Michot of the Grammy-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers as one of those fiddlers and Drive By Truckers’ Jay Gonzalez on organ.
The song was recorded on the banks of the Vermilion River at famed Dockside Studios in Maurice, Louisiana, produced by John Agnello (Son Volt, Dinosaur Jr., Waxahatchee, Horse Girl). It was spontaneously tracked during sessions for the band’s second studio album, which is expected late summer/fall 2023.
“It was kind of a Louisiana love-at-first-sight story,” says Kimberly Kaye. “Michael had known Lucinda for a while through Lu’s tour manager, his fellow native West Virginian, Travis Stephens. When we came to town for an unofficial Louisiana Americana showcase during last year’s Americana Music Fest in Nashville, with typical Southern hospitality, Lu invited us to stay with her.”
“We bonded right away, talking about parents, writing, and her childhood in Louisiana,” says Cerveris, “It seemed natural for us to invite her to sit in on our Vinyl Tap set. And despite being scheduled to head out on her own tour later that day, she said she’d love to come out and make music with her Louisiana people. We all decided ‘Crescent City’ would be the perfect song…”
Michael Cerveris elaborates on the story of what began as a spur-of-the-moment notion of a song to sing with Lucinda Williams at Americana Fest:
She suggested it and, since we’d brought along Louis, it turned into a magical moment with Kim, me, Louis and Lucinda on the cozy stage at Vinyl Tap. Afterwards, Lu told us she loved our take on it, especially our harmonies and Louis’ fiddle. When we were back in the Bayou at Dockside recording our next album, Louis, who lives nearby, dropped by one day with an arm load of andouille sausage and boudin balls for John Agnello and Jay Gonzalez to have a taste of those local staples.
We made another spontaneous decision to pause our other work and record Lucinda’s tune with the whole band and our guests. Having Rurik and Louis both playing fiddle brought some real Cajun vibe to the track and Jay’s B3 brought a little bit of church to the whole thing. When we played it for Lucinda, she smiled and gave Kim a big hug and said, “Y’all just brought me back home.” That’s pretty much the only review we’ll ever need.
Michael Cerveris
“Crescent City” will be released as a stand-alone single April 21 on Low Heat Records as a digital download and on streaming platforms in celebration of Loose Cattle’s first appearance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, May 4.
OFFBEAT MAGAZINE
BackTalk: Michael Cerveris And Kimberly Kaye Of Loose Cattle
March 29, 2022
by CREE McCREE
When I reviewed Loose Cattle’s latest album, Heavy Lifting, released during a brief pandemic hiatus in the early summer of 2021, I called band co-founders Michael Cerveris and Kimberly Kaye the “molten core” of my “favorite Americana cowpunks in New Orleans.” That’s as true now as it was then, even if “then” seems like a gazillion years ago, before the pandemic came back to bite us and double-jinxed Loose Cattle.
Originally scheduled to make their French Quarter Fest debut in April 2020, they got lost in the shuffle when the Fest moved to October and had to scuttle their Sunday lineup. But all’s well that ends well (knock on wood). Loose Cattle make their for-real French Quarter Festival debut on Friday, April 21, when Cerveris and Kaye converge with the crack team behind them: bassist Rene Coman and drummer Doug Garrison of the Iguanas, and free-ranging fiddler Rurik Nunan.
After the pandemic forced them to play together across time and space, Loose Cattle emerged more tightly bonded than ever. That’s partly because they didn’t just livestream shows, like most bands did, during the long lockdown. They created visionary videos of two iconic cover tunes that reflected the pandemic’s yin-yang dynamic: John Cale’s “Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend,” with Drive-by Truckers keyboardist Jay Gonzales’; and Bowie/Eno’s “Heroes,” with Johanna Divine and André Michot of Lost Bayou Ramblers. Both are innovative, and haunting, in completely different ways.
“Everybody was in these little individual bubbles, not even in the same city,” Kaye recalls at Café Degas, where I joined Loose Cattle’s co-founders shortly after we all pulled our tiny shoebox floats through the streets of the Marigny during the ’tit Rex parade. “Then we started communicating over Zoom just to see how everybody was doing, and I thought let’s see if we can do something with this,” adds Cerveris. “So, we just started calling audibles like here’s this song, learn it and record it in your room, and we’ll put them all together” says Kaye. And it worked. “My Pro Tools facility has grown enormously over the pandemic,” deadpans Cerveris, who also learned video editing to create the oft-spooky visuals and montages. “Like all of my ideas,” he adds with a laugh, “it started out as a really simple idea. Got really complicated.”
Like an old (happily) married couple, Cerveris and Kaye frequently finish, and expand on, each other’s thoughts. Which isn’t that surprising. They met across a microphone in 2008. The relationship “began as professional turned romantic, then musical, then friendly after they split,” according to their official Origin Story. They also bonded over their mutual affinity for country and punk, which crosses rowdy Johnny-and-June-Cash romps with the punky L.A. ’tude of X’s John Doe and Exene in Loose Cattle’s own close-to-the-bones harmonies.
Cerveris is also a two-time Tony-winning actor (currently cast in HBO’s The Gilded Age). That’s almost incidental, though it’s often the first credential cited in stories about Loose Cattle, which is a double-edged sword. “On the one hand, I’m proud of the acknowledgements I’ve gotten,” says Cerveris. “And if it makes people who wouldn’t otherwise know me decide to listen to Loose Cattle, great. But it can also put off an equal number of people who think, oh, here’s another one of those actors dabbling as a musician, though I’ve played music as long as I’ve done anything on stage.”
Loose Cattle also has plenty to be proud of as a band. Their poignant and hilarious 2017 Christmas album Seasonal Affective Disorder was named one of Rolling Stone “Country’s Ten Country/Americana Records To Hear Right Now,” while Heavy Lifting was one of OffBeat’s 50 Best Albums of 2021. They’ve also shared the stage with leading lights of New Orleans music like Paul Sanchez, Debbie Davis and Meschiya Lake, at their own Christmas throwdown and many other events, including Harry Shearer and Judith Owens’ holiday show. But though both have lived here for years, Cerveris part-time and Kaye 24/7, they still feel a bit like outsiders.
“We aspire to be less of ‘a New York Broadway guy with a band,’” says Kaye, whose own theatrical credentials include directing, and costarring in, a much-lauded local production of Hedwig’s Angry Inch. “Because we care about this community, we live in this community, we’re actively involved in it. And we wanna have more opportunities to serve it. Service is really important to both of us as artists, and as people. It sounds corny when you say it out loud, but it’s true.”
Over a lively lunch of mussels (Cerveris), blood-rare steak (Kaye) and crawfish quiche (me), we talked about service in general, inclusion in the Americana community in particular, and a big upcoming event where you can warm up for festival season: Loose Cattle’s STAMPEDE! On Saturday, April 16, at 2 p.m., a galaxy of Loose Cattle co-conspirators will converge on stage at The Broadside: special guests Mia Borders, Bruisey Peets and Joy Clark; A2D2 Experience (Arséne Delray and Antoine Diel); and the Riverbend Ramblers, featuring members of the Lost Bayou Ramblers. The three of us also rambled a bit, as old running buddies are wont to do. We hope you enjoy the ride.
You really pumped out a lot of videos during the pandemic. I love that crazy animated one Caesar Meadows drew for “Sidewalk Chicken” from Heavy Lifting that has a rooster pimp daddy.
Michael: We tried to keep our friends busy with paid art projects.
Kimberly: Yeah, it was a nice project during the pandemic for everybody. Caesar drew that during lockdown. It was another Loose Cattle project that came to fruition.
Your video covers of “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend” and “Heroes” really capture the duality of the pandemic zeitgeist. How did those come about?
Michael: We were asked to contribute something to a charity fundraiser in New York, and I think they actually suggested “Heroes.” And we said great, but we want to do our own take on it. So, we asked our friends Johanna Divine [dulcimer] and Andre Michot from Lost Bayou Ramblers [accordion] if they’d contribute to “Heroes” too. And we asked Jay Gonzales from Drive-By Truckers to play keyboards on “Fear.”
Great choices! “Heroes” has a real rural vibe that almost verges on a Cajun waltz, and it’s partly set in bayou country, with Johanna and Andre playing outside. “Fear” also has a lot of rural Acadiana shots, but like the song itself, they’re much more ominous. Stuff like graveyards and abandoned houses.
Michael: Yeah, we had fun with that.
You’ve also been working on a new album, right? Will that be released in time for festival season?
Kimberly: No, we’re still going back to the studio to record. Hopefully, it will be out in time for the next French Quarter Fest. This year’s Fest set is gonna be mostly originals and new stuff that people haven’t heard. We all spent the pandemic doing a real hard reassess about what matters and what doesn’t matter. What kind of people we want to be and what kind of stands we want to take. So, I think you’ll be able to hear that our songwriting has changed. We used to be more like, ha ha let’s tell some jokes and make people laugh.
Michael: The new songs are about things we’ve been thinking about for the last two years, everything from the pandemic to George Floyd.
Kimberly: Like, God, I’m kind of angry about this. Here’s a song about it.
You’ve always had a bit of a tongue and cheek approach to your songwriting, which I actually love. But I get it. You got serious.
Kimberly: Yeah. I think we’re saying the quiet part out loud a lot more now.
Michael: We’ve always been activists as people and conscious as artists. But I think we’re becoming more activists as artists. We’re more invested in building communities and making sure that we are doing what we can to support them.
Kimberly: We’ve been waiting for a really long time to get the spotlight and the microphone. And now that people are handing it to us, the right thing to do is to pass it to someone who has never gotten the spotlight or the microphone.
Michael: Yeah. And we’ve been doing it, in terms of our bookings and inviting performers who we know as people or as artists. Like we made this really great friendship with Lilli Lewis, whom we adore.
Kimberly: We love her compassion and her empathy. I’m a very fiery, sharp-tongued person. And I like learning from people like Lilli who are gentler and more like water in their approach to changing things.
Michael: We met Lilli when Mark Bingham put together this group of people to sing background and play on an album he was producing. That’s where we also met the Jelly Sisters and Ocean Boyfriend, who sing these absolutely gorgeous pitches. Perfect, complex harmonies.
Who else would you like to pass the mic too?
Kimberly: Artists who haven’t really been accepted in the Americana world. For me, being in that world has been very satisfying but also incredibly frustrating, in a way that it hasn’t for Michael. Because I’m a weird person and this scene is full of homophobia and white men excluding women and artists of color. If you’re not a blonde white Christian, you’re not part of the club, you don’t get to headline festivals. You either gotta be a straight dude in a denim jacket or a beautiful housewife with a guitar singing sweet love songs.
But don’t you think that’s been changing? Americana publications like No Depressionhave made a conscious effort to diversify in the past couple years.
Kimberly: It feels like it’s starting. And it was really important for us to have other people on our bills who felt the same way. Instead of just a parade of white heterosexual people, singing songs for white heterosexuals. Especially in New Orleans, which is so diverse, so colorful.
Michael: We wanted our stage to look like our friend circle and we wanted our audience to look like our families. To be a part of a change that is happening. We’re not inventing anything: just recognizing something that has been going on, and making sure that we are contributing to changing it. By playing with artists like Joy Clark, who’s fantastic and is part of this Black Opry thing that’s been happening. In fact, I think they’re at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville tonight. And Bruisey Peet from Lafayette, who plays queer swamp pop.
I’ve seen Americana beginning to diversify mostly in terms of people of color. But I’ve seen less of it with queer folks, so it’s good that’s starting to happen too.
Kimberly: I’ve been very lucky to be insulated from some of the discrimination because I’m always surrounded by four robust heterosexual men who nobody wants to offend. So, I’ve been protected by my bandmates from some outright shitty behavior that exists for women in the music industry. Michael shares the microphone with me quite a bit, and not only onstage. Sometimes people just want to talk to him about the band, and bill us as Michael Cerveris and Loose Cattle. When that happens, he picks up the phone and says, that’s not our name. Bill Kim equally. I’m not doing this interview unless Kim’s on it too. And that’s very rare in the entertainment industry.
Michael: Some of it is selfish too. I would much rather do an interview with Kimberly knowing that it’ll be more fun, and it’ll be more interesting. And I would rather sing with Kim than sing by myself anyway, and we would both rather sing with the band.
If Loose Cattle was only Michael, it would just be Loose Cow!
Kimberly: Mad Cow! [laughs]
Mad Cow Disease! [laughs] So besides becoming more inclusive, what else would you like to see happen with Loose Cattle going forward?
Michael: We’ve been doing this long enough on our own that we’re just looking forward to the day that we have our own slot at Jazz Fest and invite Paul Sanchez on stage with us, instead of him inviting us.
Kimberly: Now that we’ve made it into the French Quarter Fest, we want that position on the Lagniappe Stage. But what probably matters more to us than anything else is being embraced at home. I think we’ve sometimes felt like people thought we were a novelty act. Michael, the Broadway guy, and his ex-girlfriend. How cute!
Well, Jazz Fest is way overdue, and I’d bet good money that you get Lagniappe in 2023. But the exciting thing is that French Quarter Fest is free and everybody can come see you there.
Kimberly: It’s the most socialist of all of the festivals. And I really appreciate that.
Michael: Not that we would turn down a slot on the Gentilly Stage.
You will work for money on occasion…
Michael: Occasionally. [laughs]
So, when people show up for Loose Cattle at French Quarter Fest, what can they expect to see?
Kimberly: We’ll be playing a lot of new material, and almost all the originals.
Which is important for fans to know. As an old fan myself, I do wanna hear some of the old hits, too.
Kimberly: Oh, you will. Although I’m not sure if we can sing “Jolene fuck you” when we do that song. Because there’s a stipulation in the contracts that it’s a family-friendly show, so I don’t think you’re allowed to yell “fuck” a bunch of times on stage. But don’t you worry. We’re gonna sing “Gasoline and Matches”!
Warm up for French Quarter Festival at Loose Cattle’s STAMPEDE! On Saturday, April 16, from 2-7:30 pm at The Broadside, 600 N. Broad Street.
Loose Cattle will perform at the French Quarter Festival on Friday, April 22, from 12:50 p.m. until 1:50 p.m. on the Jack Daniel’s stage.
Music Mecca- Nashville
Tony & Grammy-Award Winner Michael Cerveris & Kimberly Kaye Of Americana Band Loose Cattle Discuss New Album ‘Heavy Lifting’, Group Origins, & Much More
JUNE 23, 2021
So how did the idea for Loose Cattle come to fruition, and how did the band all get together?
Michael Cerveris & Kimberly Kaye: Kim and I had both been in various bands over the years, and were frankly tired of that dynamic that happens a lot where you’ve had to put so much time and energy into the million things that come before you get to stand on stage to play that when you’re finally there, you’re almost too worn out to enjoy the thing you wanted to do most: play music for people. SO we thought we’d start a band playing country covers with a pick-up band of friends, never rehearse, always have lyrics and chord charts onstage, and mostly just play in our friends’ living rooms (hopefully, but not necessarily, invited).
Also, Michael and I were dating at the time and, clearly never having read a Fleetwood Mac bio, thought starting a band would be a great way to improve our relationship and keep us from disagreeing. Yeah. We learned a lot. Mostly we learned that we were infinitely better being best friends and bandmates than we were being a couple. That first incarnation of Loose Cattle started in New York and grew to include our friend Lorenzo Wolff (Restoration Sound Studio) on bass, Justin Smith (Defibrulators) on fiddle, Eddie Zweiback (Losers Lounge) on drums, and Gabriel Caplan on guitar, with Alex Harvey sometimes joining on mandolin and Jon Graboff (Laura Cantrell, Shooter Jennings) on pedal steel.
Over time, I started spending more and more time in New Orleans, a place I’d gone to for a job and just fell in love with. Eventually, Kim moved to New Orleans and after she got married, her life settled in there permanently. The more we were playing in New Orleans, the harder it was for the rest of the band to make it down all the time. Eventually, we realized we needed to base the band out of New Orleans. We’d met René Coman and Doug Garrison through their Iguanas bandmate Rod Hodges, who’d played on our Christmas album. Being fans of theirs from that band and then learning they’d also spent time as Alex Chilton’s rhythm section, we asked if they’d be interested in playing with us in their free time and, against their better instincts, they said yes. We’ve held them to it ever since. We met Rurik Nunan (Whiskey Gentry, Cracker) after asking around town for the best singing fiddle player with low standards. Rurik was top of everyone’s list.
It’s hard not to be intrigued with certain band names sometimes, and this one is pretty great. Is there any significant meaning or backstory to it?
KK: There’s a wonderful music and BBQ venue in NYC called Hill Country. Around the time we were forming the band, and deciding the band would be this loosely roaming assembly of amazing musicians, Michael and I were at Hill Country to see our friend Laura Cantrell play a beautiful Americana set. On the wall was a huge photograph of a Texas road sign that read: “Loose Livestock.” Apparently drivers in Texas need to be warned of some large, capable animals wandering the area freely and confidently…which seemed an apt description of the band we’d decided we wanted to form. It was the perfect name for our new musical herd.
But because alcohol and life, Michael immediately forgot the name and edited it in his head to “Loose Cattle,” and started calling the band such in emails and press listings. We’ve never been big on correcting small errors, and said “fuck it.” Michael’s brain fart became out permanent band name, and now we pay homage to that sign in Hill Country every time we’re in NYC.
In your origin story, it discusses how playing music together started out as a replacement for therapy in your relationship. Do you still find music to be therapeutic, maybe in different ways?
MC: So just to clarify, since Kim is hilariously militant about “nothing is a replacement for therapy, only therapy with a capable and certified practitioner is therapy:” We DID actually do the couples’ therapy, we just failed to graduate that process as a romantic couple, LOL. But absolutely and enthusiastically, YES, music is deeply therapeutic. There’s clinical research on it and everything. Hearing music you love releases dopamine and serotonin in the brain, both necessary chemicals for lasting happiness and calm. And singing together releases oxytocin, the same stuff that helps mothers and children, or sexual partners, form close bonds….whether you’re duetting or singing with the church choir you’re getting all doped up on oxytocin, and it feels wonderful. Plus there’s all the parts of it beyond the neurochem aspect. One of the reasons Michael and Kim still are family to each other even after breaking up IS the healing that making music together can facilitate. Hell, look at how many romantic couples in music history broke up but kept playing together: White Stripes, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, X—the last is one of our personal band heroes, BTW, Exene and John Doe are heavy influences on Loose Cattle.
Music is so therapeutic that people who would never be able to make it work otherwise find themselves in these decades-long creative relationships, partnerships that longer than most marriages ever do. That’s part of the reason the pandemic was so traumatic for so many musicians, and music fans too. COVID cut us all off from our weekly or monthly group therapy sessions without warning, and we all suffered as a result. It’s not a replacement for true therapy with a certified professional, but it’s an essential “adjuvant therapy” for pretty much all of us.
What is it like being a part of the New Orleans and New York music scene? How do they differ, and which do you feel suits your band better?
KK & MC: One of the best descriptions of the difference between New York and New Orleans I ever heard goes something like this: In New York, everyone wants to know what’s the newest restaurant, the newest band, the newest club. In New Orleans, everyone wants to know what restaurant has been around the longest, what band has been doing their thing for years, what venue has the deepest roots. I think there’s some truth in that oversimplification.
We love both towns and have roots in both places (as well as Kim’s Freehold, NJ and Michael’s Huntington. WV childhood homes), but making music for the love of playing instead of the love of a career is a lot easier in New Orleans. I think mixing styles and genres and traditions is much more common in New Orleans and, because it’s a fairly small town at heart, the different scenes are more fluid and permeable. Everyone knows everyone and there’s a lot of musical cross pollination. And audiences seem more open, embracing, and less tribal than up north. That’s changed some as more people have migrated down and the vibe isn’t always quite as inclusive maybe as it was when I first got to town in 2007. But I think the band and our style has been growing and expanding because of the wealth of musical influences and friends we have here.
It feels like we’ve found a real musical home here in New Orleans, even though we don’t fit the traditional New Orleans music label. But most musicians I know figured out long ago that labels are about as meaningful as the ones on your beer that get stuck on your hand when it’s humid like it always is down here. It’s what’s in the bottle that matters.
How does your experience on Broadway affect your approach to music, such as recording or performing it?
MC: I guess I have a work ethic that comes from the rigors of Broadway, but what we do musically feels light years away from that world. I’m sure it’s confusing to fans how different my singing can be, and I think sometimes I’ve shied away from talking about it, because it gives some people an easy way to dismiss the band as a vanity project from yet another actor-with-a-band. Though I’ve somehow managed to pay my rent as an actor, I’ve mostly lost money playing music. That last fact alone seems like it should give me some cred as a musician. But I’m trying more to just embrace it all and worry less about being judged ‘authentic’ by people who don’t know me.
For the longest time, I found it so much easier to stand up and sing in front of people when I could hide in a character like I did on Broadway. Even though I’d played in bands as long as I’d ever acted, something about that anonymity and that mask made it easier to show my heart as a character onstage. Maybe David Bowie understood. Even in our band, I would find it so much easier to really let go in a cover than in a song I’d written.
Eventually, I started pretending that my songs were actually covers of some obscure singer songwriter, and then I could kind of trick myself into not wanting to hide my face when I sang. It’s still there some, though it’s so much better having Kim there to sing with. I’d rather sing harmonies with her than ever have to front a band on my own again. And in fact, my favorite songs are the ones where she sings and I can just play guitar and do harmonies. Don’t tell her, but I’m planning to sneak more of those into the next record. And writing together makes it feel better and easier, too.
You just released your new album, Heavy Lifting. What are you hoping listeners will take away from this collection of songs?
KK & MC: I think we’ve always gravitated to stories and songs of the people at the margins, the ones who have the least but somehow make the most of it. That’s often guided our choice in covers as well as our songwriting. When we started recording the album, it was pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd, but it’s not like society was taking care of people at the margins magically better in The Before Times.
Our Christmas record from 2017, Seasonal Affective Disorder, was as much If We Make It Through December as it was Got To Get You Under My Tree. If anything, events of the last year and a half have been a real wake up call to all of us in the band that we want to and need to do more to call out inequality and injustice and support especially anyone having a rough time. And now that the entire planet has had a rough fucking time (though some decidedly more than others), I guess our biggest hope is that people would listen to the record and, besides being entertained, feel a little like the weight they’re carrying is something we’re sharing with them. We’re not telling anyone to cheer up. We’re saying, we know, it is as absolutely dark and hard as you think it is. But also we can waltz together and cry a little, or stomp the floor and shout together and sing our way to something better. It’s heavy lifting, but maybe we can start seeing the heavy, lifting.
If Heavy Lifting was inspired by “the increasingly dark American landscape,” when it comes to meaningful change, what sort of “heavy lifting” are you hoping to see?
KK: Loose Cattle has been fairly privileged overall—hard working, never handed a thing, never rich, but still privileged. Michael worked his way through Yale washing dishes in the dining hall for four years, but he still went to YALE and his parents to Juilliard. Rene and Doug are exceptional musicians, but plenty of exceptional musicians never get to tour with Alex Chilton or be a member of a band as respected as The Iguanas, like they have. And America LOVES stories like theirs! “Poor boys rich in talent bootstrap their way to success” narratives are the ones we binge on in this country, to the point of pretending millions of people struggling due to systemic failures don’t exist. But in the last year I’ve watched these incredibly talented men I make music with accept their privilege and go, “Oh wow. I thought things were hard for me, but they’ve been even harder for POCs, women, the disabled. Bootstrapping worked for me, but that doesn’t actually mean it works for everyone. How I can use my privilege to help, or at least not harm anyone?”
I’m a queer gal with serious physical disability, plus I’m on the spectrum. I’ve been sexually assaulted, and felt crushed under the weight of all that stuff at times. So I can barely articulate how healing it’s been to watch my band mates examine their biases, stay present during very uncomfortable conversations, make efforts to empathize with marginalized people, then outright advocate for marginalized folks. The American Reckoning has made them want to help, to share stories that too often go untold, and help their neighbors rather than blame “the other” for their problems. They speak truth to power, and support me fully when I’m working to advocate for MY communities. That right there—refusing to get sucked in to American Exceptionalism, deciding to help people who have not had it as easy —IS heavy lifting.
It would have been so easy for the guys in this band to exclude an atypical woman like me from the spotlight entirely, or ignore that we have issues like police brutality and class warfare which require activism right now. Instead they’re doing the same heavy lifting you see guys like The Drive-By Truckers, or Chris Stapleton doing, even if it makes other white guys (hell, and women) mad. If more people with that privilege would do the hard work and say, “Hey, I don’t care how we used to do it—we’re not gonna pretend bigotry and abuse aren’t a problem just so we can feel good about ourselves,” I think life in America could at least start feeling lighter for a whole lotta people.
Other than the more obvious Covid restrictions, what was the most challenging part of writing/recording this album, and who might’ve helped bring it to life?
MC & KK: The COVID stuff was a challenge, but the biggest challenge of making music in this time has been figuring out what place music had in our lives. The idea of what kind of work is essential really made us all take a hard look at ourselves and what we were running around worrying about. And we all had our moments of asking ourselves what the place of music was in our lives, not just career-wise, but in terms of who we are.
Through the pandemic, we kept connected remotely by continuing to work on this album, but also on one off covers (Bowie’s “Heroes” with friends from Lost Bayou Ramblers, and John Cale’s “Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend” with Jay Gonzalez from Drive-By Truckers). We thought about adding those to the record, but they were part of a different universe somehow and we decided to leave the album intact. We’d initially planned to release Heavy Lifting in April 2020, but that came and went and we struggled with whether we should scrap it as a relic of an irrelevant past or embrace it as who we’ve been and work it into pointing in a direction we might want to go.
Rick G. Nelson at Marigny Studios in New Orleans was instrumental in helping us capture most of the record playing live together in the studio. Our old friend Lorenzo Wolff helped us bring it to life in his Restoration Studio in Brooklyn with overdubs from New Orleans’ John ‘Papa’ Gros on keyboards, Bennett Sullivan on banjo and Jon Graboff on pedal steel, and David Barbe gave a depth and coherence to our various flights of fancy with his legendary mixing skills at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, GA. And Greg Calbi did that magic mastering thing he does.
The music video for “Filling Space” seems to be telling a particular story visually. What purpose do the animations fulfill in enhancing the narrative?
KK & MC: With all our videos for this record, we just handed the songs off to animators and told them to go where their instincts take them. The whole fun is seeing your song reinterpreted and given back to you in a visual form. With “Filling Space”, we’d approached Jason Shevchuk after seeing his video for DBT’s “Tough To Let Go.” I think we were expecting something whimsical and melancholy. He came back with this whole computer graphic world that somehow combined a handmade feel with a desolate machine manufactured world.
Early on, he showed us images from a Swedish filmmaker, Roy Andersson, that he wanted to use as inspiration for these environments. It was so different from what we’d initially envisioned, but we could see Jason was getting at something even deeper in the song and we trusted him to run with his vision. The narrative thread is entirely Jason’s interpretation of Derek and Selda’s lyric, with a suggestion here and there from us. I think what we like most about it is the way you feel a strong narrative even if you can’t find all the words to describe it. Jason’s video takes this already emotional song and gives listeners and viewers a bunch of new access points to make the song part of their own narrative. We love it.
Do you plan to tour on behalf of the album or have select regional shows lined up? What else might fans look forward to from Loose Cattle?
MC & KK: Man, that’s the million dollar question. We’d love to tour the record, but we’re kind of in the middle of figuring how and where and when that’s going to be possible for acts at our level. The record was originally planned to coincide with festival dates we had in New Orleans and other places last year, all of which obviously never happened. We’re hoping to find slots in some festivals coming up, but as many of them are having to downsize, the less established acts are feeling the crunch.
So we’re hopeful that we can at least organize a few regional tours for ourselves and return to places like Nashville where we’ve loved playing (most recently at the Bluebird a few years back). And we’re already in writing mode for the next record. We’d like to get in the studio early next year, maybe. We’re feeling so grateful for each other in the band and really eager to have new things to share with people, ideally in the same room, one where the only screens are ones to keep the flies out.
SINCE I LEFT YOu blog
Loose Cattle Interview: Making the Listener Not Hate You
June 9, 2021
BY JORDAN MAINZER
“The New York Philharmonic is basically a cover band,” Michael Cerveris told me over the phone a couple months ago. Okay, he was being facetious; in context, we were talking about the merits of labeling Loose Cattle, the group he leads along with Kimberly Kaye, as a cover band. They certainly started out that way 10 years ago, forming with the low-bar goal of playing country songs in their friends’ living rooms. (After all, Cerveris had a successful theater, TV, & film career, and Kaye in a ska band, so they weren’t banking on success.) When they started landing high-profile gigs and releasing only non-traditional recorded material like live records and Christmas collections, they didn’t really have time to ask themselves who they were as a band. You could argue that they finally get to do that on Heavy Lifting, their debut studio album a decade in the making, which came out on Friday via Low Heat Records.
On Heavy Lifting, Loose Cattle–which has always had Cerveris, Kaye, and a rotating cast of other members, at this time René Coman, Doug Garrison, and Rurik Nunan–finally record some of their crowd favorite covers and original material but also include some timely, somber interpretations. In a sense, they say it’s both the first album and the difficult second album, the original statement and the changing of trajectory. They get their kicks on a rollicking version of Buddy and Julie Miller’s “Gasoline and Matches”, Bob Frank’s upbeat “Redneck Blue Collar”, and “Sidewalk Chicken”, an original about disposed poultry that’s treasure for a passing-by dog. They duet on the Johnny and June-esque “He’s Old, She’s High”, a song written by Cowboy Mouth’s Paul Sanchez about the two of them (Cerveris and Kaye started Loose Cattle while in a romantic relationship), whose line “He loves his Dolly Parton / She digs her CeeLo Green” segues perfectly into their closing mashup, “F*ck You Jolene”. But the most poignant and notable songs on here are the somber ones, versions of Vic Chesnutt’s “Aunt Avis”, Judith Avers’ “West Virginia”, and Selda and Derek’s “Filling Space”, which gets a bluesy strings and pedal steel treatment.
Cerveris and Kaye cite both the insularity caused by COVID-19 lockdowns and their ever-present tendency to look towards the margins as why they’re, too, most moved by these songs. “We’re required all of the time to be looking at people,” Kaye said. On the morning of our interview, the top story was essentially pictures of whatever Kardashian was currently horny for Travis Barker, pictures to which we were both subjected on our social media feeds. “If you’re going to look at somebody, why them?!?” Kaye said, exasperated. Songs like “West Vriginia”, on the contrary, “ask you to open your eyes a bit,” said Cerveris. They also wanted to roll out and open the album with more reverent tunes. “The idea of putting out songs in your face or requiring you to party felt really bad and discombobulating,” said Kaye, who couldn’t listen to almost anything during lockdown without crying–especially party music that made her miss her friends. A song like “Filling Space”, on the contrary, according to Kaye, “doesn’t have any judgement about what loneliness looks or feels like.” Though Heavy Lifting may preview a period of more original songwriting for Loose Cattle, these songs are just as if not more personal.
Which brings us back to the eternal question: Is Loose Cattle really a cover band? Perhaps somewhere in between. What’s clear is they reinterpret songs to fit their emotions and the zeitgeist the same way great jazz or country musicians do for standards. They’re artists. And, yes, at the same time, the next time they hang out and get tanked, they’ll probably start jamming and playing some well-known tunes.
Read the rest of my conversation with Cerveris and Kaye below, edited for length and clarity:
Since I Left You: What about Heavy Lifting is unique as compared to anything else you’ve released in the past?
Michael Cerveris: We kind of did everything backwards. We had both been in a lot of bands before we ever met, and so much of the time you spend doing rehearsals, learning music, teaching different people music. Once you’re out of college, you’re not on the same schedule as everybody else you play with most of the time, usually because the only way you can make a living in New Orleans or New York or places is being in 5 different bands in the same time. So you spend so much of your time sending messages back and forth and trying to find places where you can rehearse. We wanted to cut all that out when we started this band. The idea was that we would learn a bunch of country covers because we both loved that kind of music and the storytelling, and the characters in them were just great. Our highest aspiration was be to play in our friends’ living rooms, and that was it. That’s where we started.
Within a month, we suddenly had these random opportunities to play on Mountain Stage in my home state of West Virginia and to play at Lincoln Center in New York and its American Songbook Series. The kinds of gigs you would build your career towards. We were randomly landing there out of the gate, so we thought, “Maybe we should rehearse like an actual band.” Similarly, with records, our first record was a live record from a residency we did in a club in New York called 54 Below. Our second record was a collection of Christmas singles we had been doing once a year to treat our fans around Christmas time. So this is our first debut studio record.
Kimberly Kaye: It’s coming years into being a band.
SILY: How did you go about deciding what to include on here, both covers and originals?
KK: The problem of being a band that exists for a decade before you make a record is that by the time you make a record, the five people who do love you already have a list of favorite songs that they want to hear on your record. These are the songs we never recorded that people were like, “Why don’t you have a version of this I can download?”
MC: There were definitely fan favorites that we had to do because we had said we would forever. There were a bunch that we wrote, because we wanted to move out of being a covers band. Kimberly and I have been writing separately and together, and that’s definitely where we plan to move as a band more and more. As we were recording them, we actually wrote another couple in response to where we were finding ourselves as the process went along.
SILY: Is there a general approach you take when covering a song or recording a song someone else has written?
KK: It’s challenging when you’re doing covers to be true enough to the original that people A) recognize it or B) think, “God, this terrible cover band just murdered this song I otherwise love.” That’s always a player, being respectful to the original. Also finding a way to to say, “Hey, I might be in New Orleans or in New York but we’re not a Bourbon Street or Times Square cover band.” How do we add texture? How do we use our approach to storytelling to emphasize the parts of the story that are very meaningful to us as musicians or humans listening to the song? Trying to strike a balance between representing the song so that the person who wrote it originally wouldn’t want to murder me if they saw me in public, and then backing that up with, “How do I make it interesting?” so that the person doesn’t feel like they’re hearing the song for the ten thousandth time. Regardless of who they are, making the listener not hate you, I think.
MC: The primary motivation of our band is not to be hated. [laughs] It’s funny: Cover bands get such a bad rap, but it’s so much a part of most bands’ development. The Beatles were a cover band for most of their beginning. It’s how you cut your teeth. [I think of it as being] song interpreters. A lot of people who are famous and not thought of as a cover band aren’t necessarily writing their own material most of the time. Nashville is full of people writing songs for other people.
I think it’s always about trying to find songs that mean something to you. That bottom line is how songs end up in our setlist. It’s a song one of us will hear and think, “We should cover that.” When we say that to each other, it means the song has struck something in us, which normally means it’s about someone who is marginalized or in an uncomfortable situation not part of the mainstream. We both gravitate towards the margins and misfits and outsider type people. Those kinds of songs, either written from that perspective or about people grappling with those kinds of things, usually strike us.
[When] there’s something in the song that somehow feels like something we have a way to express, that will be true to us. There are songs we sometimes think of that we think are great to cover, but what we really want is just to have been in that band who did the song originally. It’s only when we feel like we have something to add to the song we love or we want to share it with more people. A lot of our fans think we’ve written a lot more of our material than we have. It could be because we’ve made it absolutely unrecognizable, or that the way we do it makes it feel like it comes from us.
SILY: There’s a good mix on here of better-known songs, and songs I looked up and couldn’t find the original version online, like “Filling Space” and “He’s Old, She’s High”.
KK: Michael and I aren’t in Nashville, but those are this album’s, “Hey, if we were in Nashville, this would be our Nashville moment.” “Filling Space” was written by a songwriting pair that go back and forth between Nashville and New York, [Selda and Derek]. They put that together and sent it to Michael thinking it would be a great song for us, and they were right. “He’s Old, She’s High” was written for and about Michael and I as a gift by Paul Sanchez, now of solo fame in New Orleans, previously of Cowboy Mouth.
SILY: I was gonna say, it was almost too perfect the way you combined “Jolene” and “Fuck You”, which inspired the line, “He loves his Dolly, she loves her CeeLo Green”.
MC: It was actually the other way around.
KK: It was one of those things before we were a band, and we hadn’t performed yet, and Michael said we should start a covers band for living room parties. I said in that case, we should try to find a way to cover CeeLo Green’s “Fuck You”, because it’s my jam. That’s how old that cover is. That song was new at the point where I thought we should wedge it in with “Jolene”.
MC: The song used to always be in the first person, and we decided when recording that it would be about two other people to make it so more people could feel it was about them.
KK: It felt a little masturbatory to sing the song about just us, so if we changed the tenses and the pronouns, maybe you know a couple where he’s high and she’s old.
MC: When we started the band, we were a couple, and we thought starting a band would be a great thing for our relationship, because clearly we had never read any band biographies before. Even though we stopped being in a relationship but kept the band together, the dynamic between the two of us is a lot of what informs everything. It does feel like a family, though people have come and gone. Kim and I are the constants. Now, we have this really solid band that feels like a band, which is what we always wanted.
SILY: “Aunt Avis” is the first single and album opener, one of the more downtempo tracks on the album. Why did you choose to lead with it?
MC: We were aware that it was kind of an odd choice as the opener and first listen people were gonna get of the record. I guess the odd choice is the choice we go with most of the time.
KK: Yep!
MC: [laughs] I think it also captured a lot of what we’ve been talking about. It’s somebody else’s song that exists in an original version that’s so idiosyncratic and iconic. Nobody else performed [Chesnutt’s] songs the way he did. But it’s also a song Widespread Panic does that a lot of people think of as a song by Widespread Panic. This is the kind of band we are. We’ll take somebody else’s song and try to make it ours.
When we originally recorded [Heavy Lifting], we thought we would put it out in 2020, and for reasons we’re all aware of, that didn’t seem like a good idea at the time. We started to sit down to figure out when we were gonna put it out and guess what the future was gonna be like, when people were gonna want to listen to music and when we were gonna want to listen to music, and when people did want to listen, what kind of music it was gonna be. When we looked at the record, this song kind of seemed to be the ideal song to talk about things that are on people’s minds and have been for the past year. How do you be good? How do you keep going when you don’t know how or if you should? Starting out of the gate with something not acknowledging the world we’re in would be jarring and weird and could be good if people wanted escape, but we’re not entirely an escape kind of band. It felt like the right song for this moment to represent us and the record and let people come in through that. The next single, “Filling Space”, too, is a step along that road. When people get into the full record, there’s all kinds of stuff on it, much more lighthearted and rocking stuff. But it’s been a rough fucking year, and we wanted to let people ease their way out of the cave.
SILY: What’s the significance behind the album title?
MC: We’re such an old school band in a lot of ways. We’ll take forever deciding on the sequencing of the record. I still look at records as A-sides and B-sides. It really matters to me. There are a million ways to do it, but I spend a lot of time thinking about the flow of the record. Similarly, we take forever naming our records. I don’t know how many titles we had for this record.
KK: [laughs] A lot.
MC: They go from the ridiculous to the less ridiculous to approaching the sublime, but mostly just ridiculous.
KK: For a minute, we were calling it Herd Immunity, definitely leaning away from the sublime on that one, more towards the absurd. But [Heavy Lifting] was a dark horse that came out of nowhere and kind of won the race. We had another title picked, and I can’t really remember it, so it obviously wasn’t that good.
MC: This definitely came up post-COVID lockdowns. I think it might have been encouraged by finding the photo first.
KK: Yes. I remember it came from the photo.
MC: And the sort of dual nature of “heavy lifting,” which feels like what everybody is getting through these days, to “heavy, comma, lifting,” which suggests that maybe this weight is slowly getting lighter. We liked the duality of that idea.
SILY: By the way, when I was Googling “heavy lifting loose cattle interviews,” just to see what other interviews you had done, I got a lot of results for interviewing for jobs on farms, and the proper way to lift loose cattle.
KK: [laughs]
MC: I think I’ve done the same thing. [Note: At the time of publication] The top hit you get is this harness, because there’s this thing for lifting down cows, which goes around their hips and lifts them down by their pelvic girdle, which doesn’t seem like a great idea, but I guess it’s what you do when you have a cow to lift.
When you Google “loose cattle,” you often get great videos of herds of cows across the world, wandering across freeways and through town squares. I think, in a way, it’s appropriate.
KK: Loose Cattle the band is not on TikTok, but we have a very strong showing on TikTok anyway if you type us in, just because people love filming animals in places they shouldn’t be.
SILY: What else is next for you, as a band or individually?
KK: In 2020, we were positioned to be playing such great shows. We had a spot at French Quarter Festival in New Orleans, which, if you’re a local, is your favorite, since [New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival] is very crowded. We had this incredible year of gigs lined up, and then all of a sudden, nothing, and we were all in different places, so we were not allowed to interact. While we didn’t get to work on too, too much as a band, we did, as we do, produce some more covers, which are not on the album but are really great. We found creative and interesting ways to make videos while in quarantine. We covered David Bowie’s “Heroes”.
MC: We [also] did John Cale’s “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend”.
KK: That was the height of the COVID spike and election stuff. We made these two kind of poignant, interesting things people love. I get a lot of folks messaging me saying they’re listening to our cover of “Heroes” saying it’s helping them get through something. In the meantime, trying to keep busy, I accidentally started a not unsuccessful true crime and horror competition podcast with a friend of mine. We compete to tell really horrifying stories from history. Hottest Hell Presents. It marries stories from history’s colon with competition.
MC: My day job has been as an actor for a number of years. I got a job on a great new series for HBO called The Gilded Age which should come out early next year some time. It’s written by Julian Fellowes, who made Downton Abbey, and it’s kind of Downton Abbey for the U.S., set in 1882 in New York. Kind of follows America in a really transitional phase after the Civil War, and the rise of the Industrial Age. I’ve been learning, doing research while we’re making it. [It’s amazing] how much we talk about today, like race relations, labor relations, the rise of the 1% and suffering of the 99%, the seeds of it came out of that period of American history. I’ve been filming it in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. It’s been a blessing to have a place to go and be creative and manage to feed myself so we can keep doing the band.
My Spilt Milk
Loose Cattle Have a Wonderful Life
On "Seasonal Affective Disorder," Michael Cerveris and Kimberley Kaye try to deal with the dark and light sides of the holiday season.
December 18, 2017
by Alex Rawls
The number of suicides don’t go up during the Christmas season. A CDC study shows that suicide attempts are actually at a yearly low in December, but the urban legend makes sense. Shorter, darker days added to Christmas’ ability to push people’s buttons can weigh heavily, particularly when balanced by gaiety of Christmas trappings. Christmas lore is built on a foundation of absence and loss, and its first and biggest hit, “White Christmas,” became a hit in 1942 during World War II, when many GIs and their families could only dream of a white Christmas together. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (“if only in my dreams”) was a conscious attempt to strike while the iron was sad a year later, and the lyrics to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” were rewritten because the ones Judy Garland sang in 1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis were too bleak. It’s a Wonderful Life is only wonderful after George Bailey’s life bottoms out.
Americana band Loose Cattle titled their Christmas album Seasonal Affective Disorder in that spirit, and their holiday covers don’t twinkle with hope and good cheer. Instead, there’s a woozy, tentative warmth in Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” and Merle Haggard’s “If We Make it Through December,” and a hard-scrabble, make-do attitude in BR5-49’s “Truckstop Christmas.” When Michael Cerveris and Kimberley Kaye harmonize on the songs, their connection fills the emotional blanks left in the lyrics.
“A Very Loose Cattle Christmas” brings their music to the Chickie Wah Wah stage Tuesday night with a long list of musical guests that includes Tom McDermott, John Boutté, The Iguanas’ Rod Hodges, Bonerama’s Craig Klein, Lost Bayou Ramblers’ Andre and Louis Michot, and many more. Although Cerveris and Kaye come from New York’s theater community—she was a writer, he is a Tony Award-winning actor who this year appeared on television in Gotham and The Tick—they’ve both made homes in New Orleans and the show celebrates that.
“Kim described [the album] really accurately as the musical equivalent of getting your friends and family together for the holidays in all the complexity and joy and difficulties that entails,” Cerveris says.
Cerveris and Kaye’s relationship began as a professional one that turned romantic, then musical, then friendly after they split. The kind of unflinching honesty that makes those relationship changes possible is a part of their music. Americana was a musical neutral ground for them, not exactly in either’s wheelhouse, but it’s a space that embraces their musical values. “When we looked for a way to make music together, this seemed like a place where you get great songwriting, great storytelling and great characters—the combination often of clear-eyed, borderline cynical eye on the world or the time of year combined with heart-on-your-sleeve,” Cerveris says.
Their shared affection for the musical and emotional rough and tumble of Johnny Cash’s duets with June Carter Cash gave Loose Cattle its aesthetic, but Kaye’s health specifically shaped Seasonal Affective Disorder. She spent much of 2016 in a hospital in Cleveland dealing with a rare disease that left her battling a host of illnesses including Crohn’s Disease, shingles and a kidney infection. “When you’re surrounded by the frozen Rust Belt of Cleveland, Ohio and it’s cold and you’re sick, that definitely influences what kind of stories you’re in a place to tell,” Kaye says.
When Cerveris asked her to consider the Tom Waits song, he asked if she thought it was really a Christmas song. It opens, “Hey Charlie I'm pregnant and living on 9th Street / Right above a dirty bookstore off Euclid Avenue,” and from her hospital room window, Kaye looked down on a Euclid Avenue. She didn’t see any dirty bookstores, but she knew what snow and slush looked like in a Rust Belt city under the gun metal gray December sky. After that, she says, “I don’t know if it’s anybody else’s Christmas song, but it’s my Christmas song.”
Because Kaye was ill and had less affection for Christmas music than he did, Cerveris did much of the legwork to find songs for the album. Along the way, he found Christmas Gumbo, the 2004 compilation of Christmas music by New Orleanians and other musicians from the region. They move the Sonny Landreth and The Dixie Cups’ “Got to Get You Under My Tree” away from Landreth’s signature guitar sound by adding R&B horns that punctuate lines, and they deemphasize the piano and add some push to Allen Toussaint and Irene Sage’s “The Day it Snowed on Christmas.”
“There’s no point in covering a song if you’re just going to try to insufficiently imitate the people who did it in the first place,” Cerveris says. “You hear songs like that all the time that basically sound like the band really wishes they were that person. We put some time and energy in thinking about, What’s our version of the song? and tried to be faithful to the spirit and intention of it, but also we add something to it.”
That’s clear on Loose Cattle’s version of Joni Mitchell’s “River,” a song Kaye wanted to sing from the start. When Mitchell recorded the song, she sang about wanting to “leave this crazy scene,” but you knew she wouldn’t. When Kaye sings it, the outcome is less certain. Bennett Sullivan’s banjo gives the song fragility to the song, and Tom McDermott’s piano circles the thoughts in a way that Mitchell’s doesn’t. Similarly, it’s not clear if Alex Chilton is standing naked or taking the piss when he sings “Jesus Christ” on the complicated Third. When Loose Cattle replace the electric guitars with acoustic instruments, return the song to Appalachia, and adopt a less mannered vocal tone, the belief expressed in the lyrics is clear.
The desire to do Christmas music their way really proved to be a challenge when Cerveris and Kaye tried to write a Christmas song. “It seemed like a great idea until we sat down and tried to do it,” he says. “It calls into question so much more than writing a song for your next record.” He thought about Christmas songs—what made them work, and what made them memorable. The most important thing, he decided, was simplicity. “The classic songs, they’re most often describing in very everyday ways things that find the universal in the specific,” Cerveris says.
That’s what Cerveris and Kaye went for on “Shepherds in the Parking Lot” as Cerveris fired off verses that Kaye sorted through for lines that could lead to a real song. The emphasis on the simple and quotidian guided the process, even as the song began to respond to the 2016 they were going through. When they sing, “The doctors gave you pills / and now you’re numb but you’re still sick,” the lines telescope out to address Kaye’s experience and those of countless others dealing with health care in America. “The song began as a much more wide-ranging, political-is rant,” he says. “It got whittled away to the human faces of all of that in our lives specifically, but also in the lives of our friends and people we know.” They hope that they captured some of what Robert Earl Keen got in “Merry Christmas from the Family,” which also appears on Seasonal Affective Disorder. According to Cerveris, “He with great sense of humor manages to say some really complex things about issues of racism, family, alcoholism and everything else in a way that you can smile at and go This is my family even if the particulars aren’t the same.”
Those basic human connections are at the heart of the Christmas celebration and Seasonal Affective Disorder, and they’re baked into the album’s origins. Kaye started to go into organ failure during the Christmas season last year, and she needed to flown from New Orleans to Cleveland for expensive treatment she couldn’t afford. When Cerveris started a GoFundMe page to help with her medical bills, people around the world chipped in. She had to deal with the irony that the one who was down on Christmas was now a hospital-gowned George Bailey, but that help came with an unexpected component. Many of those who donated found Kaye’s email address and Facebook and Instagram pages and wrote her. They felt connected to her through their donation and wanted to see how she was doing, but they wanted more.
“As this Christmas miracle was happening, all these strangers started telling me in their emails and messages how much they were going through that holiday also, and why it was important for them to reach out and help this girl they didn’t know,” she says. Kaye was too sick to read, much less deal with the messages at the time, but when she read them in the spring, “it really left a mark about how difficult this time of year can be for people: I’m making a donation to a good cause. I’m wrapping a present. I’m keeping a smile on my face. It’s 2 a.m. and I’m writing a stranger who I just $50 to my life story because if I don’t tell somebody how hard this is, I’m going to explode.”
“We wanted to make a record for those people as well as those who just love Christmas,” Cerveris says.
GAMBIT Magazine
Loose Cattle release an offbeat Christmas album
December 11, 2017
by WILL COVIELLO
A glance at the track list on Loose Cattle's December release Seasonal Affective Disorder offers a tipoff to the project's concept. There are covers of Tom Waits' "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" and John Denver's "Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas)."
But there aren't just covers of offbeat Christmas wishes and less rosy holiday traditions. Bandleader Michael Cerveris also co-wrote a tune with the Lost Bayou Ramblers: "Don't Make Your Mama Cry on Christmas Day."
Cerveris and Loose Cattle vocalist Kimberly Kaye had just formed the country and Americana band in 2011 when they recorded their first holiday song, a cover of Big Star's "Jesus Christ."
"(The recording session) was just meant to be a hang with the band," Cerveris says.
They wanted to record a song and post it on the internet in one day. "Jesus Christ" split the difference in their feelings about the project.
"I am not a huge Christmas fan," Kaye says. "But I am not a Grinch who wants to rain on other people's Christmases. (We) picked a less than Christmassy Christmas song."
Loose Cattle's tone on the song gives it a workable ambiguity.
"For (Kaye), it's a rock song," Cerveris says. "But you could play it in a Baptist church. We are a pretty inclusive bunch. We like that you could have two people standing in the audience with one person thinking it's an ironic masterpiece and the other person thinking it's a Christian tune. We like the idea those people would be at a bar together at our show."
Cerveris and Kaye split time between homes in New York and New Orleans, and at their album-release party at Chickie Wah Wah Dec. 19, they'll have plenty of guests who worked on the album, including the Lost Bayou Ramblers, pianist Tom McDermott, a horn section led by Craig Klein, fiddler Rurik Nunan of The Whiskey Gentry, vocalist John Boutte and others. Loose Cattle bassist Lorenzo Wolff and percussionist Eddy Zweiback also will be in New Orleans for the show.
Cerveris is best known for his work on the Broadway stage, having won Tony Awards for best actor as John Wilkes Booth in Assassins and Bruce Bechdel in Fun Home. He also has played guitar for a long time, and in the early 1990s, he toured with Bob Mould and punk and alternative rock band Husker Du. Cerveris recently starred in recurring roles on TV's The Tick and Gotham.
Though she sings for Loose Cattle, Kaye played trumpet for 15 years and says her musical roots are in soul and blues. Loose Cattle is more of a country band with folk and Americana strains. Cerveris and Kaye co-wrote "Shepherds in a Parking Lot," and there's a honky-tonk vibe on much of the album. There also are some songs with New Orleans-style horn parts. The album includes "The Day It Snows on Christmas," recorded by Allen Toussaint.
Seasonal Affective Disorder also has songs written by Willie Nelson ("Pretty Paper") and Merle Haggard ("If We Make It Through December"). There's a nod to more contemporary country and offbeat holiday tunes in a cover of Texan Robert Earl Keen's "Merry Christmas From the Family."
For anyone interested in another round of naughty and nice Christmas tunes, Cerveris and Kaye join comedian Harry Shearer and singer Judith Owen Dec. 22 at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre for an installment of their annual benefit show, Christmas Without Tears.
New Orleans Advocate
Loose Cattle: home in New Orleans
December 13, 2017
by KEITH SPERA
Michael Cerveris knows firsthand that a successful acting career is a mixed blessing when it comes to launching a secondary music career. A Tony Award-winning Broadway, television and film actor who lives in Treme when not working in New York City or elsewhere, Cerveris also fronts the country/Americana band Loose Cattle with vocalist Kimberly Kaye.
His extensive acting resume — ranging from the title character of the 2005 “Sweeney Todd” Broadway revival to recurring roles in the TV series “Gotham," “Fringe,” "The Good Wife" and "Treme" — gave his band a measure of immediate notoriety. One of Loose Cattle’s first gigs was at Lincoln Center for the prestigious American Songbook series.
Promotional benefits aside, his day job also “brings along as many prejudices — and sometimes well-warranted ones,” he said during a recent phone interview from New York. “Every time I hear about some actor who’s got a music project, my first thought is, ‘No.’
“And the kinds of things that people know me for in acting doesn’t necessarily make them fans of the kind of music that we do.”
Or as Kaye put it: “‘Sweeney Todd sings country!’ is a rough sell in a social media, pull-quote kind of world.”
But Cerveris has been a musician as long as he’s been an actor. He toured as a member of Husker Du frontman Bob Mould’s solo band and has led Loose Cattle for six years.
The band’s latest release is a decidedly nontraditional Christmas album, “Seasonal Affective Disorder.” Cerveris, Kaye, their bandmates and special guests trot out songs, mostly from the country canon, that explore the flip side of the merry holiday season, including Robert Earl Keen’s “Merry Christmas From the Family,” Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December,” Willie Nelson’s “Pretty Paper” and Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis.”
Loose Cattle will celebrate “Seasonal Affective Disorder” on Tuesday, Dec. 19, at Chickie Wah Wah, starting at 8 p.m. The band’s New York-based core will be augmented by local pianist Tom McDermott, Paul Sanchez, John Boutte, trombonist Craig Klein, and members of contemporary Cajun band the Lost Bayou Ramblers.
“It’ll be a pretty big posse in Chickie Wah Wah’s living room,” Kaye said. “Even though we’ve failed to be a living room band, we’ve definitely kept the living room band feel.”
Cerveris grew up in West Virginia and majored in theater studies at Yale. He earned his first Tony nomination in 1993 as the title character in the Broadway production of “The Who’s Tommy.” He won his first Tony as John Wilkes Booth in the 2004 revival of Stephen Sondheim's “Assassins.” He scored his second, for best leading actor in a musical, in 2015 for “Fun Home”; he punctuated his acceptance speech with "Who Dat!"
Kaye first met Cerveris as a reporter covering the New York theater scene; they ended up dating. He encouraged her to start singing, a pastime that came in handy as their romantic relationship deteriorated.
“We were at a place where we were looking for things to do that weren’t arguing with each other,” he said. “Singing kept our voices busy in a more positive way.”
His appreciation for rootsy music rubbed off on Kaye.
“I thought I hated Americana and country music,” she said. “I was a Jersey punk girl from Freehold, where you come up with metal and arena rock and punk and ska. My relationship to folkier music came with other people’s prejudices on it.”
They formed Loose Cattle intending to play informal shows in living rooms. It quickly evolved into something more.
So did Cerveris’ flirtation with New Orleans. He didn’t really discover the city until the 2007 shoot for the movie “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant.” To the soundtrack of community radio station WWOZ-FM, he “fell deeply in love” with New Orleans. “I felt very connected, and devoured it the way only the converted can.”
He brought Kaye down for her first visit in 2009. She was initially reluctant to embrace “this place where my boyfriend kept disappearing to. I felt like New Orleans was the other woman. I didn’t know if I was ready to meet her.”
She wound up returning 10 times over the next 13 months and now calls New Orleans home. She and her husband, Ray, got married at Kajun's Pub on St. Claude Avenue. “I get it now,” she said. “I totally drank the Kool-Aid.”
New Orleans proved to be fertile creative ground. Cerveris and Kaye worked with Paul Sanchez to develop his songs into “Nine Lives,” a musical based on the post-Katrina struggles and triumphs of a cross-section of local characters. Sanchez in turn introduced them to the local music community.
“We owe our individual and collective connections to the music of New Orleans to Paul,” Cerveris said.
“Seasonal Affective Disorder” initially took shape when Kaye wasn’t in any condition to contribute. She spent much of 2016 in hospitals battling a litany of chronic, debilitating ailments, including Crohn’s disease, interstitial cystitis, shingles, a drug-resistant kidney infection and ruptured ovarian cysts. Thus, she mostly left the song selection to Cerveris, thinking the record would never get made: “I thought, ‘This is his way of helping me focus on something that’s not the hospital.'"
His selections “kindly and generously took into account” her state of mind and body. Thus, holiday songs about “joy and kids and all the food you eat — I don’t eat solid food any more — had been carefully and lovingly weaned out.”
Instead, the songs had “a slightly more bent, or humanist, approach to the holidays,” Kaye said. “I needed that.”
By contrast, Cerveris is a huge fan of Christmas tradition. He hoped to “marry that with a not entirely bleak, but clear-eyed, look at the way the holidays are for all of us. Even if we’re having a good time, they’re still hard. If there was a sense of humor in the telling, even better.”
He asked the Lost Bayou Ramblers to help find a suitable holiday song from the Cajun canon. Instead, the Ramblers wrote the fiddle- and accordion-laced “Don’t Make Your Mama Cry on Christmas Day” with him.
Kaye did suggest one song, Joni Mitchell’s “River.” The album concludes with Alex Chilton’s “Jesus Christ,” a subtle nod to New Orleans, where Chilton lived the last years of his life.
Cerveris hopes new fans continue to discover Loose Cattle regardless of his acting resume.
“When people take a chance and come, they realize there’s a reason why we like this kind of music. There’s storytelling and characters and real narrative stuff going on. When I can get people in the room, they’re really glad to be there.”
OFFBEAT MAGAZINE
Seasonal Affective Disorder: A Louisiana Christmas With Loose Cattle
November 21, 2017
by: JOHN SWENSON
Rod Hodges walked into the Music Shed in mid-August to cut tracks for Loose Cattle’s Christmas album, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and a muggy New Orleans summer day suddenly transformed into something completely different.
“It was kinda weird,” said the Iguanas guitarist. “I had just gotten back from California and it was all dark in the studio. I plug in and suddenly I’m playing on ‘The Day It Snows On Christmas.’ It was… psychedelic.”
Hodges was one of several New Orleans musicians that Michael Cerveris and Kimberly Kaye, co-leaders of Loose Cattle, recruited to put the finishing touches on what is certainly one of the most idiosyncratic holiday records in recent memory.
At first glance Cerveris and Kaye, along with bassist Lorenzo Wolff and drummer Eddy Zweiback, appear to have concocted a slightly left-of-center country Christmas record, but a closer listen reveals more eccentric moves. Like covering Tom Waits and Robert Earl Keen along with BR549, Willie Nelson and George Strait, then adding Joni Mitchell and Big Star to the mix. Then putting together a medley of the pop music staple “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” with Charles Brown’s R&B classic “Please Come Home For Christmas.” Adding some Louisiana flavor with an original Cajun Christmas song, “Don’t Make Your Mama Cry On Christmas Day,” written by Andre and Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers and Cerveris. Then with a tough minded Cerveris/Kaye political carol, “Shepherds In a Parking Lot.”
Cerveris is known to New Orleanians for his work with Paul Sanchez in Nine Lives and to a larger audience for, among other things, a scintillating Broadway career that started out with the lead role in Tommy, evolved through two Tony awards, most recently Fun Home, and now has him playing Professor Pyg in the Gotham TV series. Kaye sings with Sanchez and in the hard rock band The Night Confession. She wrote and performed in the macabre and hilarious A Christmassacre Story in 2014. The two have been fronting Loose Cattle as an alternative “Johnny and June” act since 2011, but on this record they’re forging a new identity.
“My voice has more characters in these songs,” said Cerveris. “There are some songs like ‘Truck Stop Christmas’ where I leaned on the accents that I grew up with in West Virginia, but on ‘Please Come Home for Christmas’ I’m just trying to use my vocal instrument to put the song across. We’ve taken to calling it Americana because nobody knows what that is so you can put it under that banner.”
Cerveris and Kaye’s thoughts about Christmas are starkly different, which adds some frisson to the mix. “Shepherds in the Parking Lot” captures this perfectly.
There’s no wise men on the TV
No light in the east
No shepherds in this parking lot
Only fallen angels tryin’ to live in peace
Sometimes
It’s hard to sing
A Christmas song
“Michael loves ritual and he loves traditions,” said Kaye. “Michael and I have a very different relationship with the holidays. I hate Christmas. I’ve had a lot of death in the family, heartache; it’s a tough time of year for me. Michael loves it. He loves putting on Christmas specials, going to events, decorating the tree. I’m in shutdown mode. For us to be able to meld his enthusiasm for the holidays with the acknowledgement that it’s a tough time for some people was great and I love writing songs with him.”
Maybe you can be the wise one
Bringing love where there’s a need
For shepherds in a parking lot
Maybe fallen angels don’t have to quite believe
And sometimes
We can sing
This Christmas song
“Writing a Christmas song is a unique thing,” said Cerveris. “I wanted to include modern elements. There were a lot of drafts, but the early drafts were too political. It made the song smaller. So we did a lot of back and forth. It’s kind of like writing a Christmas card to the world.”
The album features two collaborations between Kaye and pianist Tom McDermott. “Tom’s work with Kim has been really important to the band,” said Cerveris. McDermott does a superb job accompanying Kaye on Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.” But the real payday comes on the unlikely inclusion of Joni Mitchell’s nearly untouchable “River.”
“There’s no outsinging Joni Mitchell on that song,” said Kaye. “It means so much to so many people. I was terrified to sing it. The thing I love about that song is how clear her storytelling is. It’s a beautiful piece of narrative that just happens to be a song. Working with Tom on playing that song, he has some Cuban-influenced stuff that he does with his left hand on the piano, then we added that kind of wistful banjo. We tried to present it where we’re telling this story. Tom is a huge part of that storytelling, with little echoes and phrasing. He makes snow happen with his right hand at the end of the song. It’s just perfect.”
“The songs we chose say a lot about us,” said Cerveris. “Really great songwriting says something really specific and leaves plenty of space for you to fill in the rest. As a band we tend to like to have something to say.”
A Very Loose Cattle Christmas will take place December 19 at Chickie Wah Wah, with Rod Hodges, Tom McDermott, Craig Klein and other guests. Cerveris and Kaye will also be part of Judith Owens and Harry Shearer’s Christmas Without Tears December 22 and December 23 at Le Petit Theatre.
No Depression MAGAZINE
Shepherds in the Parking Lot and a Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis
BY HENRY CARRIGAN
NOVEMBER 13, 2017
Song Premiere
Ah, it’s the time of year when images of smiling, jolly elves, compliant reindeer, sparkling lights and glittering bells, and flames leaping from crackling logs in the fireplace decorate our neighbors’ homes and store shelves. As one oft-sung Christmas song tells us “it’s the hap, hap, happiest time of the year.” In our heart of hearts, though, we know Lucy had it exactly right in her words from A Charlie Brown Christmas: “we all know Christmas is run by a big syndicate out East.” For those caught up in the wiles of the commercial glitter of the holidays, spending and getting apparently brings joy and wards off the darkness of the season. But if we look carefully look just past the branches of those trees crowding each other in the Christmas tree lots, we’re bound to see those for whom the holidays aren’t so joyous and filled with light: here’s the prostitute spending the holidays in jail; the truck driver whose holiday family are others in the truck stop; the child who pleads for its daddy not to get drunk on Christmas.
Michael Cerveris (two-time Tony Award winner and star of TV's The Tick and Gotham) and Kimberly Kaye and their band Loose Cattle remind us of this darker side of the holidays in the appropriately titled album Seasonal Affective Disorder. Their version of the Tom Waits’ holiday classic “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” is a sparse blues number made more somber by the mournful violin weaving under and around a similarly sorrowful piano and Kaye’s languorous vocals.
According to Ceveris, “This song might not be everybody's idea of a holiday classic, but in the Loose Cattle world, it just isn't Christmas without Tom Waits. Or maybe hookers. So having both in one song made it a shoo-in for the record. Even though it only has the word Christmas in the title, the whole mix of heart-on-your-sleeve sentimentality, combined with bleak reality, fits the tone of our record perfectly. Kim and I love singing harmony together, but I asked her to sing this one herself, so it would come more directly from a woman's perspective. Also, we all love every chance we get just to play and listen to her sing. Then we asked our friend Tom McDermott who is one of New Orleans' most celebrated and beloved piano players (and that's saying a lot in that city) to accompany her. He came up with the idea of making it a swaying gospel march, and the two of them recorded it live in the studio together in just a few takes. We added Justin's fiddle to help it sit in with the other songs on the record and once we heard that back, it didn't seem to need anything else. Well, just some sleigh bells at the beginning and end. Cause, you know...Christmas”
New York Post
November 3, 2017
photo by Jacob Blickenstaff
by Jane Ridley
Like a lot of people, Brooklyn-based actor Michael Cerveris, the two-time Tony Award winner currently starring in Amazon’s “The Tick” and Fox’s “Gotham,” does not always look forward to the holidays.
His band, Loose Cattle, has just released an album for the darker side of winter. It’s titled “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” after the depressive condition believed to afflict more than three million in the US.
“I grew up loving Christmas,” says Cerveris in a press release. “And I still love it, but I recognize that a lot of my holidays are kinda more like Charlie Brown’s Christmas than ‘The Waltons.’”
As his bandmate Kimberley Kaye elaborates: “You’re told you’re supposed to be having this fantastic time, but if you aren’t, that makes you feel even worse.
“People struggle alone, but as a band, we’ve learned that connecting with other people who feel the same way makes getting through those hard times a whole lot easier.”
The mostly country-inspired track list includes both originals and covers, such as John Denver’s “Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)” and the band’s own “Shepherds in a Parking Lot,” about banding together to survive the holiday season.
The record is released on Dec. 1 and the band will play the Sheen Center in Manhattan on Dec. 11.
FORBES Magazine
by Jane Levere
December 22, 2017
A totally different perspective on the holiday season can be found in Seasonal Affective Disorder, a new album from Loose Cattle, a Brooklyn-based band formed in 2011 by Tony Award-winner Michael Cerveris and Kimberly Kaye. It shines a light on the darker side of Christmas, combining humor, honesty and tongue-in-cheek twang in 15 Americana songs.
Recorded in Brooklyn and New Orleans, the album takes most of its influence from the American South, featuring country harmony, honky-tonk fiddle and pedal steel guitar in original songs and covers. The band turns John Denver's "Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas)" into a rootsy, roadhouse-worthy holiday tune, and also performs "Shepherds in a Parking Lot," an original tune about banding together to survive the holiday chaos.
"I grew up loving Christmas," admitted Cerveris, a West Virginia native currently appearing in Amazon’s The Tickand Fox’s Gotham--“and I still love it, but I recognize that a lot of my holidays are kinda more like Charlie Brown’s Christmas than the Waltons’.'" Added Kaye, ”You're told you're supposed to be having this fantastic time, but if you aren't, that makes you feel even worse. People struggle alone, but as a band, we've learned that connecting with other people who feel the same way makes getting through those hard times a whole lot easier."