After New Orleans

I feel like I have culture shock after spending a month in New Orleans with Frogs Gone Fishin' and moving back to Colorado for the summer. That's pretty strange, I grew up in Denver and have spent so many weekends romping in the mountains where I'll locate myself this summer. Something about NOLA has just become so entwined, so complimentary to my lifestyle and profession that living other places seems strange.

I love Colorado. Right now I'm staring out the window across an alpine valley at Beaver Creek mountain. The May weather has left still-white patches of snow where the sun hasn't uncovered the greenery beneath and my favorite part about the Beav, mythic cloud cover that wafts down the valley all day like a mountain out of Mordor or something. At night the lights from houses nestled into the hills glimmer at the base of the towering mountain. The way we as humans have come to interact with nature here in Colorado is beautiful. Then again, it's easy. Save for some cold winter months, we simply lack the fire, flood, earthquake or tsunami's that make life uncertain elsewhere, New Orleans for example.

Maybe its New Orleans' embattled relationship with nature that stirs my affinity for the city, but I know I become more emotional about NOLA than just about anything in life. When the Saints won the big one early this year I reacted by tearing my shirt off, crying, and running around the house at the Super Bowl party... all in the company of other grown men. I think one of the biggest problems in describing the "soul" of the city of New Orleans is just that, talking about the "soul" of a city, its food and music and culture, all sounds so cliche to non-believers, non-knowers. New Orleans carries so many cliches that getting people to picture the town as a whole, beyond Bourbon St. and Mardi Gras, is difficult.

Its scary how accurate that new Treme show is on HBO. The show is so true to NOLA that I wonder how someone without a fair amount of experience with the Big Easy can enjoy the extended scenes of musical performance and geographically specific dialogue. As a band we know five or six musicians featured on the show personally. My alma mater, Tulane, is bashed repeatedly by John Goodman in his ranting monologues for their post-Katrina policies. Even the Times-Picayune has a column dedicated to all the subtleties of Treme originating from the names, places and faces in NOLA. New Orleans is a town as deep as it is diverse, as deep as you want to take it. If you found the oldest lady living near Audubon Park, walked in her dusty dark house, and asked her about the craziest thing she'd ever seen living in New Orleans, your jaw would melt and mind might warp listening to stories about a town that has seen its share of fire, flood, prostitution, gambling, drugs and violence, problems which never really went away. Treme is the oldest black neighborhood in America and the very center of much of the music that comes out of New Orleans today and yesterday. That places it high in the running for being the center of musical creation in America, the center of rhythmic structure that went on to be our main artistic export to the world, Jazz.

And that's right, I cried when the Saints won. I said it and I'll say it again. I cried during the newly elected mayor's inauguration speech. I almost cried during the first episode of Treme when the characters are just returning from their Katrina exile. Maybe it is because I was one of those in exile and can't fathom that type of loss after living in NOLA my whole life, but both the struggle and triumph of New Orleans turns me into an absolute emotional, weeping little girl who can't keep the waterworks turned off.

How my feelings toward NOLA and the desire to live there all translate into musical opportunity is a complex issue. We make more money in Colorado, yet have also spent vastly more time building up a fan base here. New Orleans is a much richer creative environment and the sense of community as a whole makes Colorado look like the white bread capital of the world, if you get my drift. Colorado smells fresh and clean, New Orleans smells like salt water and saltier fish and gardenias. I'm torn.

You trade nature for culture between the two places and as an artist, I have to choose culture. If I did anything else for a living, I'd probably want to live in Colorado for the rest of my life. I just saw an article yesterday about how Denver has the third best economy in the nation out of 366 metro areas surveyed by Policom (never heard of 'em but that name sure does sound official).

Both NOLA and Colorado are beautiful places to live and I'm lucky to be able to switch between the two. The culture shock goes away after a couple days. I'm gonna go take a hike...