About Andrew Duhon

Emerald blue. There’s something soothing and sustaining about the words, the way they evoke the lushness of nature: the depths of calm water, a leafy and oxygen-rich forest, the expansive sky above, unpolluted air to breathe. Singer-songwriter Andrew Duhon chose them for the title of his fourth album, eleven songs he wrote and recorded during the turbulence, uncertainty, and confinement of 2020 and 2021 in part because of those poetic properties. Under COVID quarantine, amid political turmoil, they represented places he’d found beauty, solace and possibilities in recent years: The blue-green land and waterscapes of the Pacific Northwest, and the eyes of the woman he followed there from his native New Orleans. “It was a revelation to a muddy Mississippi dweller,” he said. Duhon first picked up the guitar as a teenaged Catholic schoolkid, playing praise and worship music for the campus ministry. That was a secondary pursuit for a while – his priority was serving as his high school baseball team’s first-string southpaw pitcher – until a torn rotator cuff took him off the field and opened up a lot more free time for him to hone his musical chops. He devoured old music that packed an emotional punch and told a story, like the warm melancholy of Delta bluesmen Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt, the vivid detail and narrative artistry of John Prine and Jim Croce, and of course, the skill of master New Orleanian songwriters and bandleaders like Allen Toussaint and Dave Bartholomew. Brass bands, trad jazz and funk all loom large in the image of New Orleans music, of course, but Duhon’s city also has a storied history of producing or nourishing folkies, acoustic blues pickers and guitar-slinging storytellers, too. In college, he followed in the footsteps of artists like Snooks Eaglin, Jimmy Buffett and Jerry Jeff Walker and moved to the edge of the French Quarter, where he plied his craft at open mic nights and worked as a janitor in a former convent house in exchange for his room and board.

The open mics led to his first weekly paid gig, at a downtown New Orleans bar whose owner wanted to invest in putting his songs on tape. The two did some research and wrote, out of the blue, to Trina Shoemaker, a Gulf Coast producer and engineer Duhon admired for her work with artists like Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris. That partnership led to three albums together, and the second of those, 2013’s The Moorings, brought Shoemaker her second Grammy nomination for best engineered album, non-classical. (She’d made history in 1998 as the first woman to win that honor.) The 11 tracks on Emerald Blue were recorded with Shoemaker at Dockside Studios in Maurice, Louisiana, deep in Cajun country, a storied retreat on the edge of the Vermilion Bayou whose alumni include Dr. John, B.B. King and Arcade Fire.

The songs he brought to that Dockside session in November 2021 were all written during the early height of the pandemic in 2020, many released in early versions YouTube performances via what he called the Quarantine Song Series. During that time, of course, he couldn’t tour, play regular gigs or put on the innovative, whimsical events he’d come up with in recent years, like BreakFest – a mini-festival in the brunch time hours during New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Festival – or “A Needle Falls in the Forest,” a listening party for his 2018 album False River, at which fans gathered under a chandelier hanging from an oak tree in the woods to hear the first spin. But the months he spent mostly cloistered in his New Orleans apartment turned out, luckily, to only be restrictive physically. In fact, it was wildly rich and generative creatively, and in the end he had more than 40 new songs to choose from for Emerald Blue, his most deeply thoughtful project to date.

The tracks on Emerald Blue show serious time spent in listening mode - both to himself, and to the world around him. From the rich Americana twang and propulsive, clacking percussion of “Promised Land” to the vintage rhythm-and-blues grooves of “Digging Deep Down,” Andrew Duhon meditates on what it means to be present and true, whether that’s to yourself and your ambition (“Down From The Mountain, “As Good As It Gets”) to a lover (“Southpaw” and “Plans”) or to a wider world whose fraught and violent track record demands meaningful acknowledgement, reckoning and change. The closer, “Everybody Colored Their Own Jesus,” is an appreciation of some basic wisdom from his church-school days: that faith, respect and love are boundless and have no particular colors, traits or rules. These are songs that come from a very particular time and place, when so many of us – often alone with our flaws and feelings, with few of our regular, dependable distractions - were forced to face hard truths. And yet, using the time-tested language of folk, of the blues, storytelling and soul-searching, voice and keys and strings, Andrew Duhon proves himself worthy of heroes like John Prine – who makes a fantasy cameo in “As Good As It Gets” – by similarly crafting four-minute worlds in song, that feel purely timeless, as old or as young as the chronic condition of stumbling across Earth with a human heart. That’s true as well of less weighty songs, like the ambling, satisfied title track – or the slide- blues love-song romp, “Castle on Irish Bayou,” an ode to a delightfully weird piece of architecture that’ll be warmly familiar to anyone who ever drove East toward the deep blue expanse of Lake Pontchartrain on Interstate 10 out of New Orleans. Emerald Blue shows us the vast worlds that can be discovered and traveled when we sit still, and the breathtaking vistas on view when we look within – or at the people right beside us.

Bio by - Alison Fensterstock