“The more I love, the less I trust in money / The more I get to know the soul of my fellow man,” sings New Orleans’s prodigal Americana son Andrew Duhon in the opening song of his new album Emerald Blue, due out July 29, 2022. Empowered by a wealth of songs crafted and collected throughout the great shutdown and inspired by adventures well-beyond his home in Orleans Parish, Duhon put his poetry in motion and nailed down eleven tunes representative of his view of the world in its current state: politically, socially, and personally. “The more I travel, the more I feel that I’m a man without a country / Is there truth in the story of the promised land?” But Duhon’s deep well of influences—from John Prine and Jim Croce to his city’s greats like Dr. John and Allen Touissant and beyond—and his sense of songwriter self-awareness keep what could have been a sad recollection of his forced time-off impressively light and grooving, a skill that his Louisiana predecessors have been refining for centuries. (Andrew Duhon, 2022)
Duhon released a music video for Emerald Blue’s first single, “Castle On Irish Bayou,” a thumping, bottleneck slide guitar-carried ode to escaping Midcity living for an actual, albeit modestly-sized, castle outside of New Orleans. It is one of Emerald Blue’s lighter commentaries. Admittedly more clever than true, “Castle On Irish Bayou” is infectious enough to convince even the most discerning real estate investor to uproot and move into the majestically out of place dwelling. “As I’m getting old enough to consider graduating from living under a landlord, the real estate prices just about everywhere in town scare me to the outskirts, and get me thinking about what’d be like to be ‘king of the Irish Bayou,’” jokes Duhon, but the resulting song will surely plant the same idea in the heads of listeners worldwide. Fans can now watch the “Castle On Irish Bayou” music video and pre-order or pre-save Emerald Blue here ahead of its July 29 release.
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,” Duhon meditates on what it means to be present and true, whether to yourself and your ambition (“Down From The Mountain” and “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 meditative “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,” the album’s closer—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.
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.
Catch Andrew Duhon on tour:
7.7 – Cambridge, MA – Club Passim
7.15 – Pueblo, CO – Brues Alehouse
7.16 – Winter Park, CO – Cooper Creek Square
7.17 – Boulder, CO – Gold Hill Inn
8.10 – Port Townsend, WA – Wheeler Theater
8.11 – Seattle, WA – Tractor Tavern
8.12 – Portland, OR – Doug Fir
8.13 – Kingston, WA – Concerts in the Barn
8.14 – Nine Mile Falls, WA – Live at Andre’s
8.17 – New York, NY – Cafe Wha?
8.18 – Wayne, PA – 118 North
8.21 – Exeter, NH – The Word Barn
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Emerald Blue release date
SA Examiner 