Vinyl Record - Emerald Blue - Black Vinyl

 Release Date: July 30

Side A:

1. Promised Land

2. Slow Down

3. Emerald Blue

4. Down From The Mountain

5. Plans

6. Sunrise

Side B:

7. Castle on Irish Bayou

8. Diggin' Deep Down

9. Everybody Colored Their Own Jesus

10. Southpaw

11. As Good As It Gets

All songs written by Andrew Duhon (BMI) 2022

Produced by Trina Shoemaker with Jano Rix, Andrew Duhon, Myles Weeks & Dan Walker

Recorded by Trina Shoemaker and Justin Tockett at Dockside Recording Studio, Maurice, LA and Jay Wesley at Studio in the Country, Bogalusa, LA

Mixed by Trina Shoemaker, Dauphin Street Productions, Fairhope, AL

Mastered by Eric Conn, Independent Mastering, Nashville, TN

Vocals, Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Harmonies: Andrew Duhon

Drums, Percussion, Harmonies - Jano Rix

Upright and electric bass, harmonies - Myles Weeks

Keys, Accordion - Dan Walker

Background Vocals on “Digging Deep Down” - Tif “Teddy" Lamson

Violin on track #4,  - Rurik Nunan

Photography by Hunter Holder 

Polaroid emulsion lifts by Andrew Duhon

Album design by Lindsay Anderson

Track by Track

1 Promised Land

  This song was one of three I wrote during the heaviest times of the social justice awakening, during which I went through my own awakening concerning my role as a white man of certain privilege.  I’m a believer in the “write what you know” philosophy, and for that reason, I’ve hesitated writing about discrimination that I hadn’t experienced myself.  The social justice awakening made it clear to me that my lack of experience of being discriminated against was precisely what I needed to write about.  I’m proud that the record starts with the lines, “Sometimes a forefather is a poor mother with nothing but dreams for her daughter who walks for miles and miles in the rain. I have never known that kind of pain.” 

2 Slow Down

  I’d started writing this before the pandemic.  I was in dire need of a braking mechanism, something to push against the constant motion of my own ambition and the relentless schedules that my partner and I kept.  Little did I know the pandemic would soon make the slowing down imperative, and I do think that downtime answered some questions about what I truly need professionally and personally.  I have to say it’s pretty disconcerting, though, that even as I crawl out from under the quarantine and back out on the road, I already need to hear this sentiment again like a junky back on his ambition fix.  The breakdown at the end of this song is the single most important thing to me on this record.  

3 Emerald Blue

  This song is a journal of my exploration through the Pacific Northwest over the past few years.  It’s that magnificent hue, not blue and not green but something in between that was the color of a waterscape completely foreign to a kid who grew up beside the turbulent chocolate milk of the mouth of the Mississippi.  My partner’s eyes are also blue-green. She’s the one I’d go up to visit while she worked in rural Washington state.  Our travels around the area introduced me to this song and to her and to that intangible nuance of two shades mixing together to create something new and beautiful.  

4 Down From The Mountain

  After a tour in Colorado, I borrowed a tent, and then I camped up the mountain for a week, and then I came home, and then I wondered why I did that last part: the going home part.  Walden and Thoreau were a big part of getting my wheels turning as a teenager.  I can hear that in this song.  Its still very much the vision I have for my ‘final form’ to find some land apart from my New Orleans roots. Somewhere green or maybe ‘emerald blue’, a cabin somewhere I can walk the treeline with a couple dogs.  The only thing keeping me from that is figuring out how to slow down...

5 Plans

  I lean hard toward ‘story songs’ and I’m glad to see this one as a departure from that, more of a dream in which I’m speaking to my partner about the desire to try and live in the moment and relinquishing expectations. The quip I’ve undoubtedly overused in the past few years is “happiness is reality minus expectations.” I think that’s the right way to put my own ambition in check, and to stop and smell the roses even if they don’t turn out to be roses. I think if two people can adopt that philosophy together, there’s no better way to live. 

6 Sunrise

  Without doubt, this song was a necessary attempt to answer the question “what do you have to say,” regarding the social justice awakening of 2020.  It was no longer an option for me to balk at the question for lack of experience or leave the question to those most effected.  On the contrary, to me it felt like it was up to those least afflicted to call out the injustice that has always existed broadly, but also personally, neighbor to neighbor, and my hope is that healing could come from these sorts of attempts, the sort of honesty about my own neighbor in the second verse.  A moment like that makes me glad to be a songwriter, to have that medium to speak to these pains as honestly as I can, and hope it shines on a better way forward. 

7 Castle on Irish Bayou

  There’s a pretty unique dwelling on the Irish Bayou between New Orleans and Slidell, and its right there out your passenger side window heading north from New Orleans.  You can’t miss it,  a modestly sized, two-turret castle among the fishing camps on stilts and hurricane beached old boats.  Whoever built it obviously had an imagination or a sense of humor or both.  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’.  Its for sale right now, in fact, but I’m not seriously interested.  This one’s more clever than true, the tongue and cheek relief on the record.  

Diggin Deep Down

  I spent my quarantine squirreled away in my apartment in New Orleans.  The room that was my office space full of my guitars became what I affectionately called my ‘song cave,’ a place I’d work into the night, vigorously rubbing guitars and pages together in hopes of discovering fire.  With a pandemic and difficult questions festering outside, it was easy to focus inward, diggin’ deeper into my little cave.  That time I spent digging, I think I made real progress against my self doubt, and the preciousness my ego demands to get down there to something meaningful, not turning away from the question of ‘what do I have to say’ regarding myself as well as the questions looming outside. 

Everybody Colored Their Own Jesus

   I was catholic school educated until college, where a freshmen year elective, “Religions of the World” expanded my world view to recognize just how myopic my perspective had become.  I still very much respect the community fostering ritual inherent in much of my experience, but somewhere along the line, I’d convinced myself that my ‘truth’ was the only truth.  I wrote this song about a vague memory from first grade when art and religion came together to teach an unintended lesson, likely the most useful thing I learned in Catholic school.  

Southpaw

  I’m left handed in every way except playing guitar.  Its the only thing I ‘do right’.  I’m also a sucker for the multiple entendres, (see above) and I let ‘em fly in this one to tell the story of my less than graceful handling of a certain woman’s good heart.  It was her grace that read between the lines of my ‘left handed love letters’ and eventually shot me down.  With time and age, I can only lie bleeding and feel proud of her for being quicker on the draw. 

As Good As It Gets

  This song feels like a counterbalance to the sentiments in “Slow Down” and “Plans”.  For all my very real wishes to appreciate this moment there are also very real ambitions in me, hungry for something better up ahead, specifically as a songwriter.  The moments when a stranger tells me a song of mine served their heart somehow are the most precious elements I’ve mined from out of my little song cave, and without a doubt, I want more of that.  I want it for the stranger, but I also want it for myself, and if accolades are the vehicle to make that happen, so be it.  That’s my honest ambition though I’m at peace with a lifetime subscription of ‘paying my dues’.  In this song,  I daydream beyond the barstool I’m playing on, to a place where I’m sitting next to a hero, old Mr. Prine, and I’m playing him this song.  Ambition coupled with patience feels like a mighty force, but in the end, there’s peace in knowing that there is no final landmark, no destination, the journey never ceases, and I’m glad for that. 

• If there’s a ‘Rudy’ in this batch of songs, it's this one.  Not a front runner, and lost to an old iphone recording, but when John Prine passed away, I started searching through my old cracked iphones for that song I’d written that mentioned old Mr. Prine.  I was losing hope looking through the last cracked screen, but then, there it was.