New Orleans band Loucey
New Orleans band Loucey has always been more about the journey than the destination, says singer-guitarist Cherie McCabe. That can easily be seen in Loucey’s first full-length album, the beat-heavy indie rock record “Participation Trophy Wife,” released earlier this year.
When Cherie, her now-husband Sam McCabe, Jeremy Phipps and Ben Lorio began making music together almost eight years ago, it was in a studio setting. Although it didn’t take long for the band to start playing live, Loucey was an outlet for the friends to play around with a mix of their influences, like ’90s guitar rock, pop and electronica.
An EP, “Tether,” followed in 2017. “We played some shows, took a break when I gave birth to our first-born, and then came back with ‘Quitter’ (a 2020 EP). That was when the pandemic hit,” Cherie McCabe says. “That was a moment that altered all of our worlds and made all of us kind of pause and reassess where we were at, what we’re doing with our lives, our careers.”
And there was a lot going on: The McCabes were focused on their young family and their jobs, Phipps was busy with the synth-pop band People Museum (and many other bands) and Lorio, a producer and audio engineer, was working at the Music Shed and running his own studio, Below Productions. But after the pandemic started, Lorio, a drummer, had time on his hands and picked up a reissue of the E-mu SP-1200, the drum machine foundational to hip-hop.
Lorio had made beats in high school and was influenced by ’90s hip-hop and trip hop bands like Massive Attack and Portishead, so he began making beats and sent them to Cherie McCabe.
“I was like, ‘I’m done with music. I don’t think I can handle this. I’m so sleep deprived. I’m in a fog,’” she says. “Ben was like, ‘But look at what I sent you.’”
“I was saying, ‘Just maybe see if you can write something, see what you can do,’” Lorio adds with a laugh. “And yeah, you started coming over and started writing.”
Lorio’s beats and McCabe’s songwriting became the foundations for “Participation Trophy Wife,” which was released in May on Strange Daisy Records. Loucey next performs live at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 5, at Siberia on a bill with alt-rock bands War Bunnies and The Bottoms.
Along with Cherie on vocals and guitar, Sam on guitar and bass, Lorio on drums and drum machine and Phipps on keys and programming, the trip-hop-meets-dream-pop album features a host of other New Orleans musicians, including Professor Shorthair providing record scratches and cuts, Sam Craft, Adam Keil and Michael Girardot.
While it wasn’t intentional, as McCabe began writing lyrics, she found herself reflecting on motherhood and being a wife. “Participation Trophy Wife” explores vulnerability as McCabe sings about the anxieties that naturally come with children and a changing life.
“There were things weighing on my mind, being in this life stage that is a bit precious and not often written about because it is precious,” McCabe says. “I don’t feel like you hear a lot of music written about first year postpartum. It’s this unique experience.”
In the months since the album was released, McCabe has heard from other women — including Lorio’s mother, he says — about the album’s themes. For McCabe, the process helped her piece together the narratives that had been bouncing around her head.
“Which is kind of the magic of making music with your friends,” she says. “It was just us, several years in the making, getting to write songs, Ben making beats, and then stepping back and piecing together this statement about existing and being both a parent and a person.”
Find Loucey at louceyloucey.bandcamp.com.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source bestofneworleans.com ’
