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Newport native Susan Cowsill made her biggest splash on the pop charts before her 10th birthday. Cowsill, of course, sang with her family band, The Cowsills, on hits including “Indian Lake,” “Hair” and “The Rain, The Park and Other Things” in the late ’60s. She was the youngest person to be on a top-10 record with “Indian Lake” in 1968, at age 9.
Today, the New Orleans resident has four records coming out in the new few months and says “life is good.”
In March of next year Cowsill, 50, will release Lighthouse, a new collection of original songs. But before the end of the year, there will be two more installments in the Covered in Vinyl series — highlights from a monthly concert series that Cowsill and her band have run at New Orleans’s Carrollton station for the past five years in which they cover an entire classic album by artists ranging from Sly Stone to Bruce Springsteen to The Mamas and the Papas to Aerosmith and more. “Pretty much every two weeks, we’re learning a new record. I can’t believe we’re still doing it; it’s insanity.”
And in between she’ll release a remastered and remixed version of Just Believe It, her first solo disc, from 2005.
“We really weren’t planning on remixing it,” Cowsill says, but her contract with the record company expired while they still had orders for the disc. So Cowsill got the tapes back from the record company and planned only to run off copies from the masters. Then she got the idea to take “one or two of the songs and changing a couple of things that had been bugging us for the last five years.” But the engineers who were in charge of that task “started playing around with it, and had a lot of fun with it, and asked whether they could go ahead and make a new mix of it.”
Just Believe It was already pretty lo-fi, a loving revival of ’60s guitar pop and rock with Cowsill’s still-luminous voice leading the way, and the new mix is “stripped-down and acoustic,” Cowsill says. She also describes Lighthouse as “not just straight-ahead pop,” with new band members on cello, violin, piano and more.
And The Cowsills have gotten back together twice — once in the ’80s and again a few years ago, in the wake of the deaths of brothers Barry, who also lived in New Orleans and disappeared after Hurricane Katrina, and Bill, who died the day before Barry’s funeral.
“I think their departure from the planet spawned a familial need to hang out with each other again,” Susan Cowsill says. “And for whatever reason, on a commercial level people are wanting to hear us again.” She makes it back to Rhode Island a few times a year, either with her band or the reunited Cowsills, “and for the occasional wedding or funeral.”
Cowsill lost most of her possessions as well as her brother in the hurricane, and says now that things in New Orleans are “going better than the last time you would have asked me.”
She says of the lagging pace of rebuilding, “There’s no excuse for it, when we can see recovery from other, similar incidents throughout our world, a lot quicker.” But at the same time, “Every month that goes by, we’re a little better. We’re different; in some aspects we’ll always be different. It’s just us Southern folk down here, doing what we do. … As far as our own community infrastructure goes, we’re doing quite well. And we’ve got a new president, so things are looking up.”
Just Believe It came out 38 years after Cowsill made her first singing appearance with her group. Seems like a long time to wait for a solo disc, but Cowsill explains by calling herself “a serial band member.” She’s played in Dwight Twilley’s band in the mid-’80s, and with The Continental Drifters and The Psycho Sisters with former Bangle Vicki Peterson and, in the former band, her then-husband, Peter Holsapple (it’s also where she met her current husband, drummer Russ Broussard).
So as for going solo, she says, “Solo, schmolo. Heading it up and being the leader wasn’t really very appealing to me, comfort zone-wise. I’ve always been a member of a pack and not an alpha anything.” She didn’t start writing songs until she was in her 30s, she says: “I needed to live it out and write it out before I had much to say.”
Of course, you can’t hide anything from our friend the Internet, so when she’s asked about some solo singles she recorded for Warner Brothers in the mid-’70s, at age 16, she cracks up.
“I made a deal with my mother where she let me quit school after the ninth grade if I’d go get work. And I did!”
She calls “Might As Well Rain Until September” “my big non-hit” and adds that she also recorded Warren Zevon’s “Mohammed’s Radio” at the urging of Jackson Browne (“I wanted a really cool song to sing so people would take me seriously as an artist!”) as well as “a couple of terrible disco songs” and the terrific (sez me) “I Think of You.” She was back with The Cowsills in a couple of years, she says.
“I had no clue what I was doing,” Cowsill says. “… I was only 16; I didn’t know what kind of solo artist I wanted to be. But it kept me out of school, which was my main objective! And that worked out really well for me at the time. Of course, I regret it all now and tell my kids that. What am I gonna say?”
Susan Cowsill plays at the Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan St., Fall River, Thursday at 8. Tickets are $18 in advance, $20 at the door; call (508) 324-1926.
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