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When Susan Cowsill brings her new band and the songs from her latest album Lighthouse to Maxwell's later this month, she'll be carrying the indomitable spirit of New Orleans to the Mile Square City.
Cowsill – the youngest sibling of the Sixties pop group The Cowsills, best remembered as the real-life inspiration for TV's Partridge Family -- lost her home, priceless family heirlooms, and her brother Barry to Hurricane Katrina.
But her new album doesn't wallow in mourning and loss; rather, it's a celebration of life, and a testament to the power of music and family to heal wounds and help us move on.
"I never set out to write a 'Katrina' album," said Cowsill,in a phone conversation from her New Orleans home prior to her current tour. "That would suggest that I had some sort of plan, and I never plan anything ahead. My life is like a river, and I just follow the flow. This album represents songs I wrote over a four year period that just happened to follow Katrina, so naturally that's a theme to many of the songs. But really, these songs are just about my life and my feelings as we put our lives back together."
Lighthouse is Cowsill's second solo album, following a long career as a backup singer for the likes of Dwight Twilley, Carlene Carter, The Smithereens, and Hootie & The Blowfish. Some tracks, like "ONOLA" and "Avenue Of The Indians," specifically reference New Orleans, and others, like the evocative "Could This Be Home" and the lovely ballad "Sweet Bitter End," focus on the intense feelings of that period of her life.
In a loving tribute to her brother Barry, who stayed in New Orleans and died in the flooding that followed Katrina, she recorded his composition "River Of Love," and enlisted her brothers and sister-in-law Vicki Peterson (of the Bangles) to provide rich background harmonies. "I just had to record one of Barry's songs, he was such an amazing songwriter," Cowsill said. "I actually played one of his guitars on the track. And it was wonderful having my family sing on the track.That was a very emotional session to get through."
The album ends with the triumphant "Crescent City Sneaux" (pronounced "snow",) a 7-minute tour de force that starts off as an emotional acoustic ballad and builds into a rollicking embrace of Mardi Gras jazz with a partying "Who dat?" chorus.
It's been six years since Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, and Cowsill would just as soon move on and talk about something else; but ask her about the devastation in New Orleans and she'll tell you in no uncertain terms that it wasn't the hurricane that nearly destroyed the city. "We got through Katrina pretty good, really, when you look back on it," Cowsill recalled. "It rained hard for a few days and we had a lot of wind damage, but we survived the hurricane just fine. Then the levees broke. It wasn't Katrina, it was the Army Corps of Engineers, leaving the city unprotected. They knew those levees wouldn't hold and they didn't do their job."
Asked what would happen if another hurricane of that intensity hit the city today, and Cowsill has no comforting answers. "There's no evidence that they've fixed anything, except maybe to pile some sandbags on top of the levees," she said.
"There are some people who left, some who said they could never go through something like that again," Cowsill added. "But the rest of us, it's our city. We know where we live and we know the risks. I might stay through a Category One. If we get a Category Two hurricane or worse, I'll get my kids and my family out of there – I'll never lose another human being to a storm again – but anything else? If a hurricane wants my K-Mart furniture, it can have it. It's just stuff we bought at a store. Everything else I really cared about is already gone."
As for the upcoming tour, Cowsill is no stranger to Hoboken. She was married for a time to former Hobokenite Peter Holsapple (of the dB's,) and performed with him in the Continental Drifters throughout the Nineties, frequently stopping in the Mile Square City.
"I love coming to Hoboken and I love Maxwell's," she enthused. "There's a little boutique right across the street from the club and the same thing happens every time we come through. We play our show and I take all the money we made and go across the street and spend it on a new hat. But that's what I love about playing Maxwell's, it's not just a show, it's a whole experience. We have a lot of East Coast fans and they all come to the show early and we all have dinner together. It's like the whole room is one big family, tables and tables of people. It's always the best night of any tour. I'm coming with a new band this time (including her husband, drummer Russ Broussard) and I can't wait to show them the place."
Susan Cowsill and her band will be at Maxwell's on Thursday, October 21. Advance tickets are $10 and available through Ticketfly.com and at Tunes Records in Hoboken.
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