Meters with a bigger label, Reprise Records, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records. The deal necessitated that Neville return to the group. Porter Jr later reflected: "For the band, it was a good move [for Neville to rejoin]. We’re getting ready to go to a better label, get a better budget for recording and stuff." The move from Josie to Reprise did not compromise the Meters' relationship with Sansu, as they retained Toussaint as producer and Sehon as manager. The group's first album for Reprise, Cabbage Alley was produced by Toussaint and Sehorn, and unlike their earlier albums, the band recorded it in their own sessions, "instead of on the tail end of somebody else's," as described by Cliff White of Blues & Soul. According to Let It Rock writer Pete Wingfield, Toussaint approached Cabbage Alley as a companion project to his own album Life, Love and Faith (1972), further noting that the musician hoped the release of both records through Warner labels would revive interest in soul music in New Orleans and attract a white audience to the city's musicians, as well as "putting an identifiable N.O. sound back in the charts." However, in a 1974 NME interview with Roger St. Pierre, Neville said that while Toussaint and Sehorn are credited for producing their albums, the production work was taken by the Meters themselves, adding: "Toussaint and Sehorn don't even come into the studio while we're recording but they do get involved in the final mix and so on." Composition While rooted in dance-oriented funk music with second line syncopation, Cabbage Alley sees the group explore a wider array of musical styles than on previous albums. Bob Palmer wrote that the album features several prominently reggae-style tracks, in addition to "generous helpings of the more fashionable second line and its bastard child boogaloo", while music writer John Laycock that while the Meters are known as rhythm and blues, the record's music more closely resembles the reggae of Desmond Dekker than "New Orleans stalwarts such as Fats Domino or Dr. John." The album is also slicker, jammier and funkier than the group's earlier recordings, and continues to move them away from their all-instrumental beginnings by increasing the use of Neville's vocals, with a higher total of tracks with vocals than instrumentals. The band also experimented with several then-popular studio effects, such as phasing, echo and delay. The change in direction