Funereal love songs from the fetid underbelly of New Orleans.
The Crescent City’s Happy Talk Band formed in 2000 and then reformed in Post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005. The new incarnation consists of Bailey Smith and Alex McMurray on guitars, Steve Calandra on bass, Mike Andrepont on drums, Mitch Palmer on lapsteel and banjo, and song writer Luke Allen singing and playing a twenty-five dollar nylon string acoustic guitar. Allen’s songs are a series of eulogies and apologies set to the uncompromising rhythm of a drunken Decatur Street crawl. “There there” (2007) is Happy Talk Band’s second release and Gallatin (now Piety) Street Files and Archaic Media’s (GFAM now PFAM) first. “Total Death Benefit” (2004) will be re-released by PFAM in 2008.
The Happy Talk Band's There, There is stuck between rock and a hard place.