A Loosened Up Loose Cattle Play Jazz Fest Thursday

Loose Cattle (René Coman, Doug Garrison, Kimberly Kaye, Michael Cerveris, Rurik Nunan)

Living in New York City affected how Michael Cerveris and Kimberly Kaye thought about Loose Cattle. They had very clear, very defined ideas about the Americana band that will play Jazz Fest’s Sheraton New Orleans Fais Do-Do Stage on Thursday at 1:40 p.m. Cerveris had spent years thinking about his background in West Virginia and how that and his record collection would shape the band.

And, as Kaye says, if you can’t reduce your creative project to an elevator pitch, something you could fully express between floors, you lose people right away. As soon as the phrase“We’re kind of like…” was uttered, people zoned out.

That was the state of Loose Cattle before Cerveris and Kaye moved to New Orleans, which is the antithesis of that. “So many people here are doing genre-atypical projects,” Kaye says, so letting Loose Cattle morph naturally felt like the right thing to do as musicians in New Orleans. In the process, Loose Cattle fully came to life as a band.

In New York, Cerveris worked in musical theater. He is a Tony Award-winning actor, and he really planned to spend the first half of the year on Broadway in Tammy Faye, the musical based on the life of Tammy Faye Bakker with music by Elton John and The Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears.

“I had outs in my contract for important things like Jazz Fest,” he says, but he didn’t need them. Reviews weren’t kind, and the producers surprised everyone when they closed after three weeks. That meant Cerveris got to come to New Orleans, which he considers home, much earlier than expected.

“For tax and business purposes, my home is New York,” Cerveris says. “In every other way, it’s here.”

They started Loose Cattle in New York, where Kaye sang in bands, performed in the theater, and did arts journalism. They moved the project to New Orleans when they relocated here, Cerveris in 2012 and Kaye in 2015. At the time, Loose Cattle could sound more like a concept than a band, and they agree that it changed for the better when they got here. At a basic level, It helped that it was easier to perform more often in New Orleans. Before the Covid lockdown, Kaye remembers having almost limitless opportunities to play.

“You get better through more reps,” she says, and they got better when they found the current lineup, which includes fiddler Rurik Nunan and The Iguanas’ rhythm section–bass player René Coman, and drummer Doug Garrison. Getting Coman and Garrison into the band happened organically.

When they moved here, Loose Cattle had songs with guitar parts that sounded like ones that The Iguanas’ Rod Hodges might play, so they hired Hodges to play some gigs. Coman and Garrison attended one and liked what they heard enough to say that Cerveris and Kaye should call if they needed a rhythm section. That offer turned into a gig, then gigs, then before they knew it, Loose Cattle had a new bassist and drummer.

That changed the band meaningfully, Kaye says, because it affected how they wrote songs.

“It doesn’t make much sense when you’re writing things except to go to them and say, Here’s what we have for lyrics and melody. What do you think?” she says. “You don’t walk in and say, Here’s what you’re going to play.”

Cerveris saw the same thing, but his inner perfectionist couldn’t help but try once. Early on, he brought some acoustic demos to a rehearsal and told Garrison the rhythm idea he had in his head when he imagined the song. He meant the suggestion in a sharing way, but he heard Garrison’s non-committal, “Yeahhhh,” and knew they weren’t going that direction.

“He wasn’t aggressive or trying to have his way,” Cerveris says. Garrison simply had enough experience and imagination as a drummer to think of something better. “I learned to stop trying to steer it in any way,” Cerveris says of Loose Cattle’s sound. “We started to figure out who we are as a band.”

If 2024’s Somebody’s Monster, their most recent album, is any indication, they’re a band that has roots in the American underground indie rock of the ‘80s and the lyrical impulses of the classic country singers who told working class stories. Their affection for R.E.M. is clear in “Further On,” and they cover of Lady Gaga’s “Joanne” with guest Lucinda Williams, and a version of Willams’ “Crescent City” without her. “Not Over Yet” is a Stones-like rocker, while “God’s Teeth” leaves enough room for Cerveris’ ragged lead vocal to be heard and felt.

Cerveris and Kaye started to feel the change in the band in late 2019 and early 2020. Kaye noticed that they were collectively getting better at hearing each other onstage so the band moved through the songs as a single unit and not a collection of musicians with parts to play.

Kaye remembers those shows because they coincided with her finally getting a grip on the stage fright that she started experiencing in New York. She had become brutally self-critical and sometimes had to drink heavily to get onstage. Therapy helped, as did support from the band, and she appreciated musical friends Paul Sanchez and Debbie Davis, who would invite her onstage to sing to help her battle through it.

“One of the things I’ve loved about New Orleans is the tradition of opening your stage to people,” she says.

Sanchez, Davis, and other members of the New Orleans musical community helped her deal with imposter syndrome–the feeling that she’s not qualified to be on the stage, and that sooner or later the audience will discover she’s a fraud.

Everyone feels that in relation to someone she learned, and now her stage fright is down to what Kaye calls “a normal neurosis.”

She got a handle on stage fright just in time for the gigs to go away with the pandemic lockdown. Kaye and Cerveris spent much of that time writing the songs for Someone’s Monster. In a time when people listen to playlists and songs more than albums, the album as a concept feels slightly dated but Cerveris found it useful. He needs a project to make him write, and although there’s nothing conceptual about Someone’s Monster, the idea that he was writing for an album kept him in a creative space. As he saw a common thread in the songs in the ways that people hurt people, it was easier to recognize songs and ideas worth pursuing.

As someone with a substantial record collection, Cerveris has a romantic attachment to albums too. “[An album] doesn’t seem like it exists if it’s not in that physical form,” he says.

Still, they did have to think through what an album means in 2024 when it came out. They needed a perspective that wasn’t going to send them into a tailspin if they put years and money into it, only to have it sell moderately upon release—something that was a real possibility in streaming times.

Reed Watson from their label Single Lock Records helped. He explained that the lifespan of an album is very different these days, and that what might seem like a flop in the first months can find its audience over the space of years.

“An album is more like a seed that you’re planting,” Cerveris says. “You’re hoping it will grow over the course of years.”

If they toured, the merch table would be another place where they could sell albums, but it’s hard for Loose Cattle to travel. Cerveris’ schedule is unpredictable, Kaye has a day job, and Nunan, Coman and Garrison play with other artists and can’t strand them by packing up in a van to hit the road. At this point in Loose Cattle’s career, they’d also have a hard time making as much per person as they make gigging around town.

“You don’t want to go back to money, but ROI [Return on Investment] has got to be part of the conversation,” Kaye says.

“Sustainability is a new conversation. It’s not sexy. No one is turned on by an Ooooh, slow growth sustainability chat, but do you want to make music for one year or do you want to make music for 20 years?”

For now, Loose Cattle is focusing on the things it can like signs of growth. Some of that is making better music and playing gigs like Jazz Fest, but even thinking about markets beyond Louisiana is a sign of progress to Cerveris.

“We wanted so much—and still do—to be accepted and considered part of the fabric here,” he says. “I think in the beginning, I really wanted to prove my bona fides here, and my credibility as a musician here. I thought to do that, you had to focus on here.”

While they wanted to prove they belonged, Loose Cattle covered songs from all over the country, not just Louisiana music. When they stopped trying so hard, they could finally see that their relationship to New Orleans had changed. The city didn’t inspire them in a magical, abstract way anymore. They were part of its music community, and in a real, tangible way New Orleans was a part of their lives and their music.

“Until you’ve hit the point of Just live here, man, It’s like everything in life,” Kaye concludes. “You only get a thing when you no longer give a fuck about it.”