The Voodoo Sessions #6: Lucy's Walk

Music Notes

Lucy's Walk has been in existence since 2001, but this will be one of their first major performances since they took a hiatus post-Katrina. Their show at the festival marks their return as a major player in the local music scene, so you're definitely going to want to be there. It'll be worth waking up with the sun, I promise.

NOC: So you guys are opening up the Voodoo stage for the weekend? What an honor!

DARREN KENNEDY: We are excited! Tomorrow morning.

NOC: 11:00, right? Are you a morning person?

DK: Am I a morning person? No, not at all! But I will be tomorrow. I might have to have a beer at 10:30 a.m.

NOC: Voodoo Fest or Mardi Gras, I think it's allowed. So how long have the five of you been together as a band?

DK: Four of us started together about eight years ago. A couple of us grew up together, and we met through people we knew that knew each other, and it kind of fell into place where myself and our drummer - we had played guitar together for awhile growing up and he bought a set of drums. We just started fooling around, and then the bass player and singer and another guitar player joined the band.
When our singer joined us - he's a very talented songwriter in my opinion - we decided to make a run at it and make a CD. We made the CD in 2004, called The Long Way Around, and those are the songs on the website. We played through New Orleans: House of Blues, Tipitina's many times, Howlin' Wolf many times. We've played in Baton Rouge, a couple of times in Atlanta and through some of the Gulf South.
We kind of took a break after the storm. Everyone has full-time jobs, we travel a lot, have pretty busy personal and professional lives. That made it kind of challenging, but lately, over the past year, we started playing again and got this great opportunity to play at Voodoo Fest. We're looking very forward to opening it up on the stage tomorrow morning.

NOC: So this is like Lucy's Walk the second go-round?

DK: Yeah, on the CD itself we've got, I think, 12 songs, and we actually got together and wrote five new songs. So we're going to play probably seven or eight songs from the CD that we made, and then we've got five new songs.
The Voodoo opportunity kind of made it fresh for us and gave us a boost to write some new songs, and we feel really good about them. It's going to be really fun to play them; we're actually going to play them for the first time tomorrow night for anyone. We'd love to potentially make another CD and capture what we've worked on, and this will definitely propel us into playing around New Orleans again and the area.

NOC: So I was reading Facebook or MySpace or something and noticed that you seem to already have hit the New Orleans hotspots. Tipitina's, House of Blues, Howlin' Wolf, like you said. So you've already got lots of stuff checked off your list for a local band.

DK: I think initially, when we first started playing, we were playing small places like Parkway Tavern - when it was there. In fact, I think our first show ever was at Parkway Tavern where the Bulldog is now, and we played there pretty regularly. As we started getting better as a band and writing our own music, we started playing places like Tipitina's and Howlin' Wolf, and we had a pretty strong relationship with Howlin' Wolf and loved playing there, loved playing Tipitina's, but I think initially we just wanted to play House of Blues as far as New Orleans goes.
Then we kind of set our sights on playing a major festival in New Orleans. So this is the next step in getting to our next level of where we wanted to be. Kicking off Voodoo Fest is going to be something that makes us feel like we've progressed more as a band. We'd like to take that and set our sights one day on maybe playing Voodoo again or playing Jazz Fest and just continuing to play more in New Orleans and write more songs and play more originals.

NOC: So this is a great stepping stone for Lucy's Walk to get to the next stage of the band.

DK: It feels great. It feels great to be part of such a great festival like Voodoo and, of course, in an amazing city like New Orleans. It's going to be a great experience to kick it off tomorrow.

NOC: Are y'all all from here?

DK: We are all from here. At some point, one of the challenges we've had was when we weren't all living here through the years we played as a band. Our singer actually lived in New York for many years, and he would fly in to play shows. There were many times when he would get here that night and go straight there, and we were wondering if he was going to make it on time.

NOC: Thank goodness his flights didn't get delayed!

DK: Yeah, exactly, it never happened. Thank goodness we didn't have any of those problems. But then he had a chance to move back here and that was when we got serious, made the CD and started playing a lot of shows around New Orleans.

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