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What if Americana actually encompassed ALL of North America? You'd have the Franco Acadian inflections of Canada, as best exemplified by the accordion, blues and jazz, the only truly indigenous music the US has ever produced, and the lilting grace and fiery passion of the music of Mexico. You'd also have New Orleans' premiere distillers of this continental musical melange, The Iguanas..

Taking their cues from all of the above influences and then some,The Iguanas redefine the notion of Americana, crossing cultures, styles, eras...and even languages. It's as if Rue Bourbon, Muscle Shoals and Plaza M?xico were all within earshot of each other and The Iguanas were the musical conduit between them. Based out of New Orleans for the past couple of decades save for a short, Katrina imposed exile in Austin the members of the Iguanas have (collectively or individually) played or recorded with everyone from Charlie Rich, Alex Chilton, and Willie DeVille to Emmylou Harris, Allen Toussaint, and Pretty Lights.

Their two decade ride has taken them all over the map musically and geographically, yet the inescapable patina of their hometown infuses every note they play. Through eight studio albums, countless tours and Jazz Fest appearances, and a flood that did its best to take their adopted city with it, it's a testament to the band's endurance that the same four guys that started playing in the early 1990s are still together.

Joe Cabral is philosophical about the band's persistence in the face of challenges that would have felled indeed have felled lesser bands. 'First of all, this is all we know how to do; we're musicians. But more than that, he continues, 'we respect the power of the band as an entity, and each individual in the band steps up to play his part. When it's good, that's really what it's all about.'

Rod Hodges agrees. 'I don't want to get all heady and mystical about this, but it's not really an outward reward we're looking for. We all enjoy playing music, we all get along, and finding a group of people who can say that after all this time is a rare thing.'

“Dude’s a juke-joint professor emeritus”– Rolling Stone 

Kevin Gordon’s Louisiana is a strange place. It’s a place where restless teens road trip to where the highway dead-ends at the Gulf of Mexico; a place where prisoners who are in for life compete in a rodeo while the town watches; where a character can get lost in the humid afternoon and where religion may not signify hope; and where rivers, never far away, carry secrets behind levees. “One of the things I like about it and am mystified by is that what passes for normal in Louisiana would not make the grade elsewhere,” he says.
 
The kicker? All of these postcards are based on true stories. It’s a place that he’s been exploring for twenty years now, on the eve of the release of his astonishing new album ‘Tilt & Shine’ on Crowville Media. It is work that has earned him fans like noted author and Elvis Presley biographer Peter Guralnick; New West Records artist Buddy Miller; journalist, songwriter, and Country Music Hall of Fame staffer Peter Cooper; Todd Snider; head of the Americana Music Association Jed Hilly; and Lucinda Williams, with whom he dueted on the song “Down To The Well” (which was featured prominently on an Oxford American compilation).
 
Before you even hear his vivid lyrics, you start feeling the sound of that ’56 Gibson ES-125 tuned down to open D, often with the tremolo flowing like a river, and an unstoppable groove distilled from swamp blues and Sun Records. His MFA from the Iowa Poetry Writers’ Workshop allows him to capture it with a degree of precision. As the New York Times put it in its headline of a feature on Kevin, “A Musican Or A Poet? Yes to Both.”
 
Kevin sums it up, “There are so many stories in north Louisiana and it’s a place that nobody pays attention to. For me, you can feel the arc of time passing. I’m captivated by the power of strong memories—those films that run continuously in your mind, if you let ‘em.” With ‘Tilt & Shine,’ those movies translate into rock and roll poetry.