Introduction

Howard Gladstone explores the importance of place in his songwriting in this three-part blog series, writing about India (Part 1), Spain (Part 2), and New Orleans (Part 3). These are emotional maps, not travelogues songs that grow from the character and contradictions of each locale.

Rather than document his travels, Howard reflects on how each place shaped the feeling or meaning of a song. Through this series, he explores how geography inspires creativity and how travel, even brief, leaves something behind in the music.

Part 3: New Orleans Echoes

New Orleans is unlike any other American city. Rooted in a vivid blend of French, African, Spanish, and Caribbean cultures, it is a crossroads of language, cuisine, spirituality, and music. The city has survived wars, hurricanes, epidemics, and political neglect, yet remains resilient and defiantly alive. Its syncopated rhythms and sultry street corners pulse with memory, groove, and myth.  For songwriters, it’s holy ground: the birthplace of jazz, steeped in rhythm and shadow, celebration, and sorrow. Two of my songs, Prisoner of New Orleans, and Seven Years to the Day, draw on the emotional undercurrents of this complicated, musical city.

Prisoner of New Orleans

I visited New Orleans a few times to attend Jazz Fest before it became too big.  More than once I stayed in guesthouses or old mansions in the Garden District.

This song tells the story of Bobby, a man who cannot let go of his house on Magazine Street or his lost love. Bobby represents the stubborn heart of nostalgia—someone who holds on not just to memories, but to a version of the past that has faded. The house itself becomes a metaphor for emotional entrapment: its magnolia garden and Civil War pillars echo the beauty and burden of Southern history. New Orleans, in this song, is both setting and character—seductive, stubborn, and unforgettable.

There’s a big old house in New Orleans
Magnolia pink in the garden’s dappled light
Wrought iron fence and civil war pillars
Slowly crumbling, but the rust is just out of sight…

Now she’s gone and he’s left behind
There’s not a single day she doesn’t cross his mind
He’s held here 
She never will be seen
Trapped in his own house 
A prisoner of New Orleans

New Orleans doesn’t always let you leave easily. It pulls at you with memory and myth. 

Seven Years to the Day

This song was written in the long wake of Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that not only devastated New Orleans physically but also exposed deep systemic neglect.  Seven years later, Hurricane Isaac struck—on the same day. The song reflects a city still grappling with recovery, haunted by water, memory, and cycles of trauma. A strong strain of superstition and spiritualism runs through the culture here—where saints, spirits, and spells coexist with  music and mourning. It recognizes that in New Orleans, time is not linear: the past returns in waves, much like the storms themselves.

When Katrina broke the levees
There was hell to pay 
Another hurricane takes its shot 
Seven years to the day…

There ain’t no one can tell me
It’s nothing but coincidence 
In the city of Marie Laveau 
No one’s living in the present tense

The Broader Musical River

New Orleans has birthed legends: Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint, the Neville Brothers. The sound of the city is a living thing—syncopated and soulful. It lives in brass bands, second lines, gospel choirs, and aching laments like St. James Infirmary Blues, which has echoed from French Quarter bars for nearly a century. That spirit has shaped my own songwriting—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. I find myself drawn to minor-key melodies and modal harmonies, to the call-and-response phrasing of gospel, and to the storytelling cadences that jazz and blues embed in rhythm. The city’s music seems to echo through the bones of these songs.

It’s not surprising that other songwriters have been drawn to this place and its ghosts. 
Randy Newman’s Louisiana, 1927 is a deeply affecting narrative of loss and government neglect decades ago, and similar to the shocking treatment the city received post-Katrina:

Louisiana, Louisiana 
They’re trying to wash us away…

Bob Dylan’s Blind Willie McTell evokes the ghosts of slavery and American music and walks the same Crescent City streets with its reference to the St. James Hotel. 

John Hiatt’s Feels Like Rain is another favorite—a love song soaked in storm imagery that could only come from the Gulf Coast.

These songs, like mine, carry the weight of history—Civil War ghosts, hurricanes, the restless Mississippi, the Ponchartrain, that lives in the soul of New Orleans. What makes the city musically and emotionally compelling is its ability to hold contradiction: joy and mourning in the same breath, reverence and rebellion in the same note. New Orleans lingers in a songwriter’s imagination because it’s more than a city it’s a feeling. The stories rise from the pavement, and the rhythms never leave you.

This blog is the third in a series exploring the link between songwriting and place. In Part One, I reflected on India, its contradictions and meditative intensity. Part Two turned to Spain, evoking exile, memory, and the ghost of Lorca. Each of these landscapes leaves a distinct imprint on the songs they inspire. Whether you’ve wandered through the shadows of New Orleans or simply heard its echo in the music, I hope these songs deepen your sense of the places that shape us.

Enjoy the complete lyrics to these songs and many more in Timepieces: Selected Lyrics by Howard Gladstone.  For the full experience, listen to the songs on the favorite streaming service or from Howard Gladstone’s Music Store. https://howardgladstone.bandcamp.com