As much as music can bring people together, equally as potent is the shared absence of a cultural history, a communal gap in the timeline of a life unlived or language unexplored. For Alexis Marceau and Sam Craft, lead performers for the soulful Louisiana French pop-rock band Sweet Crude, collaboration came pre-packaged in common cause, not only in their artistic sensibilities to craft “pop, fun, rock and roll” songs, but also a musical odyssey into the long lost reaches of a recently reclaimed heritage that marries language and memory into a sound worth dancing too.
“Regardless of whether or not people from here speak French, there’s so much pride around it, it’s ubiquitous. It’s omnipresent,” said Craft. “One of the things we sought out to do, and we’re happy when it succeeds, is to have folks come up and say that their family spoke French and lost it. You might not understand the lyrics of a song, but somehow there’s a yearning that is reawakened in people.”
As Greater New Orleans natives, Marceau from St. Bernard and Craft from New Orleans proper, the pair studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Though their paths failed to cross while at school, their ultimate creative coupling was born from as much what they shared as how they diverged; with Marceau’s powerful voice, honed in the theater, meshing symbiotically with Craft’s penchant for old school jazz and the rat-a-tat rhythm of classic ragtime. Their shared desire to marry ancestral angst with a modern sound was foundational from the earliest days of Sweet Crude’s founding, when they joined up with Sam’s brother Jack Craft, along with Skyler Stroup, Stephen MacDonald and Dave Shirley. While not every member of the band is fluent in Louisiana French, they intuitively knew that their songs had to illicit a feeling beyond literal interpretation, something native speakers and neophytes could understand and feel reverberating in their bones. Songs like the soul-shattering “Mon Esprit” exemplify the platonic ideal of that ethos, crafting a sonic Rosetta Stone whose lyrics cut like a knife and excavate feelings perhaps forgotten amid the turmoil of cultural upheaval and forced assimilation.
“Songs like ‘Mon Esprit’ are where I can lean into my theater background and really emote, using my face and body language to convey to someone who doesn’t speak French what I’m saying,” Marceau said. “That particular song is very powerful. If you translate the lyrics, it’s about a woman who needs music to live. So that’s how I perform it.”
Self-identifying as the most punctual band in New Orleans, putting “the punk in punctual” as Craft describes, Sweet Crude’s artistic North Star is to craft the perfect “four-minute pop song”, fitting guard rails around their own process that allows for vastly more innovation instead of limitation, though not always. Often, they are eager to stretch beyond even their own self-imposed boundaries, with Marceau and Craft also performing as a duo and even reimagining their songs into new and exciting shapes as the basis for an opera. Still, whatever the venue of medium, Sweet Crude prides itself on being intuitively collaborative as any six skilled musicians could be, following the muse of the audience to whatever destination they want to be metaphysically transported to.
“We always envision what could make a crowd light up and try to put those types of things on a record,” said Craft. “Everyone in the band can contribute lyrically, even if they are not fluent in the language, as long as we generally stay in our lane of songs featuring melodic hooks and being vocal-driven. By focusing on those guidelines, being disciplined, we can keep in the right direction and always hit the accelerator.”
Knowing where they came from and being sure of where they are going feels appropriate for Sweet Crude, a band with one foot in the past and another leaping into the future; a credit to the families whose culture they’ve reawakened by translating the ache of generations long lost into a song sung loud.
Must-see performances this month
May 7 | Alison Krauss And Union Station, 7:30 p.m. at The Saenger Theatre, saengernola.com.
May 8 | The Soul Rebels, 9 p.m. at Tipitina’s, tipitinas.com.
May 9 | Molly Tuttle & Maggie Rose, 8 p.m. at Tipitina’s, tipitinas.com.
May 13 | The Black Angels, 7 p.m. at House of Blues, neworleans.houseofblues.com.
May 14 | Whitney, 8 p.m. at Chickie Wah Wah, chickiewahwah.com.
