New releases from these Louisiana artists deal in very different ways with the genres they inhabit.

In many ways, Rainy Eyes’ Lonesome Highway is a big success. Rainy Eyes–Norwegian born Irena Eide–presents 11 songs that telescope the past and the present. As is the case in a lot of Americana songs, sentiments sound timeless and stories could have taken place last month or last century. She sings them with complete commitment, and the band of Lafayette musicians including producer Dirk Powell, Eric Adcock, and the late Chris Stafford give the songs musical authority. As a result, Lonesome Highway sounds like a love letter to Gram Parsons-era country rock.

Eide sings with disarming sincerity, which makes her most effective on the simpler ballads, where a clear, direct emotion drives the songs. “You Just Want What You Can’t Have,” for example, goes exactly where you expect it to, but she lives the feelings so the song pays off. The slight airiness in her voice similarly makes “A Little Dream” dreamy.

She works the Americana timelessness magic by relying on familiar tropes and phrases, and doing that makes the songs sound like they have been around forever. The familiar language can take the edge off of stories, though, as happens in the title track. She could be telling a story inspired by dealing with her drug-addicted father and the world around him, but the potentially harrowing situation is muted by language that was fresh when Hank Williams first employed it in the 1940s but now sounds too commonplace to deliver the impact the story merits.

Ultimately, Lonesome Highway sounds like Rainy Eyes made an album that places her credibly in the world of music she loves. She embraces its milieu, its musicality, and its values including sincerity. With it, she has an album in the mold of the music that influenced her and helped her find her own musical voice. Now that I’ve heard it though, I’m more interested in what comes next. 

Joe Adragna of The Junior League starts his new EP, Nattering Nabobs, with the couplet, “When they hang themselves with their skinny ties / don’t ask why,” and I want to hear the Rainy Eyes song with lyrics that specific. Like Eide, Adragna has a deep, respectful love for the music that inspired him–Beatlesque pop, in his case. Admittedly, he’s much farther along his musical journey than Rainy Eyes and has already written the songs with the underlying purpose to prove he belongs. Here and throughout much of his Junior League output from the last decade, Adragna records songs that could only come from him. 

He’s part of a musical circle that includes members of The Minus 5, The Fastbacks, Sloan and others, but his songs wouldn’t be mistaken any of theirs. They love the same source material and have a lot of similar influences, but they all pursue their own muses.

Adragna’s feeling the aggressive vibe that’s in the air these days, with hanging part of the “Skinny Ties” chorus, and the title track deals with the online contrarians who tear others down. “Why don’t you let them tell each other right apart,” he sings on a track that sounds like the result of listening to Zuma-era Neil Young. The title comes from Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, who in 1970 referred to critics of Nixon’s policies as the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” but little beyond the song’s origins sound explicitly political. The lines will hold up if read that way, but it’s more Adragna’s style to speak broadly. I hear it more about the choice to let those who won’t cut anybody slack battle it out. 

Both songs jangle in familiar ways so the conflict is more in the words than the sound, and that gives the EP its charge. Adragna’s a pop guy and his instincts lead him back to AM circa 1974 almost every time, and the tension between the sound of the songs and the undercurrents in the songs gives them life. It helps that “Nattering Nabobs” includes an abrasive solo that further locates it in Young’s corner of the world, but it also helps that sandwiched between those songs is the sweet, wistful tribute of “Kinda Lost.” 

The three-song Nattering Nabobs serves as a teaser for Our Broadcast Day, due out on Bandcamp on October 4. It has been three years since The Junior League last released an album of new material, it’s fun to have more to look forward to. I’m also looking forward to hear whatever comes next from Rainy Eyes, and how living through these times shows up in her songs in the future.

In 2023, we featured Rainy Eyes and The Junior League in our Jazz Fest package since both played the festival for the first time that year. Both interviews are still online with excellent portraits by Greg Miles.