Home is as much a place as it is a feeling passed down through generations of laughter, tragedy and song. Its vessel is people, and for Robin Barnes, “The Songbird of New Orleans,” its creation is a pure act of love and reclamation. A multi–award-winning vocalist and child of the Lower Ninth Ward, Barnes’ ache to write music was marrow deep from before she could even remember, something she equates as much to experiencing the emotional intentionality of churchgoers mid-revelation as it is the idiosyncratic need of a child to articulate a world that is larger and more grand than they can understand. In that cross-section of the purposeful and the chaotic, is where Barnes’ music finds purchase; the sense that the words she conjures have always been there and offer a metaphysical comfort as bracing as a hug from a loved one thought lost. This feeling, this “note of a memory,” is made tangibly manifest in her debut album “Louisiana Love.”
“This music is supposed to make you feel warm and at home,” Barnes said. “Being a New Orleanian, with all the things we have gone through, from disaster to disaster, people say we are resilient, but I think we are simply seeking hope and to celebrate life day after day. With my health, I’m almost the poster child of not taking any day for granted.”
It was amidst the aftermath of tragedy twice over that Robin found the inspiration for her three-year journey to craft “Louisiana Love.” The first was the decimation of her family’s treasured photos and items, which were almost entirely eradicated by the flood swells of Katrina, followed by the death of her beloved grandmother soon after. The second came as Barnes was finalizing what was supposed to be her debut album, when a diagnosis of kidney cancer forced her to face not just her own mortality but a future where her own daughters might find themselves absent not just a mother but another crucial link to the lifeblood of who they are…