Revinylization

In 2010, the funky-eclectic New Orleans band Galactic—known today as much for being the owners of the city's storied Tipitina's club as for their music—cut their song "Heart of Steel" with singer Irma Thomas for their album, Ya-Ka-May. The band noticed that Thomas soon included the same tune in the sets that she played with her band. In 2022, Galactic decided to revisit the Thomas connection and came up with the idea of collaborating with her on an entire album of new music.

Thomas, now 84, cut her first single, "Don't Mess with My Man," for New Orleans–based label Ron in 1959. Her biggest hit, "Wish Someone Would Care," rose to #17 on Billboard's Hot 100 in 1964. While her career went fallow for a while in the late 1960s, she's recorded steadily for labels including Rounder and (most recently) Newvelle. She won the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album, for After the Rain. She has risen to become the cherished matriarch of the golden era of New Orleans music.

"Everything we do has reference to New Orleans music and the older music that we love," Ben Ellman, saxophonist with Galactic, told me in a recent telephone conversation. "It's kind of an embedded thing within Galactic. It all comes out in the production, the horns, arrangements, tones, those sorts of things.

"So with Irma, we wanted to make a contemporary record with one foot in the future and one foot in the past. We didn't want it all to be in the past, not be a sort of throwback retro record. We wanted a collaboration, to bring Irma into our world of music."

Like a surprisingly large number of acts past and present, Galactic doesn't write their own lyrics. For that, they mostly rely on New Orleanian Sean Carey.

"We reached out to lyricists in Nashville and Los Angeles, but all the outside guys ended up submitting clichéd stuff like 'In a Swampy Moon on Gumbo Night,'" Ellman said with a chuckle. "Sean developed a relationship with Irma. He'd come to the sessions, and they'd have conversations, and he'd take pieces from them and use that for a song. She'd come back and see it and say, 'Oh that's what we talked about!'"

The resulting album, Audience with the Queen, was recorded at what Ellman calls "a leisurely pace," in New Orleans at Galactic's Number C Studio. It was produced and recorded digitally by Ellman and Galactic bassist Robert Mercurio from 2022 to 2024. It's now out on CD and vinyl, pressed at New Orleans Record Press, on the Thirty Tigers label. It also streams on all the major streaming services. It has also been released in an "exclusive color variant"—a blue-white spatter—via Galactic's Tipitina's Record Club.

A model of how to craft a listenable, modern update to a legendary performer's sound, this collaboration unfailingly plays to Thomas's interpretative gifts. Her vocals sound like she's feeling the message and melody of every tune. Amidst Galactic's muscular backing, Thomas's voice is wisely front and center of every mix.

Immediately hitting its stride with the opening fanfare, "How Glad I Am," this set jumps into Galactic's snappy, horn-inflected R&B with "Where I Belong," in which Thomas quickly personalizes the emotional tenor: "Times can be good and they can be bad/Either way I gonna make the best of the time I still have." Those conversations with Carey make an appearance in the same track via lines heavy with her biography: "I've been 'round the world on an airplane/ Stepped onstage about a million times/I was in Paris drinking champagne/ When you were in diapers and cryin'."

In the funky "Lady Liberty," where handclaps, tambourine, and horns drive the rhythm, Thomas takes on racial injustice. The highlight of the album, though, is the big, dramatic ballad, "Puppet on Your String," whose lyrics were written by Boyfriend, a young talent from New Orleans who has toured and written for hip-hop/ bounce star Big Freedia. With a hooky, descending chorus and a pace that makes it easy for Thomas to dig into, she returns with gusto to the romantic travails she's been singing about for more than six decades: "Drowning in the very depths of my being, hoping that you rescue me/On repeat, no more love, no more trust, I got nothing left to give you/Will you ever let me go?"

Galactic's Ellman and Mercurio are also the team behind the Tipitina's Record Club, which is now celebrating its fifth year in existence. The club has reissued out-of-print studio albums by Ernie K-Doe, Danny Barker, and Johnny Adams. Even better, they've uncovered, sonically improved, and released previously unknown live sets, most recorded at Tipitina's, by James Booker, Etta James, and Taj Mahal, among others. Ellman told me that upcoming projects include music by Doc Watson, The Wild Magnolias, Elizabeth Cotten, and Jessie Hill. To legally clear and release an unreleased live set by that most influential of NOLA bands, The Meters, is a grail that still eludes them.

"We have relationships with all the surviving Meters!" Ellman says with obvious frustration. "It's something that must be done right. We have a lawyer as a partner, so everything is above board. Nothing funky is going on here. But it's hard being legit!"