Sweet Crude infuses Louisiana tradition into their music

Louisiana band Sweet Crude incorporates aspects of the state’s culture into their music.

Vocalist and musician Sam Craft knows what makes Louisiana unlike anywhere else in the world. “It’s the food, the music and the language,” he says. Over the past two years, Craft’s band, Sweet Crude, has managed to take the last two components in the list and produce completely fresh music that thrusts century-old traditions into the present. The seven-piece band consistently delivers some of the most exciting shows in town featuring enough drums for a small marching band, exuberantly bellowed harmonies and lyrics that jump from English to French in a single verse. In lesser skilled hands, this beautiful concoction would fall apart disastrously, but these fresh faces pull it off with a magnetic style and humorous quality about them, which, together, feel like an injection of pure joy.

Although Sweet Crude formed less than two years ago, the members of the band have been playing together for much longer. Separate from the Sweet Crude, vocalists Sam Craft and Alexis Marceaux make up popular acoustic duo Alexis and the Samurai, and over half of Sweet Crude’s members were formerly part of art-rock band Glasgow. When Glasgow disbanded in 2012, the friends started working on building a completely new sound from the ground up.

“Alexis and I put together this concept of a bigger band that would be completely separate from Alexis and the Samurai, with some of the members from Glasgow,” says Craft, “We had been playing together and knew what everyone could do and wanted to keep that going but with more of a drum-heavy sound.” With the addition of a few more friends to the ensemble, Sweet Crude was born.

All seven members grew up surrounded by the rich traditions of Louisiana — specifically secondlines and Francophonic speech. Craft says the ensemble’s shared experiences of growing up in New Orleans have influenced their “celebratory parade music” and the bilingual nature of their sound.

“We wanted to do a sound that was very visceral, and the two most primal instruments available to us are voices and drums. We wanted to tap into the simplicity of that and the reaction people have to hearing a lot of drums and a lot of singing, like the Mardi Gras Indians.”

While this meticulous planning has the potential to yield music that translates itself as unnatural and forced, it sounds nothing but confident, original and wholly organic.

Sweet Crude performing at the Allways Lounge

The band’s ability to slide between English and French adds a crucial layer to Sweet Crude’s musical identity. Craft says this is an essential part of their music and points to the importance of preserving the French language tradition in Louisiana. “Our grandparents learned French, but our parents never really communicated with it, so now I feel it’s on the youth to preserve the tradition.” With the power to spread a language that many have forgotten in Louisiana, Sweet Crude has a rare opportunity to keep the tradition alive through their music. “Louisiana French can become viable again if you use art and education to preserve it. It’s wonderful that there are so many Cajun bands singing in Louisiana, and we wanted to do the same thing but with our original music.” The freedom to jump between two languages also gives the band “more colors to paint with” — a device that enables Sweet Crude through to generate inventive rhymes and rhythms that would be impossible with faculty of just one tongue.

The band says they are “writing like crazy and trying to add diversity to the sounds” as they work on recording their debut full-length album set for an early 2015 release (you can pick up their debut EP here). They’re also working on boosting the production value of their performances with the goal of making every show a spectacle to match the intensity of their huge sound.

Sweet Crude will unveil some of these new tricks at an epic Thanksgiving Eve performance next week at One Eyed Jack’s, their first show at the Toulouse Street club since playing a sold out show in September. “Expect prizes, presents and props as we pay homage to Thanksgiving in our own absurd way,” Craft says.

Sweet Crude plays One Eyed Jack’s on 11/26 with support from Saint Bell and Fancy Pants. Tickets are $10.