Toward a New New Orleans

Like so many people, the great soul singer Irma Thomas lost almost everything in the storm—her house, her cars, "everything but some beaded dresses and a few vinyl albums." But Thomas, known for such hits as "Time Is on My Side" and "Ruler of My Heart," has made her peace with loss and change. New Orleans, she says, "is far from what it was, and I don't think it'll ever be what it was. You can't bring back yesterday. A lot of people have trouble with that—even musically." Before Katrina, she wasn't singing much, and she and her husband were getting ready to sell their nightclub, the Lion's Den. "Mother Nature took care of that," Thomas says. With her club and her home gone, she was left at the age of 64 with what she'd started out with: a terrific voice and not much more.

It was plenty. Now in demand as never before, she has all the work she can handle. "I'm like an apple," she says with a chuckle. "Everybody wants a piece of me." When the storm hit, Thomas was about to go into the studio to record a new album. The record was "After the Rain," for which she would win a Grammy. Although most of the songs had been chosen before Katrina, she says, when she finally got into the studio months later, "it all took on a different flavor. All the musicians at those sessions went through the storm, so it was affecting all of us. And whatever we were feeling, it was coming out in our music. Everybody there said it was the best therapy we could have had. That's all we had left. And that's what's going to happen to the musicians who can come back. You're going to hear it in the way they play. Nothing will ever be what it was. Maybe better, maybe worse—we don't know. But it's going to be different. Very different."

New Orleans is dead. Long live New Orleans.

With Allison Samuels

© 2008