Ingrid Lucia has spent a lot of late nights listen to trains go by from her Gentilly-area window. “We have all kinds of sounds in this city—the calliope on the river, the music. But for some reason, in the middle of my life I get inspired by trains.” The sound spoke to her of freedom and wanderlust—the latter the title of her new album, and the theme of her life over the past few years.
The road to this particular album was a tough one, and last year at this time her life was as bad as it had ever been. A high-profile tour with the Squirrel Nut Zippers had fallen apart spectacularly; a drinking problem was getting way out of hand; she was living from house to house after five evictions in a year; and even the hometown gigs were drying up. The first very traumatic eviction was from her home of 13 years that she had helped to pay for, and not having the proper paperwork (her in-laws were co-signers on the loan) caused her to be tumbling broke in the five years of escalating rents post-Katrina.
At one of her lowest moments she reached out to a friend. “I called up a guy in New York, someone I call my best gay fairy god brother. I told him the truth, which is that I don’t believe in suicide, but I was close as I’ve ever been. And what he said to me was one word: ‘Surrender’.”
Right on cue, she hung up the phone and then heard a knock on her door. And then…
And then nothing, because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and that wasn’t quite the road that she wanted to go down. But the phone call was still her watershed moment, the flash of light that led to her going through rehab in Nashville, to mending fences with her estranged daughter, to finding a healthy relationship and picking up pieces in New Orleans. And ultimately to her new album Wanderlust, which plays like the renewal statement that it is.
Ingrid Lucia. Photo by Kristin Fouquet.
It’s also the latest step in a musical trip that’s lasted most of her life. The story of her father, William David “Poppa Neutrino” Pearlman could fill a book in itself (and it has: Alex Wilkinson’s The Happiest Man in the World came out in 2007). Suffice to say he was a bohemian artist and adventurer who flourished outside the bounds of conventional society. Performing was one of many skills he passed on to his kids; the Flying Neutrinos began when a teenaged Ingrid and Todd Lodegan—not a blood relative but a part of the extended family—began entertaining on the streets in town.
By the time they first recorded in 1994, the Flying Neutrinos actually did fit into the mainstream—or at least the part of it that was getting into the retro-hip swing trend. By now Lucia was already well-honed as a singer and a charismatic performer, even if too many writers were comparing her to Billie Holiday (an artist she hadn’t listened to much beforehand, and largely stopped listening to afterward). But “Mr. Zoot Suit” (originally on their second album, The Hotel Child) became an underground hit, causing the group to be embraced by the same hipsters who were into Brian Setzer and the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The jazz community at home was behind them too, with Doc Cheatham among the guests on their discs.
The group ended around 2000, and Ingrid Lucia branched out as a solo artist. Her covers reached further outside the swing mold (for a time “Rhinestone Cowboy” was one of her best live numbers) and she got to air the quirkier sides of her personality—including devoting one CD, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, to unconventional takes on torch songs. Her last CD, 2013’s Living the Life, was the one where she really blossomed as a songwriter. Recorded soon after Poppa Neutrino’s death, it amounted to a testament to living creatively and romantically. Her sly celebration of edgy womanhood, “You’re in for a Wild Ride,” was one of the most recent items in our 300 Songs for 300 Years book.
But even before then, life was beginning to fray. She reckons that the problems really started with Katrina: “My marriage really started to fall apart because of the stress of having to rebuild. The relationship just kept going downhill, and then my dad and my brother died back to back—that was just too hard. There was a lot of drinking, a lot of evictions, a lot of staying in peoples’ houses. It was the first time in my life that I felt I was alone and without a plan.” She made quite a few revealing posts on Facebook that caused some friends and admirers to get worried. “I never blacked out, never fell down a flight of stairs, never stole from anybody. But in retrospect, my reputation was going downhill.”
New hope was at hand in the summer of 2016, when the Squirrel Nut Zippers asked her to join as their vocalist. It seemed a perfect match since they’d been contemporaries with the Flying Neutrinos and shared some local roots. During her eight months with the band, she became their full-fledged lead singer and frontwoman—and since she joined just weeks before heading on the road, the surviving YouTube clips indicate that things were working out well. The Zippers gigs called for a more aggressive kind of energy than her usual gigs, but the clips show that it was well within her wheelhouse.
What she wasn’t used to were the demands of a high-profile rock tour, something she’d never really done before. “In some ways it was a great experience. If I ever wanted the big time, that was it. Professional across the board, an organized show, four-star all the way. They were putting money into their war chest, but the job also started to feel like a golden handcuff. I was being paid $250 per gig, with the idea that I’d be paid more down the road, but I couldn’t pay my rent with what I came home with. If you can’t handle repeating yourself you burn out, and that’s what happened to me. You get up, get into the van, make it to the show, sign autographs and sell merch for two hours after the show, then go back to the hotel for five or six hours and wake up to do it again. You come home for a few days between legs of the tour, and I would wind up staying in bed for a week—I couldn’t eat, couldn’t even move.”
Matters came to a head at the end of that year, when she had to fly out of New Orleans for a Northeast tour; this time the self-medication backfired. “The honest truth was that my father always had premonitions that I would die in a plane crash, he took out insurance whenever we flew. And that’s why I would always take a few drinks before getting on the plane—and this time I did that without really eating for the week beforehand. So I showed up totally loaded and they wouldn’t let me on the plane. I’m yelling that I have to get to the show, while they’re throwing me down on the floor and putting me in handcuffs. And I’m leaving the band in a total lurch.”
Photo by Kristin Fouquet
So instead of making the gig she wound up incarcerated in the West Bank—no phone calls allowed, and she lost the Zippers gig on the spot. “I check in and I’m still loaded, they put me in a room with double beds and all these women staring. They took my boots and my sweatshirt off. The ladies were dancing around, trying to keep their spirits up. The majority were there because their husbands had beaten them, and they’d retaliated. But I started sobering up and realizing I needed to get out or I was in trouble. And I was getting pissed off too, so I started pounding out a rhythm on the desk with my fist. This big woman comes up behind me and I think great, I finally got somebody’s attention. And she throws me into solitary confinement.” When she was sprung 30 hours later, she gave the contents of her tour bag—some jewelry, a box of Altoids, and five condoms—to an inmate who’d asked.
And the fates weren’t through messing with her yet. She’d booked a solo tour of Scotland but because she had no fixed abode at the time, arranged quickly for a place to store her belongings. “So my friend’s boyfriend’s partner offered to let me keep my stuff in his place. He charged me $125 a month and that was fine, but when I got back, he wanted three thousand to give it back.” So she let it all go; now flash forward a few months to her moving in with another friend. “And one day his next-door neighbor told me I looked familiar and I said ‘Well, I’m a singer in town.’ And he said no, he had these pictures of me that he’d gotten from somebody’s garbage.” Sure enough, it all came from the house of the deadbeat, who had been evicted once the cops realized he’d been running an S&M dungeon. “This is why we love living in New Orleans.”
She went into rehab this past February and credits a number of people for getting her there including the Grammy MusiCares foundation, the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, and musicians’ advocate and all-round gentleman Anders Osborne, who’s come out the other side of addiction issues himself. It was a particular intense rehab experience, where getting sober was accompanied by some hard thoughts about what motivated her, personally and musically.
“You turn over those boulders and see what was under them. There are really three main things I took away from rehab. One is boundaries—I never had any, never put any up and never saw them in anyone else. The second is expectations—how much you can expect from someone and what they can expect from you; that’s always been a tough one. But it all came down to the bottom line, which is that I have always felt like I was a weirdo. You come to realize that whoever put you out there in the world, put you there to be you. And that’s the hard one that we all grew up with. One question you get asked is, what are you mourning? And I realized that I hadn’t been me for five years, I was just this empty body walking around waiting for some epiphany to happen.
“One thing happened that was especially powerful. Now, performing for me was the answer to a question I always heard when I was growing up—’What are you going to do in this household and what is your offering?’ So after all these good things happened in rehab I said that they should call me if they ever wanted me to do a benefit or anything. And they said ‘No, we are doing this because we value you as a human being.’ And I was just obliterated to hear that, I broke out crying. There are many of us who lack self-esteem and performing is their way around that.”
Ingrid Lucia and pals. Photo by Kristin Fouquet.
Rehab also involved coming to terms with the darker parts of her childhood. “Running away to the circus—that’s what everybody wants when they’re a kid, right? You want to run away from the real world, and that’s what we did. But the reality is that we were home-schooled, we were always dirty, and we were always rolling away on some crazy boat. We didn’t celebrate Christmas because it was Jesus’ birthday, he didn’t think it was a time to give each other presents. My father never drank or did drugs, he planned on training his kids to be like bumblebees and survivalists; you had to be able to knock on someone’s door and say ‘I’m a sign painter, and you need a sign here.’ And he didn’t believe in paying rent, so instead of staying somewhere, we’d get back on the boat. But when you do have the money, you go crazy and take the kids to Hollywood. My dad had a desire to do great things in the world—which he did. And he wanted to raise a bunch of strong kids who could take good care of themselves, and he did that.
“But we were also a polyamorous family. That doesn’t mean it was a sex orgy every night, but there were a few ladies in the circle, and I am still close to some of them. My mom was the solid one, the money maker. The weird one is that my sister-in-law had a child with my brother, and then had a long-term affair with my dad. So really, it was a good upbringing that nobody else had. Are we glad we had it? Yes. Did we want to fit into society? Yes. But would we go back to that again? No.”
Coming back to life meant returning to work on Wanderlust, the album she’d started after the Zippers tour. Recordings were done over the past couple years with much of her regular band—Stephen James Walker on trombone, Mark Braud on trumpet, Jason Mingledorff on sax, John Fohl and Chris Adkins on guitars, Chris Severin on bass, Jermal Watson and Raymond Weber on drums. The basic tracks were laid down before Covid, but she and producer Jack Miele did a couple of masked sessions to finish overdubs during the pandemic. Walker was the arranger on the album.
In some ways it’s a typical Ingrid Lucia album, still based in jazz but taking a few sidetrips. “Hey There, Listen to Love” swings into Toussaint-style New Orleans R&B, something she should try more often. Once again, she does much of the writing, but her instincts also led her to cover two of the best-known songs she recorded, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and “Nature Boy.” Quoting the latter song’s lyrics, she says “That’s what it’s about, right? To love and be loved in return. That’s the surrender factor again; there are certain songs I would never cover because I didn’t want to blow it.”
The most personal songs are put in universal terms. “It Had to Be His Way” works well as an empowerment anthem, but she says it’s an honest account of her now-dissolved marriage. The album’s torch ballad “The Escape” concerns an extramarital affair that didn’t happen, while “You’re Not the Only One,” though framed as a love song, is about a moment of reconciliation with her now 19-year-old daughter Ava, who at that time was only eight-years-old. “She was getting bratty about something, and I said ‘Look, nobody else will ever be your mother but me.’ It came right from our talk so I offered her 20 percent of the song.” Proving she’ll go far in this business, Ava asked for 40.
And the raucous title track celebrates the possibility of jumping one of those trains for parts unknown. “There is always a fight or flight thing going on with me, my first impulse is always to run for the hills. Wanderlust to me is about pure, clean, innocent love; the song is about running away and encountering those moments. I had to dig deep for that one.”
There are still serious problems to be dealt with. Even after seven months of sobriety, there are lingering liver issues that placed her back in intensive care when an infection happened in July; things have stabilized since. But she still needs to stay on vitamins, eat healthy and wait for her liver to regenerate. “Nobody knows the future, right? And I am hoping that the universe can be really good. When I was in intensive care the chaplain came in and I said, ‘Am I dying?’ And he said, ‘No, I just came to pray with you.’ So I asked if it would be sacrilegious to ask for a miracle and he said, ‘No, God is about love’”
Otherwise though, the new life is agreeing with Ingrid Lucia. “I heard so much about how you have to white-knuckle your way through sobriety and I say bullshit. I haven’t wanted a drink and being around drinking isn’t a problem. I basically find it humorous to watch somebody get loaded in front of my face. It shows me what I must have looked like.”
Thanks to Covid, she’s only played one show since rehab—a summer backyard gig that was streamed on Facebook—and otherwise it’s been the longest break of her career. Her official comeback show will be streaming with a possible live audience at the Dew Drop in Mandeville; a date is still pending but likely early fall.
While she expects that performing sober might be scarier, she wouldn’t mind more chances to find out. “One thing you deal with in rehab is how to be intimate with someone when you’re sober. And they tell you to take your time, that there’s no urgency and you shouldn’t put pressure on yourself. Performing is the same, you can do it without having a buffer. For me it’s still a religious experience; it’s been that way all my life. When you’re with the music and the audience is with you, that’s the best high you’ve felt in your life—it’s better than alcohol and better than sex. So I really look forward to getting back to that.”
And she’ll be doing it with a new store of energy. She’s already started on a couple of projects outside her usual realm: Writing a rap song that Damion Neville might record, looking out for soundtrack and commercial gigs, and even developing a talk show. Her wandering spirit is intact, as is her faith in humanity. “I really believe everybody is good, some people just do bad things. But I have a little extra; I have a community of family, friends and musicians. I can’t think of a luckier girl in the world right now.”
Wanderlust arrives September 15 on digital platforms, with a physical copy following shortly thereafter. To stay tuned, follow Ingrid Lucia on Facebook.
The post Wanderlust, Suicide & Renewal: Ingrid Lucia is the luckiest girl in the world appeared first on OffBeat Magazine.