A good songwriter writes good songs. A great songwriter writes overarching poetic narratives. The songwriter as lyric poet doesn’t just turn out albums or mixes, they weave myths that touch our collective soul and seem at once personal and in synch with the human zeitgeist. Alex McMurray is such a writer, and his songs that make up Road Songs may someday be remembered as a myth of these times...

After the forced evacuation of New Orleans in 2005, some of the earliest returnees were musicians who came back after an exile that convinced them there was no place on earth that would nurture their music better than the beautiful Crescent.

The art that some of them created was great, in some cases astonishingly so, as a new era of New Orleans music emerged, fired in the Biblical crucible...