Seasonal Affective Disorder

A Louisiana Christmas with Loose Cattle

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Rod Hodges walked into the Music Shed in mid-August to cut tracks for Loose Cattle’s Christmas album, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and a muggy New Orleans summer day suddenly transformed into something completely different.

“It was kinda weird,” said the Iguanas guitarist. “I had just gotten back from California and it was all dark in the studio. I plug in and suddenly I’m playing on ‘The Day It Snows On Christmas.’ It was... psychedelic.”

Hodges was one of several New Orleans musicians that Michael Cerveris and Kimberly Kaye, coleaders of Loose Cattle, recruited to put the finishing touches on what is certainly one of the most idiosyncratic holiday records in recent memory.

At first glance Cerveris and Kaye, along with bassist Lorenzo Wolff and drummer Eddy Zweiback, appear to have concocted a slightly left-of-center country Christmas record, but a closer listen reveals more eccentric moves. Like covering Tom Waits and Robert Earl Keen along with BR549, Willie Nelson and George Strait, then adding Joni Mitchell and Big Star to the mix. Then putting together a medley of the pop music staple “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” with Charles Brown’s R&B classic “Please Come Home For Christmas.” Adding some Louisiana flavor with an original Cajun Christmas song, “Don’t Make Your Mama Cry On Christmas Day,” written by Andre and Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers and Cerveris. Then with a tough minded Cerveris/Kaye political carol, “Shepherds In a Parking Lot.”

Cerveris is known to New Orleanians for his work with Paul Sanchez in Nine Lives