Unum de multis: Out of one, many.
That turn of phrase is the story behind how a 2017 single, “La Valse de la Peine,” by Dougie and the Tone Drifters, led to a 10-song album, Madame Zin Zin.
While the album’s actual release date is to be determined — it’s a pandemic thing you no doubt understand — a few singles have seen the light of day on KRVS 88.7 FM, on Facebook and YouTube with two claymation music videos and one regular music video.
The waltz, ‘la Peine’ was covered by the Riley Family Band in this year’s pandemic-maligned Festivals Acadiens et Creoles
But first, let’s go back to November 2017.
At Staffland Studio in Lafayette La., as musician/owner Chris Stafford tweaked this and that on ‘la Peine’ in the control room, the musicians about in the studio.
“While Chris was at the board doing something, all of the musicians were in the other room and still had their instruments out,” said Doug Schroeder, Tone Drifters frontman, recalling what would be a transformative day. “And somebody, I think Blake (Miller), started playing ‘La Valse de la Peine” as a fucking fast two-step.”
With Blake Miller that day were Jimmy Breaux, Megan Brown Constantin, Johnny Daigle, Schroeder and his wife, Susanne Giezendanner.
“Everybody joined in. I didn’t have my instrument, but you can hear me at the end say something. Johnny Daigle recorded it on his phone, so there was that,” Schroeder said. “This is fucking incredible. This has got to get out there.”
After all that went into the single, the immediate camaraderie, the fun, and first and foremost, the musicianship, it was decided that an album should be made.
“When I wrote and recorded Valse de la Peine, it was only supposed to be a one-up thing,” said Schroeder. “The idea of making the album didn’t really happen all at once, it just sort of morphed together from a bunch of ideas.”
All you need is songs and musicians and both were available.
For starters, you can’t go wrong with Megan Brown Constantine singing and strumming guitar; Jimmy Breaux on the accordion; Amelia “Millie” Biere/vocals and fiddle; guitar, and Blake Miller playing fiddle and pedal steel. You’ve got a Grammy winner in Breaux, and two Grammy nominees in Constantin and Miller.
Also on the upcoming release, Marie-Laure Boudreau sang her song, “Bebe Tu m’Fais du Mal” (“Baby You Hurt Me”). There’s Joel Breaux, vocals on “Accidentally Well-Dressed,” and who also wrote the music for the title song; Schroeder wrote the lyrics. Phil Kaelin on contrabass, and Glenn Fields on t-fer, can be found on a song or two, as well as Jane “Scooter” Yerrow, Mark Stoltz and Doreen Buller on the haunting “Marriage des Ours,” a wedding recessional.
And there’s also the talented and competent musicians, though perhaps not as well known (yet) as the aforementioned: Johnny Daigle, contrabass, and Susanne Giezendanner and Schroeder, both on fiddle – and married, and both the backbone of the band.
“Writing the music and the lyrics sort of recharged the ego, some, but the real beauty of this project was recording it with these people,” Schroeder said. “The practices. We had everybody in our living-room and then later over at Amelia and Blake’s house.”
“I was totally awed that these people actually came and played our songs with us,” said Giezendanner. “I would never have dared (to ask). I’m glad Doug actually had the courage to just go and ask somebody. They can say, ‘no,’ that’s all that can happen.”
The couple got to know the musicians over the years at jam sessions.
“We were fans of theirs, too. We’d support their gigs,” Schroeder said.
SOME BACKGROUND
Doug Schroeder
Don’t get the idea that Schroeder and Giezendanner are a couple of rookie musicians stumbling into an album with skilled, experienced musicians.
They’re members of the Potluck Band that held down a monthly gig at NuNu’s in Arnaudville in the Before Times. The band has also played Festivals Acadiens et Créoles the past few years.
Schroeder played Eb alto sax in high school.
“But I didn’t do anything seriously, other than listen to a lot of music,” he said, adding that he bought a lot albums and CDs. “Until Katrina (Hurricane Katrina, 2005).”
Schroeder arrived in New Orleans in 2001. He was living in central Massachusetts for 20 years prior to relocating.
“I got to New Orleans two weeks after 9/11 happened,” he said, working for an architect as a project manager. “After Katrina, old friends from Virginia came down to help rebuild some houses” that he and his now ex-wife owned.
A friend who’d brought his guitar down with him, suggested Schroeder pick up an instrument to de-stress. So he picked up the fiddle.
“I took a couple of lessons from a classical violin teacher. That didn’t last long, she went on tour,” he said. “Then I took a whole bunch of lessons with Theresa Andersson.
At some point, Schroeder got interested in Cajun music at a New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
“I saw a twin-fiddle set that totally blew me away,” said Schroeder.
He then took lessons from Gina Forsyth “when she was still in New Orleans” and he’d drive to Opelousas once a week to learn from the late Hadley Castille.
“It was so far over my head at the time,” Schroeder said. “I mean, when I think about it now, it’s like Hadley must’ve just been having a good laugh.”
A string of more lessons followed, including the Dewey Balfa Cajun and Creole Heritage Week (a.k.a. Balfa Camp, a week-long cultural camp that teaches pretty much all aspects of Cajun and Creole music).
Schroeder also did a lot of listening, practicing, and playing.
“I had some good teachers along the way,” he said.
Schroeder, as did many after Katrina, eventually moved to Acadiana from New Orleans. He arrived in 2010.
“For the music,” he said.
Schroeder was familiar with the area from attending Balfa Camp the previous year, which is also where and when he met Giezendanner.
Susanne Giezendanner
Giezendanner, a native of Switzerland, comes from a musical family. She had a head start on Schroeder with the violin as her classical training began at age six. She was a member of a youth orchestra.
It would be a different world 10 years later.
“Then I played in a punk band,” said Giezendanner. “It was back in Zurich, Switzerland, when I was 16.”
The band, Draske, consisted of five female multi-instrumentalists, in their own ways, that is.
“We all played everything,” Giezendanner said. “None of us knew, like, a chord on the guitar, or anything. So we had somebody tune it so that we could just play bar chords.
“We just taught ourselves, you know,” she said. “ We had a lot of fun.”
The band played “all original songs that just happened in our practice room, which was a bunker, a bomb shelter,” said Giezendanner.
But with band life came trepidation as Draske became more popular and gigged here and there.
“It was traumatic because I have such bad performance anxiety. I never thought we would ever be on a stage,” said Giezendanner. “We actually went on tour in the Netherlands.”
There, the band opened for a popular British group at the time, The Fall.
“It was horrible,” she laughed, but not in a funny, ha-ha way. “It was the highlight of my low point.”
At some point in 1996, Giezendanner and her partner at the time arrived in New Orleans.
“I came to Louisiana for the first time and totally fell in love with the place,” she said. “I pretty much got out of the plane and came home. It was the first time in my life I think that I just felt like I was home.”
The couple returned “as often as we could,” said Giezendanner. “We tried to travel in the rest of the U.S. to see something else. “We always started the trip somewhere far away like Albuquerque, by way of Big Bend. And we always ended up in Louisiana.
“It was always such a sigh of relief to cross the border and, you know, the potholes starting, the litter everywhere, dead animals,” she continued. “The first Spanish moss I saw, I’d cry.
“I don’t know. It was everything. It was nature. It was the people. We had such a lovely time, always, just only good experiences with people while traveling,” said Giezendanner.
“And I suffered when we went back and I fantasized and I dreamed about moving here,” she said. “I knew it was impossible for pretty much everything.”
Maybe four years after her first visit, “I started doing things like finally learning to drive,” Giezendanner said. Driving a car was something she did not do in Switzerland. It was a necessary task if she were to live in Louisiana. “If you want to live here ever, you have to learn to drive.”
There was the matter of an occupation to consider, if she were to move.
“I have to learn a trade or something,” said Giezendanner. “I went to a university and learned something that pretty much didn’t do me any good here.”
Information Science was the course that involved documentation, archiving and research. It was also, she learned, “everything they don’t need here.”
Giezendanner earned a language degree in English and sought further education in the U.S., “as a possibility that I could study here,” she said. “It was almost unconsciously that I adjusted all those little puzzle pieces hoping that maybe one day…”
The process took 16 years and included a bout with cancer.
“That really put my life upside down,” said Giezendanner. “All was well, but while I had to wait, my whole inside just changed to, ‘Ok. Now you’re going to do the shit you really want to do when you’re not scared to. Just do it.
“So the first thing I did was sign up for Balfa Camp,” she said.
It was 2009 and Balfa Camp was held at Chicot State Park, just north of Ville Platte. The music immersion week moved to Lafayette for years before returning to the state park.
Upon landing in NOLA, Giezendanner was put to the test on her first solo excursion in the U.S.
“I had to rent the car and drive for the first time in my life,” she said.
Giezendanner rented some instruments, including a fiddle from Tom’s Fiddle and Bow, in Arnaudville, and her partner got behind her dream, too.
“As a gift, he had Marc Savoy build me an accordion,” Giezendanner said, adding she would pick it up on her way to Balfa Camp with a dream to live out upon her return home.
“I imagined that I would be my own Cajun band. I had nobody to play with in Switzerland,” she said. “And somehow, it never occurred to me that I couldn’t play accordion and fiddle and T-fer at the same time.”
Giezendanner underwent hypnosis prior to the trip “so I would be able to play with other people, like in a jam,” she said. “That’s how bad my performance anxiety was.”
The hypnosis worked.
“And it was the happiest week in my whole life,” said Giezendanner. “I can really say that like this. I cried myself through the whole week just from happiness.”
THE SONGS
Schroeder and Giezendanner wrote most of the songs on the coming CD and allowed the seasoned musicians to do what they do best in the studio. But, again, it all began with the single.
“The very first (song) that we did was ‘La Valse de la Peine.’ I was just absolutely in love with Megan’s voice,” said Schroeder, who went to Constantin’s house with his fiddle to work on the song. He’d already sent her the lyrics and his fiddle part.
“She played guitar and sang it and I played fiddle,” Schroeder said. “The intention was just to do that one song.
“The idea of a CD had not even occurred,” he said. “I just started thinking who we might record it with.”
Of course, Giezendanner was asked, but concerns about her performance anxiety came and then went.
So with Constantin and Giezendanner on board, “I think I asked Blake (Miller) next,” said Schroeder, noting that bassist Johnny Daigle and accordionist Jimmy Breaux were also recruited.
“We were pretty good friends with Jimmy. Wherever he had a jam, it didn’t matter where it was, we would go,” Schroeder said.
Schroeder took the initial recording with Constantin and got it to those he wanted on the single.
“They all heard something and they all said yes,” said Schroeder.
The musicians met at Staffland Studio to record ‘la Peine’ “and while Chris (Stafford) was setting up, we played together for the first time,” said Giezendanner. “It was totally awesome.”
“We fooled around with it a little bit and we recorded it live,” Shroeder said. “Everyone mic’d in a circle.”
Constantin later overdubbed her vocals “because there was just too much other background going on and her vocals weren’t clear enough,” he said. “But that was it.”
Stafford mixed and mastered it. The single was made and released and a seed was planted for more.
“We just asked them and they said yes,” said Schroeder.
THE PROCESS
When it came time to start working on the album, a couple of rehearsals for each song was the rule.
“The first one, like, the whole group, was in our living room,” said Schroeder. “I made tacos and it was this big thing.”
Schroeder picked up the idea from the Pot Luck Band practices. It was a nice gesture — the first time around. Then came another rehearsal.
“Someone, in a kind way, said ‘We’re all really busy. How about we skip the hour-and-a-half wine-and-dine and just get right to it,’” he said. “So, from then on, it was a little more efficient.”
The couple laughed at their naiveté, and the rehearsals to follow were more efficient.
“We’d go through two, three, or four songs,” said Schroeder.
Still, that first rehearsal puts a smile on the couple’s face when they talk about it.
“The first time was so wonderful” said Giezendanner. “The whole evening, we kind of looked at each other and said, ‘That’s just so incredible. You know, that’s our living room on Jones Road Farm.’ There’s Jimmy Breaux. Blake Miller. Megan Brown. Millie, Joel, Scooter and Johnny. They said yes to record our songs with us and we were just so…” she trails off.
“It really was an incredible thing and it still is, I think, that they said yes, we’re going to do that,” said Giezendanner.
“And we had fun, too. It was always fun and light,” Schroeder said. “We knew we wanted the back porch jam sound, not an overly refined, over produced recording.”
Like the first rehearsal, lessons were on tap for Schroeder when it came to the recording process. An intervention of sorts was eventually needed.
“That was Chris Stafford, I think, probably realizing that I didn’t know anything about how to do this,” Schroeder chuckled. “And he kind of said, ‘Why don’t you do this, and this, and this.’ He was really great to work with.”
Giezendanner said working with the local musicians made the whole experience worthwhile on many levels.
“They were all so gentle. We got so much input, too,” she said. “Those rehearsal sessions, for us, it was clear that we basically let happen what happens.”
And what happened can be heard as the musicians played “in their style, you know, the way they do it,” said Giezendanner. “We’ve heard all of them so often.”
Schroeder recalled how arrangements, lyrics and such could change for the better at a living room rehearsal. Take, for example, the first go around with “La Courtise des Ours” (“The Courtship of the Bears”).
“Blake’s on the other side, behind a sofa, in a dark corner on the pedal steel,” said Schroeder. “And we’re going through this song and Blake says, ‘That’s not really a rhyme.’”
At issue was the French word ‘doux’ (sweet). Heads got together and ideas tossed about.
“‘What about ‘boue,’ mud. You know, they walked in the mud,’” said Schroeder, of a rhyming word brought up for consideration.
“And I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool,” he said, keeping an eye on the clock and the musicians’ time. “Mud. Close enough.
“And all of a sudden, Blake lifts up behind the sofa and goes, ‘joue a joue’ (cheek to cheek),” said Schroeder. “It’s such a beautiful image.”
“If you listen to the way they started out, it’s really an amazing process, mostly through those people that got involved and their take on it,” said Giezendanner. “Or, just the input that came, or just somebody’s style.”
Speaking of style, the couple’s friend, multi-instrumentalist/singer Joel Breaux and his distinctive Cajun and/or country vocals could not be overlooked.
“There had to be a country song. We’ve heard Joel sing Hank Williams – it’s like channeled – incredible,” Giezendanner said. “So we said, ‘We play music with Joel so often, so then, of course, there had to be a country song for Joel to sing.’”
And he’s not alone on “Accidently Well Dressed.”
Biere, another multi-instrumentalist, covers her role in the song wonderfully with an air of awareness in her smooth and gently twanged delivery.
Still, ‘Well Dressed’ isn’t exactly how a country duet typically goes.
Schroeder pointed out that a male (Breaux) sings about a woman preparing to go out and a female (Biere) sings about the man doing the same.
“I mean, he knows a lot about women’s clothing and jewelry and everything else,” said Schroeder. “And when she sings, she knows a lot of stuff, too.”
The song raises questions, he said.
“Why does a cowboy have a cat? What’s up with that?” he said.
Questions aside, “Accidentally Well-Dressed,” sounds bound for a serious country music hit with honors in the duet category.
With that, here’s a little history behind the song.
“When my father died, I inherited, among other things, his collar tips,” said Schroeder. Collar tips are big in square dancing, an activity he participated in Tidewater Twirlers Square Dance Club (in Virginia) with his folks when he was a kid.
“I’d gone through his stuff and it was like, ‘Oh my God! I want those,’” he said.
So one night at Tante Marie’s in Breaux Bridge, a restaurant that converts to a small dancehall on the weekends, he wore them. They just happened to be on a shirt collar he randomly grabbed from the closet.
A couple, Peter and Phyllis Grifford, complimented Schroeder on his attire and he said, “‘I just grabbed this out of the closet and I’m accidentally well-dressed.’
“And Pete said, ‘That’s a country song.’ And it was like all the lightbulbs going off,” said Schroeder. “So, you have the title of the song and you had a theme.”
“Plus, it totally fits how we live,” said Giezendanner. “Accidentally well-dressed pretty much hits the nail on the head.”
CLAYMATION
The couple were thinking of ways to promote the CD.
“I wanted to start on it since at least the end of last year,” said Giezendanner. “I was talking about that we should make a little movie to promote the CD. We started collecting little props here and there; just ideas. We just never found the time to start because you really have to have time and a place.”
Then March arrived with more than ides to worry about.
“The pandemic came and here were were. We have an international travel business and an Air B-n-B, so you can imagine how that went down with the pandemic,” Giezendanner said. “All of a sudden, we had a lot of time on our hands.”
The time was put to good use and Giezendanner’s longtime goal of creating with claymation came to pass.
“It was just something I wanted to do for a long time because I’m a big Wallace and Gromit fan,” Giezendanner said of the British claymation comedy franchise. “I love the genre.”
Three songs from the CD are videos; two full-on animation (“La Courtise des Ours”/“The Courtship of the Bears,” and “Le Marriage des Ours”/“The Marriage of the Bears,” and one, “Accidentally Well-Dressed” has clay figures in the video, but not animated.
“I think Susanne always knew she wanted to do a movie for one of the songs. I’m not sure why we arrived at that one,” Schroeder said. “I think the bears lent themselves to a good story line.”
Items were collected from their yard to make the sets.
“We even used our dried okra from last year where the bears swim in the lake,” she said. The okra represented the forest.
Three types of clay was used for the videos. The bears are made of modeling clay that doesn’t dry out and it comes in black or brown only. There’s also Play-Dough, and a modeling clay that does dry.
“So all the color, like Susanne’s spoonbill, needed flaming pink Play-Do,” said Schroeder.
“I just really like the idea of doing it ourselves,” said Giezendanner. “I knew it would be crude, which is something I like, too, because your skill level meets the challenge, kind of thing.”
The challenge was met and the results are wonderfully entertaining.
“You have certain images in your head, but then there’s your skill level, which was basically zero, so it would be a complete surprise, anyway, how it came out,” Giezendanner said. “It evolved by the minute, basically.”
The first step was to time the music and plan the claymation accordingly.
“I knew I needed so many seconds of movie and I just winged it,” said Giezendanner. “I just kind of rolled with it.”
At the same time, the clay objects themselves had to be considered.
“That was the point where I had to make a little plan,” said Giezendanner, adding it was similar to a storyboard, but not quite. “I made a rough outline of what the bears would do, where I had to start because I knew it would really wear-away on the bears. For example, when they walked around arm-in-arm, I had to take an arm off of one bear.
“So, I had to plan a little bit and do the scenes first where not much damage happens,” she said.
Cayla Zeek did artwork for the album and her first drawing had a bear with a top hat and a bear with a veil,” said Schroeder. “And we said, ‘You know what? I think they’re both feminine.’”
The message of the bears’ songs would get the blessings of Pope Francis.
“They then had to be lady bears because I really wanted to make them triple bikini (tops) to cover all their nipples,” Giezendanner said. “But I really wanted to have an image where they’re swimming in the lake and they’re wearing the bikinis that cover all their nipples.”
“And that’s actually a European nod to American Puritanism,” said Schroeder. “Absolutely fully intended.”
Social commentary is part of the videos/songs.
For example, in the ‘Courtship,’ a bear sings, “I’ve seen the people in their cities/And I’ve seen their pretty jewels.”
“And there are those houses and the little people and there’s actually an active shooting going on,” said Giezendanner. “But you have to really watch it several times or maybe stop it somewhere and you see there’s a guy shooting people and they drop. It’s just a couple of seconds.”
There’s also scene with a woman with her hair piled high outfitted in big diamonds.
“And the bears, they always go back to the basics,” said Giezendanner. “They go back to their blackberries, the simple things.”
Hence the lyrics: “But I’ll tell you, the prettiest things/Are wild blackberries, ripe and sweet.”
Giezendanner said it’s no different than a kid’s movie that also has something for adults, too, “so parents can bear to watch movies with their children,” she said. “There’s always an adult level going on.
“You might think it’s an inane song, there’s not much happening,” said Giezendanner. “But there are just little things here and there.”
“A lot of the songs drop lots of hints about messages on purpose. It’s not in the lyrics,” Schroeder said. “That song is a big message. Not only are the bears gay, but it’s quite a social commentary.”
Messages or not, in music vids or a song alone, songs have a way of creating a vision on our mind’s eye.
“When you listen to music, most people have imagery. Most people love to listen to music while driving, the scenery going by,” Giezendanner said. “But even so, when you sit and listen to music I think you always have images, you have feelings, and also, the other way around, you see scenery or you see images and you hear music.”
Regarding a theme to Madame Zin Zin, well, there isn’t one. That’s not to say there wasn’t a plan.
“So, at least at the beginning, there was not an intended theme. There were some criteria, though, from early on,” said Schroeder. “The album had to be about good music, authentic music, both in Cajun French, not over orchestrated or over produced; sort of a back porch feeling.
“It had to be recorded live as much as possible with local musicians with local roots pedigrees,” he said. “As the song writing and recording progressed, the themes gained a certain cohesiveness.”
And when you listen to the recording, you’ll hear, “Love, dreams, hope, loss and the human condition, music and dance, friendships,” said Schroeder. “And some tongue-in-cheek social commentary.”
As of November 26, 2020, the pandemic has kept the Tone Drifters from completing the album with one song remainng to record, the title track, “Madame Zin Zin.”
