Dustin Dale Gaspard’s release is Hoping Heaven Got A Kitchen.
By Dominick Cross
On his Hoping Heaven Got A Kitchen release, Dustin Dale Gaspard takes listeners and viewers on a musical journey, one that hits close to home for the singer/songwriter.
“It’s basically taking you on my musical journey between where I’m from in southern Vermilion Parish, all the way back up to Lafayette (where he now resides,)” said Gaspard.
The release is also a nod to his grandparents, whose photos are featured on the front and back covers. Gaspard’s grandmother died during the recording process.
“I said, ‘Man, I just hope heaven got a kitchen because that’s what would make her happy.’ I said it in passing and then when I’m leaving the studio I’m thinking I need to start writing these songs because time’s so short, I need to start melding this gap,” he said. “I need to represent my grandmother’s and grandfather’s stories.”
The process led to the hook in the album’s title song and his grandparents’ photos on the covers. On the front are his mother’s parents, Burton and Margaret Lege; on the back, his father’s parents, Emily and Ronald Gaspard.
You can find music videos of some of the songs all over social media. Gaspard calls the videos, online before the album debuts digitally on February 28, “The Road Release.”
“I wanted to connect all the dots,” he said. “Kind of make it a visual representation, almost like a visual album release.”
All but two songs (This Should Go On Forever and Feed the Flame) are originals on the album Gaspard said, who recorded the album at Chad Viator’s studio.
“He likes to do this thing before we record, he just checks in with me which I always thanked him so much for,” said Gaspard. “It’s when I ended up realizing that he was never in it to do a job. He was always in it for us to make good art and a lot of good art comes from just knowing people. You’ll be able to create better if you’re really comfortable with somebody.”
Viator also plays lead guitar on the release; Lyle Begnaud, steel guitar; Chris French and Kent Beatty, bass; Eric Adcock, keys; Bill Smith, drums; Chris Stafford, fiddle; Blake Miller, accordion/fiddle.
Background vocals: Sarah Russo, Sharona Thomas and Hanna Mitchell. “I wanted it to be like, really raw, truly authentic — somewhere between gospel and just soul and make sure it was all feminine voices that could really carry those call and responses,” said Gaspard.
Wayne Toups, Wilson Savoy, Sweet Cecilia, and Gracie Babineaux can be seen on the music videos, but are not on the release itself. More on that later.
The physical modes of the recording are set to be released March 31 at the album’s CD release party at the Acadiana Center for the Arts.
Bayou Hack Press, personified in the form of of its publisher, Dominick Cross (DC), caught up with Gaspard (DG) as himself, before his Mardi Gras string of gigs to talk about the new release.
DC: Where’d the idea for the videos come from?
DG: I’ve always been a fan of the scenery and landscape out here. It’s always inspired me. And I’m a big fan of movie soundtracks and movie scores and such, and sometimes when I’m just out playing my guitar, I like to envision a whole orchestra of sorts to be the soundtrack for the area. So I guess some of that all ties together, just being out and inspired by the visuals from home.
DC: You’ve got Cajun musicians (Wayne Toups, Wilson Savoy, Gracie Babineaux) on the release, but there’s really no Cajun music. It’s more like folk, Americana…
DG: I was just talking about this the other day about how trying to make it as folk/indie/singer/songwriter out here is just an uphill battle. Everything’s so saturated in the zydeco and Cajun lore, that it’s really hard to break through. And specifically, just to have a sustainable career or gigs that will pay you to be something other than Cajun and zydeco.
I took that as a big negative thing in my youth when I first started performing and thinking that there’s no way — like it was irredeemable — and so it made me turn my back on that. Yet, what I’d ended up coming later to realize is just like it’s so bred in the culture here, that even some of my melodic melodies I was coming up with as folk artist were completely stolen from songs of those genres.
And it was kind of me thinking I needed to find a way to bridge the gap. So on the record itself, I do sing a couple songs in French that there’s French instrumentation. Some of the songs have accordion and some have fiddle. Some have steel guitar in the indie landscape, but it’s still more of a honky tonk instrument which is something that I would have never been open to before until this record.
DC: Guest musicians on the release include Wayne Toups, Wilson Savoy, Gracie Babineaux. That’s the three I’ve seen. Anyone else?
DG: On the live videos, a lot of the artists I’m actually performing with aren’t featured on the record itself. What we’re doing is just doing a more traditional change in arrangement for those videos. Just because it’s easier to travel with (I wouldn’t be able to bring a 10-piece band to Cow Island to play in a field somewhere), but more so to do something different than what’s on the record and not over-do what’s on the record.
We’re going to do one more with Sweet Cecilia. They grew up in that vein of music, too, so I think the last one’s going to be a Cajun jam-style song. Just mainly to pay homage to the music of my grandparents.
DC: What made you go ahead and do this with this vision you had? I can visually see what you had in mind with the videos, of course, but what prompted you?
DG: My musical tastes, like I said, when I started, I was more into very ambient listening songs. I don’t even know how to describe it exactly, but things that just wouldn’t work here. It was a struggle and it was really kind of screwing with me about why I wasn’t as successful as I thought I should be and that’s a very selfish and self-centered thing to think. So, it just took years to find perspective.
Chad (Viator) had been working together for about two years now and I told him I’d had this rumbling, especially since I had the Freetown Sounds as a soul band. We were doing so well and it was mainly because it was live, high-energy rock-and-roll music, which was something that people can get behind over here in the Acadiana bubble where music events come with drinking and dancing; they usually don’t come with, ‘Hey, sit down and just listen to these song.’
So I was telling Chad how one day I wanted to reconcile and find a way to bring them together and maybe that would be both a singer/songwriter and still be a successful performer in this area. When we started talking about that, I started experiencing artists that were venturing out and doing the same thing. Folk artists that I looked up were covering old school soul songs and basically they were doing them straight from the roots with new age instruments, basically.
All these songs that my grandpa listened to, they are at the root of all my songwriting. So I was listening to old swamp pop by Van Broussard and the Rod Bernard tune and Warren Storm and think, ‘Damn. These are awesome songs that I really love and really connect with and I just thought maybe there’d be a new way for me to update that, do them with more folk instrumentation and still get what I wanted out of them, as well as deliver a song that was a lot of people liked.
DC: Are you satisfied with that? Did you reach your goal?
DG: I have never felt like I hit the nail on the head more with some of these ideas. I should mention this. I stumbled upon an old Bobby Charles vinyl and I was like this is exactly what Bobby Charles was doing back in the day. So I just wanted to find a way to meld all that together and have a good chunk of me in there and I think I just kind of grew into the role.
DC: You look at Bobby Charles and he definitely wasn’t a Cajun musician, but he’s Cajun.
DG: That’s the whole thing. I’m never going to be able to play accordion, maybe not even fiddle,” said Gaspard. “But I’m as Cajun as they come. I want people to know that you don’t have to be a Cajun musician to be a voice for these people, you know.