[UPDATED] Holley Bendtsen and Amasa Miller’s Our Songs is an album-length story about the duo’s shared history in New Orleans music. It’s quite a history. They’re best known for their work with the Pfister Sisters and the Charmaine Neville Band, but during their careers they’ve recorded and performed with a wide variety of local and national acts. This recording, though, puts their own work front and center in a way that’s new to their catalog. It’s a collection of, well, their songs: original compositions, many of which grew in the New Orleans Songwriters’ Workshop, which they founded.

Our Songs follows the arc of a professionals’ workshop, or of an all-night, all-star, jam session. Plenty of Bendtsen and Miller’s friends and colleagues stop by for a tune or two, and the album draws on a wide stylistic spectrum, from cabaret to trad-jazz to country-western to what it calls “Second Line Tango.” It opens with “Providence Provides,” a tribute to James Booker in the poetic story-song style of Small Change-era Tom Waits. “Creole Moon” turns loose a traditional marching band—Gerald French, Charlie Miller, Rick Trolsen, Tom Fischer, and Jon Gross—on a song about the Crescent City that we’d all better get ready to get used to; it sounds like Randy Newman forgot to put it on The Frog Princess soundtrack. And “Dr. John” is what it sounds like: a paean to the man himself, in his style.

What it loses in continuity to such an embrace of multiplicity Our Songs gains back—in spades—in the pleasure Bendtsen and Miller take in being New Orleans musicians who play New Orleans music. Our Songs is so ingrained in the city’s tradition and history, and vice versa, that the material feels as familiar as it is fresh.

Update June 30, 9 a.m.

The song title “Creole Belle” was in error and corrected to “Creole Moon.”