This New Year’s Eve, Mardi Gras World will host a special concert featuring some of the city’s most celebrated performers. The Revivalists and Tank and the Bangas will co-headline the December 31 event, treating fans to equal servings of roots rock, funk and unrivaled stage presence.

Ahead of the grand affair, The Revivalists’ lead vocalist David Shaw spoke with OffBeat.com about resolutions, the value in having a blast in the studio and more.

Is there the same kind of gravity to the new year for a band, as a unit, as there is for us, as individuals?

I think it can be, yeah. You think about the previous year, and all the accomplishments, all the failures…that collective energy of everybody thinking in that way contributes to, potentially, a change in the band. You can feel that reflection. I don’t think we, as a band, have ever gone into it saying ‘OK, next year we’re going to do this, that and the other thing.’ But maybe we actually should.

In November of this year, you guys released Take Good Care and amassed an A-Team of producers. What was that like?

We’d been writing and kind of recording the songs for the previous yearr. We worked with Dave Cobb, Dave Bassett, Andrew Dawson. They all really brought an interesting, unique energy to the project. A lot of bands get together with one producer. With this project, we wanted to show all of our different sides. If you listen to the album, there’s rappy delivery with a hip-hop beat; a Led Zeppelin or Rage Against the Machine kind of riff; and then there’s a song that kind of sounds like a country tune. We’re just all over the map, so we wanted to pick producers who could pull those strings.

What happens when working with new producers doesn’t work? Is there a fear that the experiment won’t produce the results you’re hoping for?

You have to be honest with your self about young music and what you want to put out there, because these producers can  basically do anything. You’re putting your vision through their lens. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t, you’re very right. I’m proud of what we did. The thing about it is that it was fun to be in the studio. So now we have these memories of just being in the studio, having fun, and I think that energy is translated into the music. If I was in the studio and I was having a shit time, even if the music was great, there’s still that feeling of ‘Ugh, I really didn’t have that good of a time.’ But all of my associations with the album are good.

Much of early 2019 will be devoted to bringing Take Good Care on the road. How different, really, is the feeling during a tour for one album versus another album?

This is one of the albums that we haven’t really played a lot of the songs live before we recorded them. So, that’s going to be very different for us. For Men Against Mountains, we played some of those songs for, seriously, like three years. Those songs don’t even sound like the same songs from when we started playing them live to when they got recorded. I’m actually pretty intrigued to hear how these new songs are going to evolve, because that’s what they do. The crowd energy kind of informs where the song is gonna go.

Will you be showcasing your new stuff primarily on New Year’s Eve?

It’s going to be a lot of the new stuff, but we’re definitely going to pepper in some of the old stuff. We have a few things planned…we’re working with Frenchmen Street Productions and Amanda Thompson, who just does a really great job of throwing a party.

VIP tickets for The Revivalists and Tank and the Bangas’ New Year’s Eve show are already sold out, but general admission tickets are still available here.

Revisit OffBeat‘s 2017 cover story, by Brett Milano, on The Revivalists.