In the past five years, Matt Dethrow and the other members of Todd Day Wait’s Pig Pen have become familiar winter faces on the streets of the French Quarter and Marigny.

More recently, they’ve settled into a permanent three man line up and made it their custom to spend October through Jazz Fest in New Orleans.

Dethrow, the group’s upright bassist, explains how the city has become like home to him.

“This is the longest we stay anywhere,” he said. “This is our base. We’ve been all over the place, this is the only place we feel normal…There are so many other musicians here who do what we do. You feel like you’re on the same level.”

The wandering artist lifestyle is pretty standard fare in New Orleans, and as Dethrow points out, you can eek out your living with all sorts of unusual rackets. You can pay your rent selling jello shots on the corner.

Inevitably, the city’s subtle inspirational forces have found their way into his music.

“You get back on the road and people are like, ‘Oh, that’s very New Orleans style,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m just playin’ honky.’ We definitely get a little more ragtime, jug-band, jazz influence. You know, kind of that laid back New Orleans beat we tend to soak up here accidentally. It just kind of  happens. There are so just so many great players here.”

For musicians operating in the old timey, county/roots genres, this plethora of great players has become especially pronounced in the years since Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Revue and a few others exploded onto New Orleans’ once negligible country scene.

“There’s a really great underground country scene here,” he says.

From concerts to square dances to the weekly Country Night at Mags, the country scene is an active part of the city’s whirlwind carousel of musical happenings.

The lifestyle does present challenges, some of which have nothing to do with partying.

“It’s weird, the gentrification that’s happening,” Dethrow said. “They’re cleaning up certain things, but they’re doing it in a certain way, that, I don’t know, it seems like it would be better if it was at a community level rather than the city deciding which streets to fix, which parks to redo. It’s like, you don’t need to redo that park. It’s just grass. Why don’t you take care of these potholes, these shitty sidewalks.”

These processes are particularly noticeable to him on Frenchmen Street, where the band busks frequently.

“This street has changed a lot,” he said. “I feel like it’s getting Bourbonized. A couple years ago, three years ago, man, it was a different scene. That Dat Dog building was gone. It was an empty lot there where they would have these fire spinners come out, there were really good carnival friends of ours. We would trade sets. It was a really good place to hang out, leave your instrument. It was safe there.”

Dethrow and the Pig Pen have had to step carefully around cops and city officials to keep their stake in a quickly-changing territory.

“They did this like weird thing, this clean sweep. There’s so many kids that come from all over to hustle, so you’ve gotta kind of clear out the riff-raff. Scares some people off, but, you know, it filters some people out too. That’s why we dress up. You know, not ruffle any feathers. Some cops on horses came down and kicked two or three bands out, but they left a couple. If you’ve got, like, a dying dog, and you smell bad, and you’re harassing people, and you’re just wasted, that’s not gonna be cool with them.”

All in all though, he doesn’t seem to be stressing too much over the current climate or what the future will bring.

“I think it will all change,” he said. “It changes every year. The main thing is to keep the core of what makes New Orleans New Orleans.”