Today (February 7), MoPodna released a second volume of a self-titled EP, which he describes as “melancholy pop.”
MoPodna — aka Aaron Boudreaux — is the drummer for People Museum and GIVERS, plus a multi-instrumentalist/ producer/ engineer for several New Orleans bands. Of the new EP, MoPodna, vol. 2, he explained, “Mo Podna is the nickname my dad used to call me. I’m half Cajun / half Mexican and he’d call me ‘my old partner’ but since he was Cajun, everything would just blend together– ‘Mo Podna’ became my thing. He even made shirts for me that said it. He passed away in 2011 and my mom and my brother kept that alive, so I thought I should too. I’m aware that it’s a weird name. People mispronounce it all the time.”
MoPodna’s latest delivery features international and hyperlocal talent. “My co-writer on this EP, Signe Krog (pronounced ‘See-na’) came to the States on a sort of road trip with a producer from Zoogma. She was determined to make music while she was here, so he connected her with Andrew Block at Neutral Sound Studio– she crammed in a ton of recording and, on the last day I asked if she wanted to create a track with me, and she said, ‘Yeah but I fly out in like four hours.’ So she listened to the beat that I had made for her and said, ‘Do you want to write it right now?’ She put down her half-packed bags and we sat in the kitchen, wrote the first song and recorded the chorus that day.”
“We collaborated remotely to finish the first song on the EP. She flew back to New Orleans to finish her album around two months later and that’s when we made our other song, last minute, again. She was napping on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, flying out later that day, exhausted. We were both working on all this other stuff but it was like, ‘Oh, this is so good! This is so fun! We gotta do it!'”
He continues,“There are two instrumental tracks on the EP, ‘A Seat Between Us’ and ‘A Lesson for Living,’ then ‘Replacing Me’ was our kitchen song and ‘Need This From You’ was our living room song. Since she’d flown here twice already, I flew to Copenhagen to help arrange her songs live and play a show with her– the video for ‘Need This From You’ is all footage from my time wandering around there.
“Writing with Signe was a particularly interesting experience because Danish people don’t really do small talk. I kinda love it. It’s either nothing said or attempts at meaningful conversation without much much of a filter. Her raw honesty and weird ways of expressing herself in English, that’s just the coolest thing. On the song ‘Replacing Me’ There’s a line where she says, ‘Since when did you start playing soccer on a Saturday?’ and I was like, ‘What does that even mean?’ but then I realized, when a relationship ends, it’s not always all at once — it’s a lot of these little hyper specific things you notice, like, “Since when do you buy rye bread?” I believe she perfectly captured the feeling of when you have that realization that you’re slipping away from someone. And, yes, in the video for the song, I am, indeed, playing soccer on a Saturday… in July… drenched in sweat in that hoodie. I literally film on the camera that I had as a child for home videos, so, good thing it only has a certain level of detail…”
MoPodna’s partnership with Signe marked a departure of several sorts, not only in a trip to Copenhagen. “So far, Signe is the only person I’ve collaborated with who’s not actually from New Orleans,” he says. “Recently I’m in talks with Alexis Marceaux from Sweet Crude and I’m working on a demo with Tif Lamson of GIVERS. Volume one of this project was a collab with Claire Givens from People Museum. Sometimes I feature them in performances, sometimes I’m solo. When I play live it’s basically a hybrid DJ performance. I’ll run Ableton on my computer and then I’ll play synthesizers and electronic percussion and sing and play guitar over all my music and then Claire will sometimes come up and play the last four songs with me.”
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