Sarah Quintana Thinks Through “Baby Don’t” Before Jazz Fest

Sarah Quintana (right) with her band, by Adrienne Battistella

Look at the song list for Sarah Quintana’s new album Baby Don’t, and it’s easy to think you’ve been here before. The first track is “Laisse le Bon Temps Rouler,” and the sentiment in New Orleans sounds familiar. Even if you recognize it as Shirley and Lee’s early New Orleans R&B hit “Let the Good Times Roll” translated to Cajun French, it’s still tempting to dismiss it as throwing a bone to the tourists.

That’s not the way Quintana’s “Laisse le Bon Temps Rouler” plays. She’s not selling a memory; she’s inviting you to dance, simply because she loves to dance. The Cajun swing gives it a dreamy quality enhanced by Quintana’s voice.

Quintana will play Jazz Fest on Sunday, April 27 at 12:40 p.m. on the Lagniappe Stage, and she has been performing in Louisiana and France since 2010. Much of her time in New Orleans has been spent around Frenchmen Street. On Baby Don’t, you can hear someone rethinking her place in that musical world. Quintana now only plays three or four shows a month, usually at the Saturn Bar, BJ’s, Three Muses or d.b.a.

“I’m trying to get the music out without being as haphazard as I used to be,” Quintana says over coffee. “I love doing nothing.” That’s self-deprecating though. Really, she’s working on how to play for the long haul. There was a time when she booked every gig she could; now she tries to be more choosy. When Tipitina’s hosted an all-star tribute to Irma Thomas, Quintana was thrilled to be asked to be part of it.

It helps that Quintana has a day job as a speech pathologist, but even that has been an adjustment. A question all artists–musicians included–have to think about is how to grow up. How long do you want to rely on three or four gigs a week in the clubs? How long do you want to get home at 2 or 3 in the morning? Those choices seem easy on paper, but the musician's life is seductive.

“The inner 20-year-old might be, ‘You’re a sell-out!” Quintana thinks. The younger Quintana would have bet everything on her art and wouldn’t understand getting a day job. “The inner 30-year-old is like, ‘Wow, I made rent this month,’ or ‘I’ve had to travel so much,’” she says. And, she really enjoys helping people as a speech pathologist. She takes pride and pleasure in helping people who communicate for living get back to what they do. 

“Part of the journey is getting to know yourself,” she says.

Still, endlessly gigging has its advantages. “Miss River [her 2015 album] came out great because I played weekly at Bacchanal, so it was basically paid rehearsal for a year,” Quintana says. She didn’t have that kind of preparation this time, but she did some creative boundary-setting. She knew she wanted to produce the album herself. She wanted to keep the songs simple, particularly on the guitar, so that she could record everything live with her band–Rex Gregory, Jason Jurzak, Rose Cangelosi, and Chris Beroes-Hagis. She planned to record each song three times so that she’d have a limited number of options to choose from, and she only wanted to do minor adjustments and punch-ins.

“I only have this much money and this much time,” Quintana says. “I can’t be a diva and go in and re-sing everything and track everything. I’ve got to be good and ready and efficient and let the band have the time.”

She recognizes that was a mechanical solution to a personal issue. She used to stress out in the studio, and limiting the number of takes forced her to choose the best version of the three, even if none were exactly right. Quintana did do some overdubs, but “I don’t trust my perfectionist,” she says. “It keeps me from getting shit done.” 

Quintana booked three days at Dockside Studio in Maurice, Louisiana, allotting two for recording and mixing and one for finishing touches. To help keep from going into her head too much, she spent much of her time thinking about basic stuff. What are we doing about dinner tonight? Do we have enough snacks? Who needs gas money?

“I don’t really think of myself as a vocalist on this record,” Quintana says, but she did give herself permission to go diva and take “a full belt” on “How Long.” It’s a lonely ballad, but Quintana’s emphasis on the group means that she didn’t push her voice to the front the way “full belt” might suggest. 

Instead, she followed the logic of the lyrics and mixed the song so that it sounds like she’s singing to herself. She heard space in the song, and “they played along with that,” she says of her band. 

That performance in particular reflects one of the ideas she brought into the sessions. “I love blues and jazz and pop music, but sometimes I feel like we’re missing that European spirit that the song form is secondary to the interpretation,” Quintana says. As that became her governing philosophy, the band realized that the best thing it could do is know the songs well and follow her because the song would never be the same thing twice.

“I’m looking for the moment,” she says. “If it means adding a crescendo or playing it around again so Rex can shred, that’s what we’re doing now.” 

On Baby Don’t, Quintana produced herself for the first time, so she had to make all the decisions. She wanted it to sound like her show, she wanted it to be New Orleans music and fun, and she wanted it to show integrity. But more than that, “I wanted to be myself so badly, and I wanted that to be okay,” Quintana says. That meant deciding who she was an artist, and how she valued her work. What is it worth? It had to be something more than just the $0.0003 to $0.0005 that a streamed song earns on Spotify.

“My goal was to not pay for the record, to fundraise and have it financed so that I don’t have to stress with credit cards this time,” she says. “Check.”

“If my goal is to get some media splash, some Jazz Fest, a few fine dates–maybe Joe’s Pub in New York–great. Attainable. Two weeks in France? Attainable. Maybe a Grammy nomination? That’s even possible. 

“I think it’s important as a creative to orient yourself on that map that anything is possible.”