People Museum Chart Their Milky Way before Jazz Fest 2023

People Museum, by Greg Miles

The New Orleans electronic funk duo talk about the songs—and video in one case—that helped shaped their sound.

People Museum is on hold. The band has finished an album that they wrote after Hurricane Ida to process the feelings that came with a city’s population being dispersed. They have finished the recording on their follow-up to the 2022 EP Destruction of, Vol. 1, but they’re trying to find a home for it “that will reach more ears,” singer Claire Givens says. They hope to have it out later this year, and to keep from driving themselves crazy, they plan to spend much of the year touring. They’ll leave for Austin after their Jazz Fest set on Sunday, April 30 at 5:30 p.m. on the Lagniappe Stage.

“We spend a lot of creative time on our live show, so it feels like we’re always creating,” trombone player Jeremy Phipps says. He and Givens have been together since 2016, and their lineup is fleshed out in concert by drummer Aaron Boudreaux and bassist/sousaphonist Charles Lumar II. “Our live show feels so New Orleans.”

You wouldn’t expect that from their EPs, which bend spare, electronic, often darkly atmospheric funk around Givens’ poker-faced voice. She’s a classically taught singer, and she uses her training to measure out how much of herself she wants to reveal. It’s a sound that lives more naturally in a club late at night, but when they played NOEW Fest to end New Orleans Entrepreneur Week on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Lumar’s sousaphone gave the bass line a familiar, breathy funk.

Fortunately, most of their songs start with conventional instrumentation, so they have found them to be malleable, which keeps them fresh. “We manipulate the songs all the time, whether its taking them to the Marigny Opera House and playing them on the grand piano,” Givens says. “The songs are always there, but they’re like little lizards that can change in the light.”

We asked Givens and Phipps to give us their Milky Way, the eight songs that define People Museum’s musical universe. They traded choices and, not surprisingly, chimed in when they had something to add.

People Museum, by Greg Miles

“Heartbeats” - The Knife

Jeremy Phipps

This is an electronic song that’s timeless. You listen to these synths when it came out in 2003. They were groundbreaking then, but they sound like they could have come out just this year. It reminds me of us.

Claire Givens

It was definitely in my life before the band, and it was in your musical life before the band. It’s influential.

“Head Like a Hole” - Nine Inch Nails

Givens

This may be my most important one because I always say, Jeremy, it needs to be more Nine Inch Nails. I love punk music and have that sensibility in my heart, but since I can’t express it with my voice, there has to be a menace underlying every track somewhere.

Also, all of the rhythmic-ness that does not come from traditional percussion instruments is what I am obsessed with about Nine Inch Nails.

“Breatherz (Young as Clouds)” - Rubblebucket

Phipps

For a while, I thought that horns were not cool. I’m not gonna lie. I grew up loving brass bands, but there came a point I got kinda bored. Everybody who hired me asked me to do the same exact thing.

Givens

Be more who dat.

Phipps

Yeah. I remember hearing them play this song and I was like, Ohmigod, horns are cool to me now. And the horns are subtle, like the Afrobeat-ish vibe that was a big influence on our band.

God bless who dat, by the way. It has paid my bills for a long time. I don’t like writing my own horn parts and let Claire write a lot of my horn parts for the first album because I know that my natural brain will sound like more who dat because I’ve played so many of those gigs.

“Love More” by Sharon Van Etten

Givens

She’s not somebody I listened to before our band, but several years ago I was introduced to her music and was taken aback by how vulnerable her recordings and her live show were. She opens up all the way like Julie Odell. Those two are the same to me, and I’ve been very inspired by that.

That has influenced how I have written newer music for the past few years. I think the I Made a Madman out of Me and You Laughed EP was that experience of me opening it up. I love the Thom Yorke way of using coded language as a way to express an experience. I’ve never been a storyteller, but those two songwriters made me want to try being more direct.

“Be Your Girl (Kaytranada Edition)” - Teedra Moses

Phipps

I remember going to Lil’ Joedici and Lord Chilla’s DJ night on a Saturday at the Hi Ho, and they played this song. Pretty much the whole night they played house music, and I had a weird association with house music. Oh, house, I don’t really have any interest in it. I went there and it blew my mind. People Museum was making music and I said, Hold up. We gotta diverge our whole thing. That was the coolest thing in the world to me, and that influenced a lot of our second and third EPs.

“On Some Faraway Beach” - Brian Eno

Givens

I was listening to that album, Here Come the Warm Jets, when I met Jeremy.

Phipps

I was into that album for a while.

Givens

Brian Eno as a whole, everything he has done is the coolest thing ever, from Roxy Music to Music for Airports. That album specifically is such a journey, and there are so many songs that are different genres that it made me feel like it’s okay to dramatically change but stay in a world that is influenced by certain aesthetics. Seeing the album cover and being That’s the world I’m in, and that’s where I’m living while I’m listening to this is so important to me. A lot of our starting points come from images first that suggest a world to live in.

Phipps

I’m going to call an audible right now. Originally, I was going to have a Bon Iver song, but I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole right now. There was a whole reason why the mood of Bon Iver was important to this band. Instead, I picked

“Na Na Na” - Theresa Andersson

It uses a sample of Smokey Johnson, the New Orleans funk drummer, and that song was one of the first times I’ve someone grab from traditional New Orleans elements and mix it with modern indie pop. To me, that’s a masterpiece.

“Ingenue” - Atoms for Peace

Givens

The music video blew my mind because it’s Thom Yorke dancing with an actual dancer, and that sent me down a movement rabbit hole. Like, music accompanied with movement. That’s something Jeremy and Charles do so well. Would you say it started for you with Solange?

Phipps

Riiiiiiiiiiiight. I think so. I have to think about it.

Givens

It’s non-dancers using movement. It’s so interesting.

The other part of that song is that I don’t think Thom Yorke would have ever considered himself a singer, but now he does and it’s really interesting to me encountering people who do things that they haven’t been doing their whole lives or haven’t been trained in. How they approach it. It is inspiring to me to hear his voice and the strange ways he articulates it. It opens my ears in a way of what’s possible as a singer, and that perfection is not the goal. The world that I come from, vocally, has this emphasis on tall vowels and how to create the most beautiful sound and not necessarily how to articulate an idea or text with truth. It has been about the cleanest delivery, not the most vulnerable.