This Week's Inspirations: Pete Fountain's New Orleans

I want to keep this week’s post, short and sweet, highlighting one of my favorite things, I’m having a deep appreciation for this week: “Pete Fountain’s New Orleans.”

I’ve been listening to this album on repeat as my “go to” this week.

It’s a nostalgic album for me, one I tend to listen to when I am missing home, New Orleans.

This album is the first album added to my new apple playlist, “When You Know What It Means… (To miss New Orleans).”

As you may already know, New Orleans is where I was born and a place I love so very much.

After Hurricane Katrina, I would visit as often as possible.

Every time I visited, I felt reenergized—reinvigorated and refocused to come back to Houston, and get back to work.

I would literally feel my soul recharge to 100%, and feel back to myself again when I returned.

I can tell emotionally, it’s been a long time since I’ve visited.

I’ll feel, somewhat “off,” like I am wandering about without direction or destination.

New Orleans will always root me, in my culture, and will always resonate with my soul, as “home,” regardless of how long its been since I’ve lived there.

Music is very powerful.

It can instantly transport you mentally, and emotionally (dare I say even, spiritually) to another place.

When the music is connected to a deep, instrinsic memory, it can teleport you back in time, where you could almost see yourself there, in your mind’s eye.

Music can have the ability to help you transcend, hardship, grief, pain, or can help you reconnect and ascend to a higher emotional vibration.

Music has the ability to do this instantly.

Change and affect your mood, mental acuity, maybe center you, rooting you back to your true self—the part of you who can overcome anything.

This album brings New Orleans to me.

It summons the energy of my Paw Paw, and the fond memories of listening to jazz music with him on his silver transistor radio.

Art can be a relic, transported into physical form…installed and positioned for an audience.

Or art can be consciousness, an experience that becomes infused into our being—-our thoughts, memories, and images (real or imaginary) in our minds.

Art is an appreciation for something, someone created. And it has the ability to transform one’s day.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend.