In Southeast Louisiana, an unassuming new trio is quickly redefining ‘Southern’. New Orleans-based The Wanting recently released their haunting debut album, Dark Road at the city’s Tigermen Den. Decked out in candles and skull totems, pairing leopard suits with cowboy hats, they ain’t your grandpa’s country. “In the springtime of your voodoo,” they harmonize, “Well I walk this world alone.”

The musicians are relaxed as they vamp in a small studio in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward, but The Wanting is a tension of opposites: Country tropes, yet proudly queer. Bolo ties, with pentagram earrings. And throughout, the unresolved longing of close harmonies.

Best described as southern gothic, ‘The Wanting’ emerges from the high lonesome sound of Appalachian folk. But Southern Gothic as a genre began as literature. It was the nightmarish social criticism of Welty, Faulkner, O’Connor.

Fitting then, that guitarist and frontman, Chris Jacob, began his musical journey with folk, he says, “the music of the people.” In Indiana, he dug into dust-bowl era sounds. He had a masters in ethnomusicology by the time he met ukulele player and vocalist, Cate Swan, who was only then coming around to her own Montana roots.

Three years later, the duo found harmonium player and velvet-voiced Chad Robin.

“I love three-part harmony, so it was like I’d walked in on a gold mine,” Robin says softly. “We all fell in love with each other.”

“The band thing is not primary,” Jacob says, as the three settle in. “It’s a product of our kinship.”

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In this interview, we layer on our own harmony - adding our voice to the candid story of The Wanting and their journey down the Dark Road album.

‘Done Wrong’ opens with Robin’s harmonium, conjuring Vedic chanting as much as Robin’s native Louisiane. But Jacob’s fingerpicking signals Appalachia, and Swan enters with light twang: “The embers in my heart, and the whispers in your words / They've done each other, done each other wrong.”

Interior conflict was part of growing up for Swan. Surrounded by, “People you would market Top 40 Country to,” she laughs, “FFA [Future Farmers of America] kids.” But Swan was drawn to a different kind of sound - busy watching Tori Amos (Under the Pink) with her dad on MTV, learning storytelling from Amos.

What does make Country, Country then? There’s no daisy dukes or mud on the tires here. Even alt-cowpunks like Neko Case are further center. On the title track to Dark Road, Jacob does yearn for the land (“That necktie was a noose”), but the Western quickly devolves into “blood” and flames. In the official Dark Road music video, collaborator and bassist Peter J. Bowling sports black assless stockings in a flatbed Chevy. The juxtaposition could be a Warhol.

“My heart was in the folk music,” Jacob explains. But what he prizes most is “that extra thing.” He found it in fellow New Orleanian transplant Ani DiFranco. “Lyrically I was influenced by her,” he says. “Spill your guts.”

Watch The Wanting perform their song, “The Savior”

Midway through the album a pair of songs swing, at home in any honky tonk. Lapsteel, courtesy of Dave Easley, puts us right under a Neon Moon. “When I was a young man, out in the corn / I buried my heart, before it was born,” Jacob sings on ‘My Woes’.

“Being a gay boy in the middle of Indiana was very solitary,” Jacob says, “That judgment...”

It may be why religious imagery is all over his writing. “Understandable terminology,” he clarifies. “There’s church in music. Anybody can go through that door.”

“Lord, don’t you leave me,” the three singers knit together on ‘Out in the Cold’, “Cause I am wandering home.”

It seems that wandering has paid off, and the three have indeed found their home. Together.

“I met Chris and Cate the same night,” Robin recalls, “St. Patrick’s Day 2015.” He says it wasn’t long before Jacob would casually text him “These gorgeous songs he had written…”

“...Trying to woo him,” Jacob laughs.

But the trio aren’t interested in being painted a certain stripe. “We’re proud of the queerness,”Jacob says, but “the brand is the music.” It’s the kind of sincerity you can’t fake.

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“I remember being obsessed with Queen and Freddie Mercury,” Robin says. “The layers upon layers of vocals.” The group launches into a thread about how close-harmony evolved from the Carter family to the Louvin Brothers.

It’s one of the key ingredients in country music. Tightly woven vocal parts possess a ‘leading’ quality. The narrow range of notes evokes--you guessed it--a sort of wanting. Open harmony has a wider spacing that serves to mute the tension.

The Louvins were no stranger to opposites, preaching Satan Is Real while generally raising hell. But there’s honesty in the dissonance. As Swan says, “It’s like reading a diary entry out loud, but with musical accompaniment.”

Swan’s writing contribution marks a sort of turning point on the fifth of seven tracks. On ‘Chapels of Dust’, Swan sings, “By the time I crossed the stateline, that's when I knew / I felt the first sting, the weight, of two golden rings.”

“I’d been formerly married to somebody that was in the Americana Roots scene,” Swan says. Through him she was exposed to touring, and even got to meet and sing onstage with Willie Nelson.

But before all that, it was her ex that first heard her singing in the shower.

“It never seemed accessible,” Swan says. “It wasn’t for me.” She began to write -- and even record -- in the shower: “I could only remember the lyrics of a song if I sang the harmonies!” she recalls.

But by the time her own road led her to Bloomington, Swan met Jacob, started a band, moved south, and the rest is history.

“Once Chad got added to the mix,” Jacob says, “Is when everything finally clicked.” After practicing together for the pure joy of it, the group was invited to play their first show at BJ’s in Bywater. “Are we a band now?” Jacob laughs, remembering their post-show conversation.

Beginning to call themselves The Wanting, they played mostly Jacob’s songs. “Mostly written alone,” he says. To shed the binds of self-consciousness. “But lately Chad can be around.”

Jacob courts creative inspiration like a poet he once heard speak. “She would feel this poem coming, across the plains. She’d sprint into the house, and if she didn’t get her pen in time, the ‘Thing’ would just pass through her.”

Dark Road is this kind of capture. Raw moments of inspiration captured on paper and set to music. One reviewer commented simply, “Witchy, raw, beautiful.” Yet Swan says words like ‘Lord’ are “very much in the canon of the music we’re doing.” So perhaps those ‘opposites’--aren’t. Perhaps that’s what The Wanting is helping redefine.

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Near the record’s end, ‘Autumn’s Daughter’ is a literal spell: “The skin of the serpent and the stem of a forest rose / The feather of sparrow and the blood of your foe.” But Bowling’s walking bass, the flutter of Dave Easley’s mandolin, and the three voices, balanced in the mix, have drawn comparisons to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. You can hear echoes of softer Bonnie Prince Billy, the modern Texan orchestration of Julie Mintz, even a shred of Gris Gris-era Dr. John.

The band is part of the nurturing mysticism of New Orleans. “I grew up in Luling, 45 minutes away,” Robin says. “There is this sort of underground magic,” he says, “to the city, which is very different than everywhere else around it...You start seeing your circles overlap: Oh I met you at Mardi Gras Zone at three in the morning.”

Part of that magic has been getting love from local audiences and media outlets like WWOZ. Part of it has been affirmation from a community of artists. “If you can follow through you can make anything happen here,” Swan says.

“But the thing that flipped the switch,” Jacob recalls, “was seeing the music touch people. At the record release, there was a gentleman just sobbing. Multiple times of being stopped and thanked,” he snaps, “Woke me up.”

Dark Road ends with ‘Best I Ever Had’, a crescendo of lust, nostalgia, and beaten earth outside an old trailer. The offering is a black lace wedding cake on the tongue, flourishes of mandolin the icing in the sinking swamp. You can all but see the lovers spinning in the repetition of the refrain, burning down the memory of what is over. A new path settles in the dust.

And herein lies the brilliance of the tug-of-war between tradition and transformation so carefully balanced by The Wanting. They may not be your grandpa’s country -- or just maybe, they are.

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You can see The Wanting play the Jazz and Heritage Festival, April 26 on the Lagniappe Stage. You can take them home with you on vinyl at thewantingsongs.com.