"Anybody in the house remember Digney Fignus' "Girl With The Curious Hand?" Yep, it's the same one that won the MTV "Basement Tapes" contest in 1984. Well, Digney is back with a "Cajun Opera" that knocked both of us out so, we thought we'd share it with the class and make this week's "New Music Monday" feature album "Trouble On The Levee" by Digney Fignus." STEVE AND JOHNNIE, WGN, CHICAGO

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The “Cajun Opera” started to come together when I met Dave Mattacks in the summer of 2004 at the National Folk Festival in Bangor Maine. He agreed to play drums on a few tunes I had written, so we went into the studio in December of 2004 and recorded the first six songs on the CD. The project was beginning to take shape, and a musical theme was emerging, so I wrote a few more tunes that we recorded in May of 2005, (Mothers Day), to complete the recording.

As I was sequencing the songs something strange happened. The characters in the songs started to take on lives of their own. They began telling me the story of Johnnie Boudreaux and his adventures on the river. How a man “too good lookin’ for his own good” could live himself to death, and still manage a laugh at his own funeral.

It’s a story about love, lust, Voodoo and incest, moonshine, gangsters, and cheatin’ fools. Wrap that up in a natural disaster and you’ve got Johnnie’s world, New Orleans 1927.

I hope you enjoy it.

Best Wishes, DF