In 2004, the baby-faced, soul-patched singer-songwriter Marc Broussard barreled into national stardom with his hit “Home.” It’s a deep, swamp-rock pop jam paying homage to his hometown of Carencro, Louisiana — which the album he released it on, Carencro, was named for. Since then, Broussard has matured into a seasoned, grizzled, Bayou-soul powerhouse.
On Nov. 10, Broussard performs at the McDonald Theatre as part of his Carencro 20th anniversary tour. He will be performing all of Carencro in its entirety, as well as music from his latest album, Time is a Thief. “We’ve been refining the show for the past year,” Broussard says. “So the West Coast version of this show is the best one yet.”
Broussard says that he has been playing music his entire life due to the influence of his father, Ted Broussard, a Louisiana Hall of Fame guitar player and former member of the blue-eyed soul band the Boogie Kings. “He put me on stage singing Johnny B. Goode when I was 5-and-a-half-years-old,” Marc Broussard says. Starting at age 16, he played with his father’s band at a local bar every Friday, and sang at church every Sunday.
Eventually, a local restaurateur who had worked in the music industry took a chance on Broussard and funded and produced his first album, Momentary Setback in 2002. Broussard says that album “led to enough eyeballs to Island Def Jam to come down here and check out the old ball.” The night they came to watch him, Broussard performed the album to an audience of 1,000. “It was a good enough indication that we were the real deal,” he says. “I was in the studio shortly after that.”
After this, he put Carencro together as a love letter to his home, though Broussard says he had been writing tracks for it “since I started writing songs at 12 or 13,” while “Home” began as a Ted Broussard instrumental. When Marc Broussard added his deep baritone, washboard rhythms and an addicting beat, it skyrocketed him into the spotlight.
“That record means the world to me,” Marc Broussard says. He chose his hometown as his muse because, by the time he was 22, he says, “I had the good fortune of traveling pretty frequently, and I quickly realized just how special my home is.” Carencro is a small suburb of Lafayette, Louisiana, with just 12,000 people. He says that “first and foremost, the food is the best in the world. There’s no place better for food.”
But he continues that, more importantly, “my family’s here. My mother and father are very dear to me, it was always just really important to stick around” he says. Broussard, who has moved four times in his life, has lived on the same one-mile stretch of road “for probably 38 out of my 42 years on Earth.” Twenty years after the release of Carencro, his hometown is more important to him than ever. He says, “this is where I’m raising my children, and I plan on staying here for a long, long time.”
This makes it all the more special for him to honor two decades of the album. “I don’t ever get tired of playing these songs,” he says. Because he has played Carencro tracks like “Home” and “The Wanderer” for basically every setlist he’s had, it’s only natural for him to play the album in its entirety. However, now he’s got a much grittier, rougher, bluesier edge to him, which will be reflected in his newest album, also featured in his setlist, Time is a Thief.
As the first original music he’s released in seven years, Thief was a dream album for him. It was compiled out of a batch of old material he had been sitting on. He had spent two and a half years attempting to contact Jeremy Most, a producer he really wanted to work with him. After never hearing back, Broussard eventually reached out to producer Eric Krasno to create the album.
One day in a phone call with Broussard, Krasno said that one of his friends was there and really wanted to help them. “What do you mean here?” Broussard asked. Krasno responded, “Jeremy Most, he’s been living in my guest bedroom for the last couple months while he looks for a place out here.”
To Broussard, the fact that the illusive Most just happened to live in Krasno’s spare bedroom the whole time felt “like the universe was giving me a little wink.”
The trio put together a soulful, funky album that Broussard couldn’t be happier with. “It’s just got heart, it’s got grit. It’s very, yeah, it’s got it’s gritty and dirty and all the right places,” he says.
In regard to his performance at McDonald Theatre Broussard says “bring your dancing shoes out to the show, because we’re coming to party.”