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MUSIC
New Orleans

Premiere: Mississippi Rail Company's 'Chocolate Pie'

Patrick Ryan
USA TODAY
New Orleans band Mississippi Rail Company.

Mississippi Rail Company hopes you're hungry — they're ready to serve up some Chocolate Pie.

The new song, now streaming on usatoday.com, evokes a big-band/swing sound, says vocalist/pianist Travers Geoffray. "Unfortunately I don't hear (that style) very often, so we wanted to do that with a bit of a food/sex theme to make it a little raunchy."

Formed three and a half years ago in New Orleans, Mississippi Rail Company is a young four-piece band that's putting a fresh spin on R&B. Citing influences such as blues singer Taj Mahal and jazz great Dr. John, their goal is "to take some of these older musical traditions and to do our own thing with it, make it a little modern," Geoffray says.

Chocolate Pie was recorded last September at Esplanade Studios in New Orleans and is the latest in an ongoing project the group is testing out: releasing one new song every month for an entire year. Rather than pen songs that need to fit a specific album blueprint, Geoffray prefers the freedom of writing on the fly, wrangling in different musicians (as he did for Chocolate Pie) and "doing the most we can with every song."

Inspired by Radiohead's In Rainbows release, listeners can either choose to download each song for free from the band's website or pay what they want for it. The experiment could eventually lead to a compilation album, Geoffray says, but for now, "we're just seeing how people value music and how they listen to it."

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