Soul and The City – Kristin Diable digs deep on her new album

The first time I heard Kristin Diable perform live, I was sitting right next to her. We were both in the control room at KLSU radio, staring across the desk at the deejay. All of 19, she was there to perform on air. As for me, I wasn’t much older, and I was well content to sneak in my interview questions during the station breaks.

Impossibly youthful and pretty, Diable had a voice equally so—almost crystalline in its delicacy, a dainty, blonde piece of pottery.

But that was nearly a decade ago, and something mighty has happened in the time between. Promise has been replaced by strength and excitement by soul.

Diable’s cup is full now, and the potter’s handprints are all over her new album, Kristin Diable & The City.

This is a magnum opus, 12 songs of road-tested Southern soul and cheeky Big Easy bravado, and it cements the artist’s transformation into a singer-songwriter of incredible substance.

The Baton Rouge native says she feels her voice has finally come into its own, both literally and figuratively.

“I can feel it in my throat,” Diable says. “Sometimes it feels like it has a life of its own, and it seems to fill in a bigger space than it did before.”

“My River” turns the enviable view from her French Quarter apartment into a universal proclamation of place and community. Diable and her band recorded the entire album, most of it live and with minimal overdubs, from that apartment overlooking the Mighty Mississippi.

“We wanted to make a record without the pressure and time and budget limitations of a studio where the clock was ticking,” Diable says. “It was important for us to be able to just be present in the songs and with each other, without having to consider outside factors.”

Stand-out tune “I’ve Been Searching” reveals that comfortable, lived-in sound as it gallops along on a circular groove and Diable’s honey-tongued Southern drawl. “Love is gonna carry us,” she sings on the track, which never tires willing ears; it digs its way deep into a quiet, intimate place—the place that stuff off the radio dares not wander, much like Wilco’s recent “One Sunday Morning.”

Warm, strutting horn blossoms burst through the Delta blues of “Water Keeps Rising,” while multi-instrumentalist Casey McAllister, a longtime staple of the Baton Rouge music scene—and a former 225 designer—adds tasty currents of shade and color to Diable’s melodically rich compositions.

In another 10 years, she’ll be even better, but why wait?