The cicadas start before the musicians do. That has always been the way of it at 544 Esplanade Avenue, where the city's layered noise — the low percussion of the river, the tambourines on Royal Street drifting over the rooftops, the humid breath of (scent of jasmine in) a spring night — becomes something you don't simply hear but absorb. Daniel Lanois understood this when he opened Kingsway Studio in 1991. “The New Orleans thick moist air is a loyal, relentless conductor of tone,” said Lanois in his book, Soul Mining a Musical Life. So did the engineers - chief among them Mark Howard - and artists who followed him through those doors. Mark Howard, who returned on Saturday May 3rd to the room where so much of it began, to record New Orleans' finest in the very space that once held U2, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Emmylou Harris, Peter Gabriel, and a catalog of names that reads less like a guest list than like a consecration.
It is not a reunion. It is a reckoning. Thirty-five years is a long time in any city, but in New Orleans — where every corner holds a hundred years of memory — it carries a particular weight. The Italianate mansion built in 1848, grand enough to have housed a Prohibition-era restaurateur and the Easter parade-founding daughter who inherited his eccentricities, has outlasted all the uses men have put to it. It survived Nicolas Cage, who filmed there in 2002. It survived the storms, literal and otherwise, that the city absorbed in the years between. And it has arrived, under the stewardship of local entrepreneur and International House Hotel owner Sean Cummings, at this moment: older, luminous, and ready to record.
"There is a singular, stimulating aura to the place. A retreat from the 'real' world. Art with a capital 'A' seeps from the walls." - Bradley Bambarger · Billboard
That aura did not arrive with the furniture. It was built, measure by measure, in the years when Kingsway functioned as one of the most improbable recording studios in the world — improbable because the rooms that produced multi-platinum albums were not clinical or sterile but alive. Fifteen-foot ceilings. Marble floors. Crystal chandeliers throwing fractured light across walls that Lanois and Howard chose precisely because they sounded like no control room ever built. The idea was radical and, it turned out, obvious: put the music where the beauty is, and the beauty finds its way into the music.
Howard, who came up through Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton, Ontario, where he first crossed paths with Lanois, has spent a career chasing that principle across continents and into living rooms that became, temporarily, the most important recording spaces on earth. His memoir reads like a road atlas of great sound — the Neville Brothers' Yellow Moon, recorded in New Orleans before Kingsway even existed, as well as the albums that followed once the studio opened its doors on Esplanade . He has said, simply, that the best results come when the recording equipment lives in the same room as the music. Saturday's session was, in that sense, not an experiment. It was knowing confirmation.
"An intoxicatingly beautiful mansion, Kingsway represents much of what I love about Big Easy ambience." - Bradley Bambarger · Billboard
What Lanois established — and Howard helped build — was something the industry eventually gave a name: the Lanois sound. The phrase gets used loosely, applied to albums as disparate as Bono's arena anthems and Harris's Appalachian grief, but producer Trina Shoemaker — who worked within these walls and knows them the way a musician knows a chord — has always resisted the shorthand. "The rooms here have a really cool sound," she said. "Some call it the Lanois sound. I call it the sound of the rooms in the building at 544 Esplanade." That is not a correction. That is a location. The building is the instrument, and Saturday, Howard played it again.
Cummings, who acquired Kingsway in 2004 and renovated it alongside interior designer LM Pagano and architect Wayne Troyer, has kept faith with what the place demands. The Italian monastery table, the patinaed bar, the Cascade chandelier — these are not decorations. They are arguments, made in wood and light and iron, that certain rooms have a purpose that outlasts any single owner's ambitions. "A beautiful vision of the future in a breathtakingly historical setting," Marie Claire Maison called it. That tension — between the historical and the forward-looking, between what Kingsway was and what it might yet become — is exactly what Saturday's session inhabits.
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There is a temptation, with anniversaries, to be sentimental. To speak of what was lost, what passed, what can no longer be reclaimed. New Orleans understands this temptation better than most cities and has learned, again and again, to resist it. The music made here was never about preservation. It was about the living room (architecture or the space) as a conduit — between the artist and the room, the room and the city, the city and whoever was listening, (maybe the young apparition so many say they’ve seen.) That circuit, on Saturday night, closed again. The tape will roll, or the equivalent of tape will roll, and, in every good way, whatever the rooms at 544 Esplanade have been holding for 35 years found its way out.
“The great house was a crossroads for many, including a few stray dogs looking to ground themselves and write songs, like my friend Chris Whitley. I still welcome stray dogs into my house,” Lanois wrote in his book about the ebb and flow of Kingsway.
Cummings seems to have picked up where Lanois left off. International House and Kingsway have long been havens for the creative ones - the rebels and muses, artists each, who riff to a different rhythm. And, Saturday night honored this special space, with Cummings and Howard joining multiple generations of noise makers and noise lovers to drown in this city’s sound. As I sat on the edge of the original roman bath mining my soul, set to a landscape of Sorrento Lemon trees and queen palms and gazing at the beautifully lit Buddha, it came to me. Kingsway was there. The cicadas were there. The river's low hum was there. The musicians of this city — in whose hands the legacy of Kingsway lives whether they recorded here or not — were there. And somewhere in the space between what was played and what was heard, the soulful sound of the rooms in the building at 544 Esplanade did what it has always done. It answered.
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Event Details
Kingsway Studio: 35th Anniversary Live Recording Session
Saturday, May 3, 2026 · 544 Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans
Hosted by Sean Cummings · Engineered by Mark Howard
A live recording session with New Orleans' finest, in the living room at Kingsway — just as it was in 1991.
