Wednesday March 12th, 2025
Introduction
Hello and thanks for reading this blog – in case you’re wondering, my name is Serge Villanova and I am the president of Stranded South Music, Media and Events. My debut record, “Prizefighter” is coming out and streaming world-wide on May 23rd 2025 – I’ve recently released a few singles from the record and you can listen to them here. You can also pre-order the record here.
In 2021, immediately following the pandemic, I founded a music festival in the small town of Harahan, just outside New Orleans. The goal of that inaugural event was to start to heal as a community and to bring people back together, where they belong. On November 8th 2025, we will be celebrating our 5th year with the 5th Annual Harahan Music Festival and Food Drive, so I hope to see you at the Harahan VFW located on 1133 Hickory Avenue.
The following entries will be about the process of recording “Prizefighter,” and founding/producing the Harahan Music Festival and Food Drive…Now let’s get down to business!
Five Years since Covid: A Retrospective
Part One: Inspiration to Create?
Inspiration can come in the form of many things: music, art, movies, special moments with a friend, old family photos…
Sue Bickerstaff in Texas (Grandmother).
…perhaps even during times of great turmoil, like an international health crisis of historical proportion.
It would be great if we could find a way to bottle up just what it is that inspires us, pull it out when we’re short on fresh ideas or new things to do, but I guess most of time it’s a waiting game. Until something strikes us like a lightning bolt, or maybe until we have no other choice but to act.
Drawing: Horse of Louisiana
Five years seems to have some significance to me at the moment. It’s the amount of time it took me to record, mix, and fully produce the eight original songs that will be on my debut record “Prizefighter.” As previously stated, the 5th year of the Harahan Music Festival and Food Drive, which has raised over 12k items of food for the St. Rita Food Pantry, is taking place at the end of 2025. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it’s been 5 years since the world stopped due to the Covid Pandemic, and I was inspired to create something positive from a bad situation.
I suppose that is where this retrospective will start: where I found the inspiration to start a music festival, and how I found the motivation to finally begin recording my debut record (but not before a shameless plug of my new single).
“Haunted Mansion in Your Eyes” ( 2025)
The End of an Era
The end of 2019 came with a bang. At the time, pre-pandemic, I was working part-time at two different restaurants in the New Orleans area and also working in sales for Basin Street Records, a storied Jazz label where I’d worked since graduating from LSU in 2009. I immediately started interning there upon graduation and would work there until the declaration of Covid as an International Pandemic…
Jann Darsie from New Orleans’ The Ella Project was kind enough to interview me about my artistic and musical beginnings, spanning from college to starting my own festival, and you can read that article HERE.
Working for Basin Street Records and alongside New Orleans’ best Jazz musicians including trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, clarinetist Dr. Michael White, and percussionist Jason Marsalis (to name a few) was fundamental to my artistry and development, and I will get into those experiences and lessons in future blogs. For now, I will just say I learned a great deal from the friends I made in the decade I worked for Mark Samuels, and was inspired and motivated daily from the talented people I was fortunate enough to be working around.
With Braden Piper and President Mark Samuels of Basin Street Records
A New Beginning
The start of Covid, for me, meant the end of a job I’d had for over a decade in the city of New Orleans, time on my hands, a growing paranoia of what was lurking on the other side of tomorrow, and an unexpected move from uptown New Orleans to a brand-new residence in an unfamiliar and somewhat isolated city in South Louisiana…that had a killer back shed.
Working on new park sign for Zeringue Park in Harahan (2022 at Stranded South Studio)
The start of 2020 was certainly a recalibration of sorts. I was without direction, income (aside from governmental assistance), and for the most part free as a bird in terms of responsibilities. Of course, because of the shutdown, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.
Months prior, after receiving the phone call from my boss (a truly wonderful man) to tell me I had to be let go because of the pandemic, I found myself walking down Jefferson Highway, near my new apartment in Harahan, which was a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River, to process my situation and “new normal.”
With the oddest sense of clarity, comfort, fear, and anticipation as well – the kind of mixed emotions that come with being freshly laid off at the start of a mysterious world-wide health emergency that forced the avoidance of human contact, and for many, a way to make a living – I felt the connection and presence of my ancestors, making their way by foot or by horse, through the treacherous landscapes that defined their own stories.
Carr Smith (grandfather) with brother (Mississippi).
I could feel deep in my spirit the unpredictable world that they knew, and I sensed, as lightly as the breeze blowing from the river water onto my face, the adventure that was to be made of it…with a little help from a new city
Inaugural First Annual Harahan Music Festival and Food Drive Announcement Video (featuring Bill Ellzey) | March 2021
Back to 2020, without a job, anywhere to go, or anything to do, I did what any aspiring music producer with a dream of recording a full-length record would do, I turned my back shed into a recording studio and got to work!
One night, while visiting my parents, I would discover a treasure trove of old training photos of my grandfather Carr who was a paratrooper during World War 2 before serving as a detective for the Dallas Police Force.
Unlike the majority of my relatives, I never knew the man all that much…and we never connected while he was alive.
Strange as it seems, it would be a relationship birthed in the afterlife.
Of course, in most of the photos that would make their way into the video of my original song “Down to South Texas,” my grandfather and grandmother Sue were younger than I was then. I remember that fact striking me and inspired by photos of them going through a very challenging time in their own lives, I was able to reach new sonic abilities in writing, instrumentation including learning the violin, as well as recording and production in what was now a place for me to direct my emotions: Stranded South Studio.
And without knowing it, with a handful other hard-won musical ideas in my back pocket, I’d truly begun working on “Prizefighter,” and I’d taken the first step to accomplishing my lifelong goal of recording an album.
“Down to South Texas” (2020) would become a demo to the title track “Prizefighter” from upcoming debut record.
Fueled by the music I was producing every day I’d also unknowingly started down a path that would lead to making the first move to creating a new community event in my new home of Harahan (more on that in the next blog).
Through the end of 2020, I would continue to write new music, much of it inspired by the painful time that defined the Covid Era: uncertainty, loneliness, confusion, and sometimes illness and even worse.
Things weren’t all that bad, I admit, but they weren’t great for anyone. You could still go outside for fresh air and exercise and of course the regulations and restrictions seemed to come and go abruptly as the city of New Orleans, including its residents, fell into even more dire economic circumstances. During a walk one day at Audubon Park, I would come up with the idea for a song about feeling like a ghost…of a ghost town.
Coming Soon: Part Two