Meschiya Lake’s Coat of Many Colors

Meschiya Lake has no shortage of accolades: NPR, OffBeat, WWOZ, Gambit, KEXP, the Sun Valley Jazz Festival, the Danish Music Awards, fellow musicians, and fans throughout Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, the U.K, the Netherlands, and Ireland revere her. The name “Meschiya” even means “Messiah” in Hebrew, and yet, for all her extraordinary accomplishments, she’s still scrappy, still a fighter, still an impossibly hard worker. It has taken a lifetime for her to love herself the way her listeners do.

Lake and I met up over several weeks, at a series of coffeeshops and music venues, and drank a variety of caffeinated, decaffeinated, and boozy drinks, one of which spelled an untimely death for a curious fly. We attracted stray cats, swapped book suggestions, shared immune-boosting tinctures and opened up about heavy topics before I even had the chance to press “record.” So here we are, jumping in from the middle…

Read the whole article, by Sabrina Stone, in The New Orleans Arts Rag Volume 1