Podcasts about New Orleans, Louisiana

Saints football takes up more of this page than any other subject, and in the window these shows cover it is draft season. The same names cross between shows that sound nothing alike: Jordyn Tyson is in "Are Saints Interested in VERY Injured WR Jordyn Tyson?" on Saints Happy Hour and in a NewOrleans.Football title about the top 10; Alvin Kamara's future is argued on more than one show at once. Past the mock drafts the city arrives from another direction: levees and vanishing wetlands, Arthur Hardy on Mardi Gras, a cold case built around scouts in Troop 137, and a legislative session described by people who went to the Capitol to disrupt it.

What New Orleans is

New Orleans is Louisiana's largest city, on the Mississippi River near the Gulf of Mexico with Lake Pontchartrain to the north, much of it below sea level and kept dry by levees and pumps. It is known for Mardi Gras, jazz, Creole and Cajun cooking, the French Quarter, and for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the levees failed and most of the city flooded. The Saints are its NFL team, the Pelicans its NBA team.

Draft boards, contracts and the argument that never ends

NewOrleans.Football: Saints Podcast is the measured end. Nick Underhill and Mike Triplett think through decisions in real time, and the clips are evaluation: whether to spend a pick on a running back, safety or linebacker when three of the draft's best players sit at positions the league devalues; whether McKay Lemon, a 5-foot-11 receiver, fits despite fan skepticism. Locked On Saints, from Ross Jackson, works the same board with titles heavy with seven-round mocks and gets a prospect in his own voice: LSU receiver Chris Hilton Jr., the first player through all four all-star games in one draft process, saying that after a rough five years at LSU he was not going to leave anything to chance. Straight Up Saints is one host in a postgame argument; its Falcons clip is about losing, off a bye, to a team on a five-game skid without its starting quarterback, with two goal-line failures and missed field goals from 38 and 47 yards.

Saints Happy Hour and Saints Block Party Podcast are the rooms where the Saints are a shared condition. Happy Hour is a fast, profane panel that assumes familiarity with the old scars; its clips ask whether a team with the fewest rushing touchdowns in the NFL should give up on the run, whether to tank or play for morale, and why Ralph calls a loss in Miami perfect (it turned up a quarterback and a kicker). Block Party is Adam and Ryan a.k.a. Wolf at full volume: Kellen Moore refusing to answer about Kamara, which leaves Adam wondering whether Kamara is still a Saint, and Ryan on why Cam Jordan's contract feels personal. The Kamara thread runs into the show titled simply New Orleans Saints, where Deuce McAllister says turning 30 ends nothing ("Nothing. Go play."), and into a Block Party title, "EMERGENCY POD - Kamara is BACK".

New Orleans Saints Podcast, presented by Rouse's Market, is interviews, Erin Summers setting up a question and letting the answer run: John Silva, the team's international fan of the year ("I wake up and I eat Saints."), on the Paris game; Demario Davis on the difference between charity and being a change maker. Dunc & Holder, with Jeff Duncan and Larry Holder, is beat-writer conversation from 2020 and 2021 whose clips look back, ranking Saints touchdown celebrations from Joe Horn's cell phone to Jimmy Graham's goalpost dunk.

Zion, and what to do about him

Locked On Pelicans, from Jake Madison, is one voice starting from a blunt claim and working through fit, coaching and numbers. Its April clips are a coaching search: James Borrego praised by the team, Taylor Jenkins pitched as the coach the Pelicans and Zion Williamson need with an offense of threes, rim pressure and pick-and-rolls, and a 56-loss season that, unlike the other 55-loss teams, left no first-round pick. By September the titles carry Jamahl Mosley's name and ask whether running it back with Zion is a mistake. Polk and Kush comes at the same team sideways: comedian Andrew Polk and longtime local columnist Scott Kushner reach sports after a civic or food riff, gleefully petty and briefly sincere. One clip calls Zion the most relatable professional athlete ever, and when Jay Williams says Zion does not like the grind, they find him more relatable still; a later clip says it is time to trade him.

Water, then the legislature

Two shows treat the ground itself as the story. Floodlines, from The Atlantic, is a documentary in a plain, controlled register, and its narration states the premise: "New Orleans was built by levees and pumps", and drive long enough in any direction and you end up in water. The Katrina clips are voices: Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center phoning a reporter to ask "Mark, how high is your building?", Russell Honoré warning that sniper rumors could turn the city into a war zone. Behind The Lens, from The Lens, New Orleans' nonprofit investigative newsroom, has the coast in the present tense: Karen Gadbois's clip puts Louisiana down 2,000 square miles of wetlands and losing 16 more a year, "a football field every 100 minutes", and answers the shrug that this is just party town in the bayou by calling the region the most productive coastal estuary in North America south of Alaska. Its other clips are political, Republican lawmakers moving to eliminate the job Calvin Duncan won in a landslide, which Katie Rechdahl calls "less about efficiency than about power". Biz Talks adds Jesse Noel on the West Bank's flood protection getting one shot because every inch has to work in a hurricane.

LAST CALL: NEW ORLEANS DYKE BAR HISTORY PROJECT is an oral history of the city's disappearing dyke bar scene, but its clips here follow a third season to the Capitol: a 'Protect Trans Youth' banner briefly halting the Capitol and turning every representative around; bills copied from other states with "Colorado" still in the text; Pearl Ricks on how "save women's sports" weaponizes empathy. The speaker heard is careful not to undo what organizers in Baton Rouge have built, because it is not their neighborhood.

Krewes, an incubator and the musicians

Beyond Bourbon Street, an Insider's Guide to New Orleans is Mark Bologna's city show, and its clips lean on Arthur Hardy: the 2006 post-Katrina Mardi Gras as "the most special one" he ever covered; giving every krewe the same ink because "nobody puts on a bad parade on purpose"; Mardi Gras as free, family-friendly and "the most open celebration in the world." Its titles run from St. Roch Market to a traditional jazz camp. Biz Talks, with Kim Singletary, is the business register: the Greater New Orleans Food and Beverage Incubator on GEDCO's Churchill campus in Jefferson Parish, its funding brought to $8.7 million by a federal earmark, with Annalisa Kelly noting that LSU in Baton Rouge already has a waiting list for this kind of thing. Jonathan Freilich's interviews with New Orleans musicians are working-musician talk: vocalist Tony Green tracing a London washboard encounter into eight years touring England with a fusion skiffle band, and a frontman's education in empty clubs, flat tires and bad PAs.

Cold cases and haunted rooms

New Orleans Unsolved, from Anna Christie and Thanh Truong, is narrative true crime with the investigator inside the story. Christie is heard describing years of searching databases for unidentified kids matching the scouts in Troop 137, a state police detective agreeing to review the case, and pulling over on Canal Street to finally tell the people with her about the photos; another clip has her refusing demands for her notes, which will come from her "cold, dead hands". Big Easy Spirits covers the city's ghost stories and older crimes: Mac Rebennack turning Dr. John into a voodoo-rock stage act with glitter, snakes and chicken theatrics, a mummified severed head in Mary Oneida Toups's abandoned occult shop, a country-music-loving ghost at the Audubon Cottages. Its episodes here date from 2021.

Where to start

• For the Saints without the shouting: NewOrleans.Football: Saints Podcast, then Locked On Saints for the draft names.
• For the Saints as a shared condition: Saints Happy Hour or Saints Block Party Podcast.
• For the Pelicans: Locked On Pelicans for the basketball, Polk and Kush for the jokes about Zion.
• For the city rather than its teams: start with Floodlines, then Behind The Lens for the coast and the legislature now, and Beyond Bourbon Street for Mardi Gras.

The New Orleans feed on this page plays clips from these shows.