Picture a small jazz pub somewhere along the Mississippi. There’s dingy lighting, not enough chairs and the smell of stale beer hanging in the air. The stage is barely big enough for a ramshackle piano and two barstools.

But it provides a warm refuge from a cold winter’s night.

Without any of the noisy patrons noticing, the middle aged tannie and her entourage of two take their places. The sound of guitars being warmed up fills the small room. The upright piano timidly breaks through.

The tannie sings ‘New Orleans is drowning. Soon be under water. Ain’t that a dirty shame.’

She sounds like Tom Waits.

‘Oceans are rising higher. World is getting hot. Deny it all you want to. Coz New Orleans is going down.’

Everything around me fades away.

‘And are you ready to say goodbye to New Orleans? To the trumpets and the saxophones and the ragtime blues piano? And the nightclubs on the streets and the whaling guitars?’

Barbara Lynch is in fact Canadian and I have not ever seen her perform live, but this is the vision her second album ‘In the Nickelodeon’ evokes in me.