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Meet The Neighbors: Tess Brunet Offers 'a Music Education'

Tess Brunet with Agnes the cockatiel
Ann Marie Awad
Tess Brunet with Agnes the cockatiel
Tess Brunet with Agnes the cockatiel
Credit Ann Marie Awad
Tess Brunet with Agnes the cockatiel

Meet The Neighbors introduces you to some of the remarkable people who live and work in the Baton Rouge area. Do you know someone we should meet? E-mail us at news@wrkf.org and keep up with Meet The Neighbors, follow us on Tumblr.

In a cozy little duplex in Beauregard Town, Tess Brunet runs a neighborhood record store. 

The Houma native opened the store with her partner Patrick -- he’s from Maine. And he’s the one who came up with the name, Lagniappe Records.

“He was so enamored by South Louisiana and New Orleans and he’s discovering all these things about this region and you know Lagniappe is you know it’s normal to me I know what that is, people anywhere else besides here they see that word and they’re like ‘how do you say that?" she jokes. "He fell in love with this area.”

After touring the country as a musician, Brunet landed in New Orleans, but she kept being drawn back to Baton Rouge.  

Credit Ann Marie Awad

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  It’s kind of the opposite of what people do; they usually live in Baton Rouge and always go to New Orleans, I was living in New Orleans and always going to Baton Rouge. There’s a lot of young people who are trying to make their city better and that’s infectious.

It’s a vibe too, you come in here and it’s a vibe - a converted house in Beauregard Town, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Baton Rouge which hopefully, they’re building up around it, it’s going to be more pedestrian and biking friendly - we want to be your neighborhood record shop, literally.

I started collecting vinyl - the earliest I can remember is probably five or six years old... And I had older siblings that were much older, and our age gap was drastically different. I was three and four years old when the youngest - next to youngest - was in high school. And she had her own car. So she was out hanging out, you know, cruisin' the mall parking lot, man. And so that left her record collection to me. And I did that with my dad's collection too. And I know a lot of people when CDs came out where like oh throw their vinyl out! CDs are the wave of the future! But I never did that, I held on to all my vinyl.

Credit Ann Marie Awad

  I didn’t want to operate as an online thing. It’s boring, there’s no interaction with people, you can’t share your love of vinyl with someone else, you can’t geek out to a record and like pull it out and play it, put your hands on it and check out the liner notes and check out the artwork and someone standing next to you feels the same way about this particular record and you just trip out on it. You can’t do that online, you know?

I think what you should get out of your local record shop is a music education. You should walk out of there having some piece of knowledge that you didn’t have before you walked in. I just firmly believe that. I feel like that’s a true record shop. 

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Tell us about someone remarkable in your community. Get in touch with us via Facebook or Twitter, e-mail us at news@wrkf.org

To keep up with Meet The Neighbors, follow us on Tumblr.

Copyright 2021 WRKF. To see more, visit WRKF.

Ann Marie Awad
Ann Marie came a long way to WRKF. Originally from Buffalo, NY, where she was a freelance print reporter, she moved to New York City to get a masters in journalism from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. During her time at CUNY, she interned with Brooklyn's Heritage Radio Network and Philadelphia's WHYY FM. When she's not wielding a microphone, Ann Marie loves comic books, politics and a great cup of coffee.

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