• He wrote a letter flawless both in handwriting and grammar and punctuation in response to an invitation to join the academic games team. He was interested in participating but couldn't make the opening meeting. The fact that he took the trouble to respond showed an exceptional level of maturity.
• He turned out to be an outstanding member of the team for four years, contributing to local and national titles.
• Keith contributed his literary talents as Editor-in-Chief of the yearbook and Assistant Editor of the newspaper. He was also a member of the National Honor Society.

In an interview for thebrowser.com, Keith described growing up in New Orleans surrounded by music.

It makes for a different kind of rhythm in your step. It is a very different city from most cities in North America. The joke is that New Orleans is the northernmost city of the Caribbean as opposed to one of the southernmost cities of the United States. I actually grew up in the sub­urbs of New Orleans [New Orleans East], which are not terribly different from the suburbs of any other town. But during Mardi Gras and the festival season the whole city is affected. My family was very enthusiastic in its participation in ... Mardi Gras. Also my father had a col­lection of New Orleans rhythm and blues records, which he started as a boy in the 1950s, so I heard a lot of that sort of music in the house growing up.

As I became a teenager I sort of dismissed that music as old man's music. I was listening to whatever the pop­ular hard rock band was of the day. But now I have come full circle. And now that I have written and hung out with people like Fats Domino I realize how hip and cool that music is that my dad was listening to!

• His dad's record collection survived Hurricane Betsy in 1965, although it took "countless hours scrubbing muck and mold from his vintage vinyl" while a refugee in central Texas.

After earning a degree at Texas A&M, Keith returned to New Orleans intent on a writing career.

• He first contributed articles to Offbeat magazine before mov­ing to The Times-Picayune in 1996 to become music critic, a position he still holds even after the paper's reorganization in 2012.
• What a job! He gets to combine two loves, music and wri­ting, not to mention a permanent pass to each of the music festivals in the city. There is no end of inspiration for articles.
• Along the way, he has written obituaries for many New Or­leans musical luminaries. He has also written for Rolling Stone and chronicled his first years as a father in the Pica­yune.
• He recently covered the many musical events in the city the week of the Super Bowl as well as the pregame and halftime shows.

Keith has written this about his Katrina experience:

I rode out Hurricane Katrina inside the newspaper's stout brick headquarters. As a music critic, death and destruction are not normally my beat, but when rising floodwaters forced the paper's staff to evacuate eighty miles to Baton Rouge, I joined a small band of reporters and photographers who remained behind to chronicle the unfolding devastation. ... I witnessed firsthand the suf­fering caused by official ineptitude and negligence at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and elsewhere.

• Living out of a backpack, he spent nights in Houma, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Houston.
• Keith got a chance to cover a music festival in his hometown again on Halloween weekend just two months after the storm, "a downsized yet scrappy version" of the annual Voodoo Experience.
• The resumption of the city's rich musical life served as a barometer for the rebirth of the entire area.

 

Keith Spera, Times-Picayune
Music Critic

Keith Spera 1984-5

• Each of the 13 chapters deals with a different musician or band and their experience of Katrina and its aftermath.
• His subjects run the gamut of musical genres from Pete Fountain to Fats Domino to the rapper Mystikal.
• Many chapters are expansions of articles he wrote for the Picayune.
• Jason Berry wrote about the book: Spera moves seamlessly from one idiom and disparate artist to another, carrying a contagious sense of wonder.
• On the occasion of the book's publication in paperback, Keith wrote a TP article "What I learned as a first-time author." One of his points was:
  Every reviewer should be a reviewee at least once.
  Musicians, I feel your pain. I now understand what it's like to invest countless hours in a creative endeavor ... and then watch helplessly as your creation is released, defenseless, into the cruel world to be criticized. Or, even worse, ignored.

You haven't been ignored here, Keith.