Marc Broussard’s “Chance Worth Taking” Earns the Risk
Thirty seconds into “You’ll Be Sorry,” the opening cut on Marc Broussard’s Chance Worth Taking, the question is already answered. The Louisiana soul singer — the guy who made his name twenty years ago with Carencro and a song called “Home” that played over closing credits and coffee-shop speakers for a decade — is not dipping a toe into the blues. He is standing in it up to his neck.
That voice, the one Bayou-soul fans have heard worn smooth by two decades of touring, sounds different here. Rougher at the edges. Hungrier. Marc Broussard Chance Worth Taking is his fourteenth studio album, his first on Joe Bonamassa’s KTBA Records, and the first time he has committed an entire record to original blues material. Consequently, it lands as the pivot his catalog has been circling for years without quite taking.
The Album
Bonamassa and Josh Smith produced the record alongside bassist Calvin Turner, who also handles horn and string arrangements — a production team that has quietly become one of the most reliable hit-makers in modern blues. Bonamassa plays on ten of the fourteen tracks. However, the album never devolves into a Bonamassa session with a guest vocalist. Broussard is the gravitational center, and the band orbits him.
The sonic palette is bigger than anything Broussard has cut before. Reese Wynans handles piano, Hammond B3, and keys with authority. Lemar Carter drives the rhythm section on drums. Meanwhile, a full horn section — Steve Patrick and Tyler Jaeger on trumpet, Barry Green on trombone, Mark Douthit and Jimmy Bowland on saxophone — delivers the album’s punch and cinematic swagger.
“No More” — The Ballad That Makes the Case
Track four is where the skeptics go quiet. “No More,” a Broussard-Bonamassa co-write, opens with stately strings and Broussard’s yearning lead vocal, then builds into a sweeping cinematic ballad anchored by Bonamassa’s soaring guitar. Furthermore, the arrangement never pushes the guitar hero to the front — it lets the song breathe. Broussard’s voice does the heavy lifting, aching and commanding in equal measure.
The track works because the collaboration works. You can hear two songwriters actually writing together, not a star producer imposing a template on a guest vocalist. Additionally, it’s the kind of ballad that would have slotted onto any Otis Redding or Bobby Bland record from the sixties without raising an eyebrow.
“Fever” — Roadhouse Grit With Horns
“Fever” pivots the record into different territory. Josh Smith takes the lead guitar chair here, delivering stinging roadhouse leads over funky rhythm guitars, punchy horns, and an insistent beat. Consequently, the track feels like a live dance-floor cut captured in the studio — modern in production but entirely rooted in the Stax-era Memphis tradition.
The horn arrangement is the star. Calvin Turner writes charts that cut rather than cushion, and Broussard rides the groove without ever oversinging it.
“Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler” — Louisiana Earns Its Cameo
The closer, co-written with Trombone Shorty and featuring him on horns, is the move that could have gone wrong. However, it doesn’t. The “Laissez Street Parade Intro” opens with a brief second-line groove, then “Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler” launches into a New Orleans parade shuffle that sounds lived-in rather than tourist-bait.
Shorty’s horn work and Broussard’s Carencro roots make it credible. Moreover, ending a blues album with a Louisiana celebration instead of a ballad tells you where Broussard’s head is.
Artist Context
Broussard grew up in Carencro, Louisiana, the son of guitarist Ted Broussard — who put Marc onstage at age five and a half. He signed to Island Records in his early twenties, broke through nationally with 2004’s Carencro and its single “Home,” and has spent the last two decades recognized as one of his generation’s finest Bayou-soul vocalists. Nevertheless, the catalog has always leaned toward soul, R&B, and singer-songwriter material rather than blues proper.
The KTBA deal changes the framing. Bonamassa’s label has spent the last decade functioning as a home for artists who want to commit to the blues without the major-label pressure to soften it. Samantha Fish took her own sharper turn with the label’s support, and the Bonamassa-Smith-Turner production brain trust has a track record of pushing artists deeper into the idiom rather than diluting them for crossover.
Broussard himself has been candid about the learning curve. “I’m still more versed in soul music than in blues,” he told press ahead of the release, “but I’m getting an education in the genre and its history from Joe and Josh.” Consequently, Chance Worth Taking plays like a document of that education — a soul singer working out what his voice sounds like inside a blues framework.
The Louisiana connection also matters. Broussard’s home state has its own deep blues tradition, covered in our complete history of Louisiana swamp blues — the Baton Rouge and New Orleans scenes that shaped Lightnin’ Slim, Slim Harpo, and Lazy Lester. Broussard is not a swamp blues artist, but the Bayou-soul vocabulary he built his career on sits in the same regional lineage. Chance Worth Taking finally makes that lineage audible.
The Verdict
This is a Sunday-afternoon record and a 1 a.m. record at the same time. The ballads — “No More,” “These Walls,” “Whispers” — reward headphones and a quiet room. The grooves — “Fever,” “Let Me Take You Out Tonight,” “Satisfaction Guaranteed” — belong on the car stereo with the windows down. Furthermore, the closing New Orleans sequence is the kind of thing you play for friends who don’t think they like the blues.
For longtime Broussard fans, Chance Worth Taking is the record where the catalog finally breaks open. For blues fans who have watched KTBA Records turn into one of the most interesting label ecosystems in the genre, it’s further evidence that the Bonamassa-Smith-Turner production team knows how to bring out a vocalist. Moreover, for anyone tracking the broader modern blues artists pushing the form forward, Broussard has just entered the conversation with both hands.
The title isn’t modest, but it isn’t empty either. A soul singer with a twenty-year catalog bet his fifteenth album on a genre he’s still learning. The bet paid off. Consequently, the next one — and there will be a next one, because records like this don’t end careers, they redirect them — is going to be worth watching.
Chance Worth Taking is out April 17, 2026 on KTBA Records{:target=”_blank”}.
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