Paul Sanchez

As the Canal Street ferry churned across the Mississippi on a recent afternoon, Paul Sanchez and jazz singer John Boutte stood at the rail, watching St. Louis Cathedral recede.

Boutte, a committed French Quarter-ite, relished the Algiers-bound perspective. "Sometimes it's good," he said, "to see things from the other side."

Sanchez smiled. "That's what I'm doing. But I'm taking it to the extreme."

In November, Sanchez left Cowboy Mouth, his primary musical outlet for 16 years. He and his wife, Shelly, still have no permanent home, after Hurricane Katrina's breached levees poured 9 feet of water into their Gentilly house. It has since been razed.

And so, at 47, Sanchez finds himself looking at life from the other side.

"We were so indecisive after Katrina," he said. "It got worse and worse. At first we couldn't decide where to live. Then we couldn't decide where to go on vacation. Then we couldn't even decide where to eat.

"Literally, the first decision I made since my house got flooded was to leave Cowboy Mouth."

Even as he barnstormed through 3,000-plus Mouth shows, he nurtured a side career as a singer-songwriter. With an acoustic guitar, he sketched sly, intimate scenes, alternately bittersweet, humorous and tender.

That is now his primary occupation. His new, seventh solo CD, "Between Friends," features guest vocalists -- including Boutte, Susan Cowsill, Theresa Andersson, Darius Rucker of Hootie & the Blowfish, and Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra -- interpreting his songs.

On Monday, Christmas Night, he'll co-headline Carrollton Station with former Deadeye Dick bassist Mark Miller. He's also booked at d.b.a. on Jan. 4.

Beyond that, "we're going to go a little slower, let the roux thicken, and see if we can't have a tastier gravy as a result," Sanchez said. "I'm doing it the New Orleans way. Whether it's singing, eating, drinking, . . . people in New Orleans take their time, because life is to be savored."

Days after quitting the Mouth, Sanchez and his wife left for a previously scheduled three-week vacation in Belize. They fell in love with the country and rented an apartment in San Pedro, a beach town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

Sanchez plans to spend the next few months strumming in beachside bars, returning to the United States for short tours.

"There's probably no musician I have more respect for than John Boutte. He sings in small rooms, but he sings all over the world and makes his living at it. He sings with a mastery that few singers ever achieve. That's a great life to aspire to. That's a New Orleans musician.

"So there won't be a tour bus or posters any more. I know what I gave up. It was 16 years of my life -- blood, sweat, tears, laughter, joy and pain. Fred, Griff and I built that band together. It was a great ride. But I gave it up for the right reasons."

"We weren't the most musical band, and 'nuance' didn't exist in our lexicon," Sanchez said. "But Fred gives a hundred percent. To be onstage with him, you have to give 100 percent. You're drawn into that energy. And that's why the audience is there."

They logged 200-plus nights on the road annually, surviving multiple breakups with managers and record labels to build a dedicated national following.

During a manager search in the late 1990s, they hired Jon Birge, a Tulane graduate and former CBS Records exec. Subsequently, Sanchez said, his relationship with LeBlanc, always tempestuous, disintegrated even further.

So Sanchez was disappointed to learn that his bandmates had rehired Birge this summer.

"I'm not saying he's a bad man, or a bad manager," Sanchez said. "But I found some of the things he was doing alienating. I tried to work with him for three months, and I couldn't."

So Sanchez walked. Ironically enough, "the year and a half after Katrina was the proudest I'd been of what we did. We played some great rock 'n' roll shows.

"We'd each lost parents, we'd lost New Orleans. We stayed on the road to work through that, partly because we couldn't come home and partly because we didn't know what else to do. It forged a bond.

"But the vibe was changing every day. After Katrina, I lost everything. I wasn't going to lose my love for Fred, Griff and Cowboy Mouth. I wanted to quit while I still loved them."

In Belize, he realized the full ramifications of his resignation.

"That was the scariest part, knowing that I didn't have a house, a job, a manager or a booking agent," Sanchez said. "What am I going to do? Show up with a job application that says, 'I played 16 years in Cowboy Mouth'?"

"The first few days in San Pedro, I was a little in shock and a little sad. But it's a wonderful, healing place. I was glad to be there and look at life as present and future, not just past."

Three years ago, he started hosting informal recording sessions at Beatin Path guitarist Mike Mayeux's home studio in Chalmette. When Mayeux evacuated before Katrina, he saved the hard drive containing the recordings that became "Between Friends."

Guest vocalists took Sanchez songs in unexpected directions. He planned to trade lead vocals with Peter Holsapple on "Lonely Wasted and Blue." Then Theresa Andersson, originally slated to sing background, took a turn.

"Peter looked at me halfway through the first take and went, 'We're fired,' " Sanchez said. "She wiped us both off the track."

Former Jolene singer John Crooke remade "Fool's Gold" from an upbeat country song to a slow dirge. Bonerama's Mark Mullins recast "No Bothering You" as "old New Orleans" with drummer Herman Ernest. Kevin Griffin croons "Someone Again," then has fun with the children's song "Wake-y-up-o."

After Hootie drummer Jim Sonifeld recorded "Leaving," his bandmates reworked the track for the 2005 Blowfish album "Looking for Lucky" and a subsequent live CD.

Sanchez wrote the "folky protest song" "Wake Up" with Hootie guitarist Mark Bryan as a carefully considered anti-war anthem. "We wanted to say we didn't agree with the war," Sanchez said. "But he had a friend going to Iraq, and I had a nephew going. So we didn't want to be negative. We wanted to say, 'I love you, but I wish there was another way.' "

Boutte sang a new arrangement by multi-instrumentalist Loren Pickford, a style Sanchez dubbed "Creole swamp protest."

"I learned so much from everybody," he said. "It was a fantastic experience."

Sanchez lost the remaining stock of his first six solo CDs -- as well as the master tapes -- in his flooded house. He asked fans to send copies, so he could dub tracks for the upcoming "Washed Away" compilation.

He sees a mixed, but hopeful, message in its title.