From All Music Guide: It's impossible to consider The River in Reverse without taking the devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked upon New Orleans into account. Indeed, it's quite likely that this collaboration between Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint would not even have occurred if it weren't for that cataclysmic event. They've collaborated before -- Toussaint wrote horn charts for Costello's 1989 album Spike -- but neither had plans to work together until they appeared together at a September 2005 Madison Square Garden benefit concert for the victims of Katrina. That kick-started the album that became The River in Reverse. Initially, the plan was for the collaboration to be a songbook album, with Costello and Toussaint performing some highlights from Allen's rich songbook, and while the record bears some remnants of that blueprint -- seven of its 13 songs were written by Toussaint in the '60s and '70s -- the finished work evolved into an elegant, eloquent protest album crafted out of old songs and new. Co...

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