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After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Cowboy Mouth singer Fred LeBlanc wanted to make a statement.

He knew his city. He knew what it needed — not sympathy. Not a declaration of purpose. Merely a statement to the rest of the world — we’re still here, and life goes on.

“I didn’t want to write a song that would be, ‘Boo-hoo, poor us, poor New Orleans; we miss it,’ and I didn’t want to write a corny, ‘New Orleans is coming back!’ kind of song,” LeBlanc told The Daily Times this week. “I just wanted to write a song that acknowledged how I was feeling — that we were down, but we weren’t out. And to me, one of the most fun times of the year is Mardi Gras.

“So with ‘Avenue’ (off the band’s 2006 album, “Voodoo Shoppe”), I wanted to create this juxtaposition. I wanted to say, ‘This happened, and it’s bad, but the marching bands will still roll and the parade will happen again.’ It was my way of putting my arms around my city and saying, ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’”

If New Orleans is a city of gritty perseverance and unbridled revelry, then Cowboy Mouth may well be one of its best ambassadors. The band formed in the early 1990s around LeBlanc, a former member of the power trio Dash Rip Rock. Over the years LeBlanc has remained the driving force and focal point behind Cowboy Mouth, which enjoyed several modern rock hits that, while modestly successful, never quite reached the status of mainstream success obtained by other groups that came along around the same time, like Counting Crows.

Not that such a measuring stick matters to LeBlanc, or to the band’s fans. The group’s performances have been likened to “a religious experience,” and whether the band is performing one of its hits (“Jenny Says,” “Disconnected,” “Love of My Life”) or one of the songs that the Cowboy Mouth faithful participate in enthusiastically (“Everybody Loves Jill,” where audience members throw red spoons on stage), there’s always an intensity and enthusiasm to a live show by Cowboy Mouth that few acts can match.

“What I try to do, and what I think the band successfully does, is to get the audience to pull themselves out of themselves,” LeBlanc said. “These days in popular culture and the world we live in, everything is so self-conscious. There are very few places where adults or even kids can go and completely let themselves go and let it all hang out in a positive way.”

Part of that revelry is no doubt tied to the band’s New Orleans roots. Which is why, when the group was in an Atlanta studio working on “Voodoo Shoppe” while Katrina rampaged through its hometown, LeBlanc found himself shifting directions and shaping the album to address the devastation and its aftermath.

“On one hand, it was really hard watching all of this from Atlanta, but at the same time, I would walk outside of the hotel after watching hours and hours and hours of my home being destroyed right in front of my eyes, and people couldn’t have been nicer or more empathetic or more welcoming,” he said. “That got me thinking — these people were going to school. They were going to work. They were getting on with their lives, and that’s when I understood that life is going to go on, and you can either be part of the flow of it or let it drown you.

“Even though Katrina knocked the hell out of us, we don’t stop living. If anything, it gives you more of an impetus to live and to be alive and to appreciate everything that goes along with it.”

If the disaster taught him anything, it’s a newfound respect for the resilience of both his city and its residents. Despite the news focus on the damage and its lasting impact, despite the political mishandling and the corruption and the slow rebuild, the city goes on, LeBlanc said. Despite the threat of future hurricanes, the people stay — because of what New Orleans is and what it represents.

“The thing that makes New Orleans unique is the resilience of the people,” he said. “We’re a city that always has, against all reasonable odds, celebrated ourselves. We think pretty highly of ourselves down here, because we know we’ve got it pretty good — this is a pretty easy place to live in terms of the food and the culture and the music.

“And that’s what Cowboy Mouth celebrates — the nature of life. We’re far from being Up With People, but we’re very celebratory of life and the good and bad aspects of it. We celebrate the pleasures as well as the heartaches, because it’s all part of life’s rich pageant.”

Right now, the band is wrapping up work on its first DVD — “And the Name of the Band Is …,” which is scheduled for an autumn release. It’s been in the planning stages since before Katrina, but in the wake of climbing out of the chaos, it got put onto the back burner.

Now, LeBlanc said, the biggest challenge has been capturing the feel of a live Cowboy Mouth show on celluloid. It’s not as easy as it looks, but like most things LeBlanc does, he aims to get it right.

“When I formed the band, I had this vision, and it wasn’t an idea of playing pop songs with catchy hooks or rock songs that shred your hair,” he said. “In black gospel churches, they sing and scream and let it all out, and it’s a very cleansing experience so they can go face their troubles the next day. And I wanted to create a rock ‘n’ roll experience that would be a similar kind of release.

“I wanted to do it in the rock ‘n’ roll context, without the religion. Pretty grand aspirations, I know, but unless you shoot for the stars, you ain’t gonna hit nothing. That was my thing — I wanted to create something that would be very freeing, celebratory and almost ecstatic.”