New Orleans’s musical personality feels at stake. Martha Wood lives beside a loud bar that hosts live music. “The bar was one of the deciding factors in me buying the house so I won’t ever complain about the noise,” says Wood, who also manages a live-music bar which, following a series of noise issues in 2013 (including complaints about the loud smokers outside), became one of New Orleans’s first ever bars legally disallowed from serving drinks to go. “Now, any small infraction could get us shut down,” says Wood. “We recently installed a smoke eater to help with the smoke because we can’t open the doors at night because of the 'noise'.” The Maple Leaf club went smoke-free voluntarily in 2014 as did another club where artists had been demanding smoke-free nights. “A lot of the performance venues were already starting to show that consideration to performers so I wish the city would have just let that happen instead of forcing the ban into every corner bar that doesn’t host music,” says Zalia BeVille, manager of the All Ways Lounge, which went smoke-free in 2013 because, she says, “The horn players and the singers, they asked us for it.” Luckily, All Ways has an outdoor patio, unlike Lost Love Lounge, whose owner, Geoff Douville, loves the ban – he’d previously felt forced to live with smoke to keep his bar financially viable. “There’s no