Tank and the Bangas get jiggy in the aisles of a convenience store in the video for their new single “Spaceships”—not a surprising look for anyone who’s caught the New Orleans band’s hyper-bouncy mashup of R&B, jazz, hip-hop, soul and spoken word onstage. But the sight of a daydreaming Tarriona “Tank” Ball behind a cash register recalls another life for the flamboyant frontwoman, who worked as a teenager at her local Winn-Dixie supermarket in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

“I loved Winn-Dixie,” says Ball, 30. “I had a good time. I met people. It was right after the storm in New Orleans, so it was the only place available to give people food. Our lines were crazy long. You had to have a positive attitude about it, because you had people rebuilding their homes and their families.”

Tank and the Bangas thrive on positive vibes shared with others. “When I come onstage, those people, they give me something,” Ball says. “I get so excited.”

So what should people in the crowd get out of it? “They can do their thing,” she says. “Everybody’s not going to want to be like me. They’re not going to want to sing. And I don’t care if they’re doctors and nurses. They see that I’m doing my thing, and it gives them motivation to do theirs. All dreams are contagious.”

Yet behind Ball’s emotive-eyed glee and multi-hued outfits is a girl who didn’t dream of grabbing the mic as a born performer. “I would close my eyes,” she recalls of her first performances. “I didn’t want to look at anybody. It made me quite nervous. I don’t even like to watch videos of myself because I’m so crazy. It’s another girl. I won’t call it an alter-ego because all of this is me. It doesn’t separate. But it’s interesting to see a different part of me.”

Growing up in what she calls “a family full of pastors,” Ball first performed at churches her grandmother brought her to. She gravitated to poetry in the footsteps of one of three older sisters, and blossomed into a championship-winning slam poet. And her father, a DJ who drove a carriage around the French Quarter to “tell stories and sing,” provided her with a nickname that fit her determined personality.

At home, she absorbed the sounds of Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway and Anita Baker before discovering spoken-word artists. Yet her true epiphany—when she says “I knew that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life”—came when she attended a concert by the pop band Fun.

“Nobody grows up in one room,” Ball says from her New Orleans home. “You grow up in many rooms. I’ve met many people, and they’ve all inspired and shaped who I am today—and the performer that I am as well.” In the end, she says, “You have to be yourself, because everyone else is taken.”

With that in mind, she spins highly layered stories in free-associating favorites that hit cultural touchstones like “Rollercoasters” and “WalMart.” “I’m always going to write about life,” Ball says. “I rode a roller coaster, I went to WalMart, I shop at the grocery store, and there’s some political shit that I’m not too happy about. So I’ve got to write about all that because it’s literally part of my everyday.”

Now she and the Bangas—musical director Joshua Johnson (drums), Norman Spence II (synth, bass), Merell Burkett Jr. (keyboards) and Albert Allenback (sax, flute)—eye an early 2019 release for their first studio album since 2013’s Think Tank.

“I’ve always wondered how people manage the balance of creating an album and a show and waking up at 4 in the morning to catch a flight to France,” she says of the hard-touring group, which plays Royale on Oct. 23. “It’s art. It’s not made overnight.”

Nonetheless, she’s buoyed by public acceptance for a band beyond expectations of genre, dress or body image. “Hopefully that will be the mainstream now,” Ball says. “It’s all kinds of people. It’s not just a certain type.” ◆

Tank and the Bangas play Royale on Oct. 23.

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