[1] Rotary Downs is a two-time winner of the "Best Rock Band" category at Gambit Weekly's Big Easy Music Awards.

[2] NPR's Morning Edition considers them "outsider artists" and characterized their 2007 album Chained To The Chariot as "a stunning collection of psychedelic art-pop songs that play like brilliant mash-ups of Neutral Milk Hotel and Odelay-era Beck".

[3] Chained To The Chariot was recorded in the months preceding and following Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, as described in a feature on Current TV.

In the wake of the disaster, band members described a sense of increased artistic collaboration and cross-pollination in the music scene in New Orleans.

[5] On March 9, 2010, Rotary Downs released Cracked Maps & Blue Reports, described by Filter magazine as "perfectly New Orleanian: both high and low, in and out, joyous and mournful.