Cloud Cult: Eco-friendly band uses its most natural resource–talent
Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes), Earthology Records
Release date: 8 April 2008
By Jerilyn Covert
Writing can be a powerful catharsis, especially for a talented singer-songwriter such as Craig Minowa. In 2002, the Cloud Cult founder spent half the year secluded and alone on his Minnesota farm and, there, driven by all the desperation of a broken soul in need of healing, he penned 100 songs. Just months before, his two-year-old son, Kaidin, had drifted off to sleep one fateful night and, quite unexpectedly, never woke up. Unable to cope with the strain of grief, his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Connie, fell apart. Indeed, a tragedy of these proportions would be enough to drag anyone into the depths of despair–or insanity.
Fortunately for him, Minowa is an optimist. From his organic farm, which Minowa–ever the environmentalist–converted into an eco-friendly home recording studio, he produced They Live On the Sun, a concept album about Kaidin’s death. Thanks to a whole bunch of critical acclaim, the album earned airtime on national radio stations and paved the way toward the full-blown cult phenomenon Cloud Cult has become. The next three records, all critically adored, carried Cloud Cult to the top of the college radio charts. To be sure, this is some of the most original music you’ll ever hope to hear. Songs channel grandiose themes and spiritual meditation, while the occasional ballad betrays a lingering pain that will never completely fade. But by now, more than 6 years after the loss of his son, the Cloud Cult front man is ready to move on. He called the group’s latest album, Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes), “an analysis of being reborn.” That analysis, not surprisingly, is a hopeful one.
Still, Minowa’s personal self renewal isn’t the only rebirth going on here. Throughout the album, death emerges as a prominent theme, and Minowa broaches the taboo through images of earthly reincarnation. “You were sewn together with a tapestry of molecules,” he sings in the first track, “No One Said It Would Be Easy.” And when we pass away, we’ll return to the earth in the form of stardust, a cloud, water. After all, what would our structure be, if not elemental–composed of things like carbon, hydrogen and oxygen? For Minowa, that insight alone is enough to provide solace. And it certainly helps to explain his environmentalist sensibility. (Cloud Cult has turned away major record labels so they can continue to make music the way they want to–using organic and recycled materials and wind-generated electricity, all from inside a home studio which is heated and cooled by geothermic energy. They also vow to plant 10 trees for every 1,000 albums sold, according to their Web site.) In “When Water Comes to Life,” Minowa chants of angels who come and cut you open, remove your heart for the afterlife, and then, “give you back to the water, from where we’re all born.” Knowing what he’s been through, it’s hard not to contrast such a divine concept against all the pain and frustration of life. In the end, it seems, all that will be left of you is water–that, and “two tiny handfuls” of sand crystals. It’s a humbling notion, one that Minowa clearly embraces.
Feel Good Ghosts is exquisitely existential, yet lighthearted and whimsical. Just when you think it’s veering into preciousness, piercing riffs break lose from Minowa’s hearty guitar, Shannon Frid’s lively violin, and Sarah Young’s sinewy cello. Minowa weaves together all the different instruments, which also include drums, bass and trombone, into melodic genius. Musical arrangements move with all the irrationality of human emotion, yet hang together so perfectly, like the individual brush strokes in a painting. The aforementioned “No One Said It Would Be Easy” starts off the album softly but quickly breaks into twinkling melody punctuated by the excitable beeps and boops of Minowa’s keys. Track two, “Everybody Here is a Cloud,” is one of the album’s catchiest tunes imbued with cryptic lyrics and stomping chants.
Conceptually, the album is huge, and yet the lyrics always return us to the simplicity of things. When the singer begs God for a miracle in “The Ghost Inside Our House,” he is told “that it’s a miracle just to be breathing.” In “Journey of the Featherless,” he tries to fly to heaven on crepe paper wings but ultimately decides “I’m pretty lucky” because “my heart keeps beating.” The lyrics themselves often are minimal in their honesty, yet striking in a delightfully bizarre way that fits right in with the weirdness of the music, as in “May Your Hearts Stay Strong,” in which he sings such great lines as, “He met her at a nightclub. She couldn’t keep the beat. She wore her grandma’s prom dress with raccoon slippers on her feet,” and, “There’s something to be said about trading stories of when you were eight years old: He had his first stitches when he bit an ice cream bowl. She had her first kiss in a swimming hole.”
My personal favorite is track four, the aforementioned “When Water Comes to Life,” which opens with a magnificent orchestral intro that, at one point, approximates the sound of drops of water. A friend of mine remarked that the lyrics are morbid. And I guess they are, in a way. But the subversive thing about Cloud Cult is that in singing about death, they’re really singing about the acceptance of that which is beyond your control. These ghosts are feel-good ghosts, after all, and they’re enjoying a Mad Hatter-esque tea party, in the midst of tornadoes that may very well whisk them away to Oz at any moment. But if, in spite of everything, you can bring yourself to laugh–as Cloud Cult does in “Hurricane and Survival Guide”–well then, you’ll be alright. Minowa certainly will. He and his wife Connie, who also sings backup vocals for the band, have already reunited with the help of a grief counselor. After this–what could be the band’s last tour–the couple plan to move back to their old Minnesota farm and begin working on a new family together.