Keeping their heads in the Cloud
Music can be a meditation or benediction, a prayer or celebration, a means to an end. In Cloud Cult’s universe, it is all of these things. For singer-songwriter Craig Minowa, it’s been that way ever since he began recording albums a decade ago in the closet-cum-home studio of his Minneapolis apartment, using anything he could find as an instrument: a bucket here, a couch cushion there. He called his one-man-band project Cloud Cult, and the songs
on his first album, 1995’s “The Shade Project,” and the others that have followed all deal with the struggle to understand nothing less than the meaning of mortality itself.
“As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been deeply philosophical,” says Minowa over the phone from the organic farm he owns and operates in Minnesota with his wife, Connie Minowa, an artist who paints on stage (with fellow painter Scott West) during the band’s performances and is considered, along with West, a full-fledged band member. Cloud Cult plays the Middle East Upstairs next Thursday.
“I was raised in a really conservative Christian family and an environment where you’re talking about morals and ethics, where we go when we die, and prayer and giving thanks,” he adds. “So once I stepped away from the life that I had back then, I felt like I still needed to fill that space in my mind. I had a lot of questions.”
Those questions increased tenfold after Craig and Connie Minowa’s 2-year-old son, Kaidin, died unexpectedly in 2002. The loss threw the couple into an abyss of despair and has haunted Cloud Cult’s albums as a thematic preoccupation since. (The cover of the band’s 2005 disc, “Advice From the Happy Hippopotamus,” even features illustrations of Kaidin, as does the sleeve art on the band’s new album, “The Meaning of 8.”) If anything, Minowa’s writing, always soul-searching, allegorical, and shot through with spiritual questing, has grown even more so.
On “Take Your Medicine,” a quick-stepping backbeat and crisp strum of guitar propel Minowa down the street, singing to himself in a voice as high as helium that “it’s a good day to face the hard things.” On the particularly stirring tribute “Your 8th Birthday” - Kaidin would have turned 8 next year - Minowa rapturously recounts a litany of childlike images, punctuating each by repeating his son’s name over and over, a simultaneously desperate yet joyous mantra of recollection and summoning.
“If I didn’t have music in my life at that point, I don’t know how I would have made it through,” says Minowa. “It was an emotional safety net. At that point, it was really a great way to communicate with Kaidin, because I had all these recordings of him. I fell into this long period of time where I could just sit at the piano and play his voice in the background. After a few hours of that, you don’t really have a grasp on reality anymore - and for all I could tell, I was completely with him.”
“The Meaning of 8″ was released on the band’s own label; Cloud Cult has repeatedly turned down offers to sign with major labels in favor of releasing music on its own ecology-friendly Earthology imprint. Minowa says the album represents a seismic shift in his spiritual and emotional outlook these days.
“I feel like some major turns have taken place in the grieving process, and that really happened with `The Meaning of 8′ - it felt like coming full circle in a way,” he says. “With each album after Kaidin, it was an analysis of the grieving process and trying to understand where we go, and why we have to go, and why some of us can stay behind.”
BITS & PIECES Tonight: Acid Mothers Guru Guru (featuring members of, you guessed it, Acid Mothers Temple and Guru Guru) is at the Middle East Upstairs. Sunday: Ex-Jayhawks founder Mark Olson and the Last Town Chorus are at the Paradise Lounge. Tuesday: Spokane is at P.A.’s Lounge. Blanketeer holds down the fort every Tuesday at the Plough &#amp Stars. Mute Math plays the Paradise. Wednesday: Animal Collective is at Avalon. Thursday: The reunited Meat Puppets are at the Middle East Downstairs. Editors are at the Paradise Rock Club.
Keeping their heads in the Cloud Cloud Cult plays the Middle East Upstairs (472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge) Thursday with Land of Talk and Jeff D. Johnson starting at 9 p.m. Tickets are $10, $9 in advance. 617-864-3278. mideastclub.com Indie collective’s music meditates on philosophy
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