Formed in 1995 as a solo project by Craig Minowa, Cloud Cult has since become a full touring ensemble, creating idiosyncratic, electronica-infused indie music. The band prides themselves on their do-it-yourself and environmental approaches to music business; Minowa formed Earthology Records in 1997, which is nonprofit label that practices a variety of environmentally friendly practices.
After the tragic loss of Minowa’s son in 2002, Minowa used music to cope with his suffering, and his son’s memory has been an integral part of the band’s sound and approach to songwriting in the years since. Over the last decade, the ensemble grew to include a variety of instruments including cello, drums, bass, French horn, and Minowa’s wife Connie working as a visual artist during performances. Cloud Cult’s 2010 release, Light Chasers was their first album to make the billboard charts and has launched their name into mainstream indie rock.
When speaking with Minowa, it is clear that has a lucid, infectiously calm perception of the world. Whether this clarity of purpose and lightness of spirit stem from the more difficult events of his life or from his recent success both personally and musically, it is clear that Minowa is one person who truly loves what he does. Glide spoke with Minowa just days before his band left for their 2011 national tour.
How is your tour going?
We did some regional warm up dates here and are in rehearsal. We’re actually headed out to the East Coast on Friday. We’ve got a couple of down days where we’re just getting ready.
Are you still touring for the Light Chaser album?
There’s still a lot of focus on the Light Chaser album, bringing more of it to fruition, especially with a concept album. We’ve done some new videos for it to define what’s going on better. That’ll be playing on a back screen that we didn’t have on the preliminary Light Chasers tour.
Who made these videos?
We have a few of them and they’re each done by different people. Some are volunteers and some hired people. We actually released one on masheable.com last week for the song “The Exploding People”. It’s one in a series of videos that will tell a story. Without seeing the video, its tough to see what the story is, but its kind of a person coming to grips with the idea of the afterlife and all that overlaps with our living situation here.
Can you talk about the connection that you feel with Native American culture, especially given your band name?
There’s a familial connection. I am 1/16th, so its not that much, but its more driven by culture itself. I think anybody who lives in an area that has a long ancestry that has lived there prior to them living there ends up taking in some of the resonance of that energy and the biological memory that was there. The land has been inhabited for so long by that lifestyle. For all of us, whether we have it in our blood or not, it really is a part of the history of this land.
Do you feel that this affects your music directly or more the inspiration to play music in general?
The first official Cloud Cult album, Who Killed Puck, it did have a lot of Native American influence in my philosophies and spirituality at the time. Nothing really specifically direct that I could describe, but some of the general philosophies and obviously the ecological respect was very much on my mind at the time. It really fit well with that. With that album, I was really not ready to make Cloud Cult into any kind of functioning band. I made the album as a studio project and I needed to name something once I was done with it. I had no plans for anything to come out of it. Then I came across the Cloud Cult concept and it seemed to fit the concept really well of that album.
Have you changed the songs from Light Chaser significantly for this tour and have you been playing albums from your expected 2012 release?
We have changed the songs in the set that are from past albums. Most of the Light Chaser songs that we’re doing are like what you hear on the album but some of the new songs we’re doing on we’ve really gutted them down and re approached them in new ways to try to bring some new life to them. There are some songs on the album that we’ve never done live before on this tour. Nothing from the coming album, actually; it’s really in a beginning stage now.
I know that you have string players on your albums, but what was the inspiration for playing with a live orchestra?
There’s a really strong classical influence on Light Chasers and increasingly true on the albums over the years. I have a classical background, but the recording has gotten to the point where I have been able to integrate it, so it just became more logical. I wanted to have that on stage too. We gradually added a lot of instrumentalists to the band over time, most recently we got a new cellist for this tour, the first tour actually, and a brass player last year, and we have french horn and trumpet parts.
How did you decide when you are going to have electronic elements instead of live elements in your songs, especially on tracks like “Exploding People”?
There’s a real intentional use of recording and auto-tuner on the Light Chasers album. It started with the last song on a previous album. The song was the first song I ever used a vocal recorder song and I wrote it with a robotic sound in mind, having always liked the sound of robots. There’s a preliminary symbolism for myself at that time. Once it got more into the more robotic way, it became more separate from me and in that way it wasn’t messaging that was coming through me, it was messaging that was coming through another source. The more intense the vocal recording for me the more its message is going to come from an outside source. If there’s overlap, it’s kind of there. It’s both worlds at the same time.
Can you talk about environmentalism in your music? It seems that environmental activism today is what anti-war protests were to music of the 60’s and 70’s. Do you believe that this is the case?
I’m really happy to see that it’s gotten to be that there’s a lot of bands that are getting out there and using the audiences that they have to bring a really important environmental issues. There’s a lot of people back in 90’s and even five years ago didn’t want to associate themselves with any kind of issue because they felt like they would be alienating themselves from any sort of audience. It’s great that people have become more forthright. Particularly in the entertainment world, it’s incredibly important, because for whatever sort of reason, in the United States of America, we put our heroes in the entertainment world, on pedestals akin to what the Greeks did with deities, unfortunately. So much limelight that some of these entertainers get, but the truth is that they do get this kind of attention and respect and the fact that they can take that and bring a positive message to people is incredibly important. If you have that limelight, you have a responsibility at that point.
I know that music has gotten you through tough times in your life. Do you believe that your music is now supporting you through happier periods of your life?
Music is a universal language and it communicates on a level that you can’t communicate with words, both spiritually and emotionally. Pretty much everyone uses music as a metaphor and a tool to pick them up after a hard day of work or to get in touch with their feelings. It’s all encompassing. As a listener and as a creator, there are periods in my life when I focused on needing to create the darker stuff and periods when I needed to create positive stuff when my life wasn’t going as great as I needed it to go. I needed to create the positive. During that period, I tried to realize how much power I had over my own reality. I think I got caught up in a vortex of negative music for a really long time and it took me awhile to realize the power of music to console people emotionally.
