Craig Minowa of Cloud Cult
(A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Nov. 9, 2006)
Minnesota’s Cloud Cult can lurch from childlike to sinister in seconds, switching just as quickly between funky electronic beats and spare acoustic passages. That variety brings out the sweetness and trauma on the band’s 2005 album, Advice From The Happy Hippopotamus. The band recently finished recording its next LP, The Meaning Of 8, due out in late February. Happy Hippo is still a pretty fascinating listen, so The A.V. Club talked with leader Craig Minowa about how it came together and how the band ended up touring with live painters (now a staple of a solid live show that drew a respectable crowd when it last came to Madison in September).
The A.V. Club: How is the new album going to be different?
Craig Minowa: We worked with a lot of studio musicians with this, and there are a lot of strings and horns on it. It’s a really thick, layered album. I feel like it’s gonna go over pretty good. My biggest concern with it is trying to figure out how the heck we’re going to play it live [laughs]. There’s probably two or three songs on there that I think we could pull off as a four-piece, and the rest of it, boy, there’s just so much going on [laughs].
AVC: You’re still planning on releasing it on your own label, Earthology, and you’ve turned down some label offers.
CM: Back with the first couple offers that we had, we made it really clear that we had to have the environmentally friendly CD replication as part of any kind of release that we would do. They just weren’t open to that, because it would cost more per unit. Now, the offer that we’re discussing right now, which would end up being ultimately a Warner deal, it looks like they would put out for that. It’s kind of surprising. But it’s also surprising [that] in finding out that they’d put out for that, we realize that we’re still not really interested [laughs].
AVC: You’re constantly referred to as an eco-friendly band, but you don’t do a lot of political or environmental songwriting. Why?
CM: Ninety percent of the time, the songs have nothing directly to do with that. I think that it’s just because there’s a lot to be said about living by your ethics. It takes a lot of energy to operate Cloud Cult the way we want, particularly environmentally ethically, and through our activist work we’re really focused on specific things in politics and whatnot. After doing all that, I’m not necessarily inspired to write lyrics about that.
AVC: How did you start having a painter onstage?
CM: I had a friend from high school and we played in a band together. Our first year in college, we played in this band in Minneapolis, and he was going to art school, and it just kind of seemed like his time focus was more on painting than it was on playing guitar in the band. And I said, “Hey, why don’t you paint on stage? That would be really super-cool.” He was kind of resistant to it at the time. I think he kind of took personal offense to it. “What, you don’t want me to play guitar?” Years later, Cloud Cult started to come together, and after [the band’s 2003 album] They Live On The Sun, it became a live-band thing, and it seemed like the kind of project that required a really elaborate show. So we started bringing painters on board and we rotated whoever we knew who was a painter that was available. Over time, [ex-wife] Connie [Minowa] and Scott [West] proved themselves to be the most long-term dedicated. There are occasions where they haven’t been able to do a show, and the crowd really misses it, especially people that have heard about the painters being there or people that have seen shows in the past, we hear them feeling gypped a little bit.
AVC: Who’s the hippo in the song “Happy Hippo”?
CM: The hippopotamus is something that pops up in my dreams a lot. I would have these dreams with the hippopotamus in them when I was at some sort of transitional time in my life, or there was some type of thing that I needed to understand, and the dreams were always pretty much the same. In the dream, the hippo never actually spoke, but it left impressions or ideas. That song is the introduction of that and you have a lot of transition in it, where it’s a playful sort of situation of crossing sleep with this hippo and moving into this really intense emotional understanding of the preciousness of life.
(A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Nov. 9, 2006)
Minnesota’s Cloud Cult can lurch from childlike to sinister in seconds, switching just as quickly between funky electronic beats and spare acoustic passages. That variety brings out the sweetness and trauma on the band’s 2005 album, Advice From The Happy Hippopotamus. The band recently finished recording its next LP, The Meaning Of 8, due out in late February. Happy Hippo is still a pretty fascinating listen, so The A.V. Club talked with leader Craig Minowa about how it came together and how the band ended up touring with live painters (now a staple of a solid live show that drew a respectable crowd when it last came to Madison in September).
The A.V. Club: How is the new album going to be different?
Craig Minowa: We worked with a lot of studio musicians with this, and there are a lot of strings and horns on it. It’s a really thick, layered album. I feel like it’s gonna go over pretty good. My biggest concern with it is trying to figure out how the heck we’re going to play it live [laughs]. There’s probably two or three songs on there that I think we could pull off as a four-piece, and the rest of it, boy, there’s just so much going on [laughs].
AVC: You’re still planning on releasing it on your own label, Earthology, and you’ve turned down some label offers.
CM: Back with the first couple offers that we had, we made it really clear that we had to have the environmentally friendly CD replication as part of any kind of release that we would do. They just weren’t open to that, because it would cost more per unit. Now, the offer that we’re discussing right now, which would end up being ultimately a Warner deal, it looks like they would put out for that. It’s kind of surprising. But it’s also surprising [that] in finding out that they’d put out for that, we realize that we’re still not really interested [laughs].
AVC: You’re constantly referred to as an eco-friendly band, but you don’t do a lot of political or environmental songwriting. Why?
CM: Ninety percent of the time, the songs have nothing directly to do with that. I think that it’s just because there’s a lot to be said about living by your ethics. It takes a lot of energy to operate Cloud Cult the way we want, particularly environmentally ethically, and through our activist work we’re really focused on specific things in politics and whatnot. After doing all that, I’m not necessarily inspired to write lyrics about that.
AVC: How did you start having a painter onstage?
CM: I had a friend from high school and we played in a band together. Our first year in college, we played in this band in Minneapolis, and he was going to art school, and it just kind of seemed like his time focus was more on painting than it was on playing guitar in the band. And I said, “Hey, why don’t you paint on stage? That would be really super-cool.” He was kind of resistant to it at the time. I think he kind of took personal offense to it. “What, you don’t want me to play guitar?” Years later, Cloud Cult started to come together, and after [the band’s 2003 album] They Live On The Sun, it became a live-band thing, and it seemed like the kind of project that required a really elaborate show. So we started bringing painters on board and we rotated whoever we knew who was a painter that was available. Over time, [ex-wife] Connie [Minowa] and Scott [West] proved themselves to be the most long-term dedicated. There are occasions where they haven’t been able to do a show, and the crowd really misses it, especially people that have heard about the painters being there or people that have seen shows in the past, we hear them feeling gypped a little bit.
AVC: Who’s the hippo in the song “Happy Hippo”?
CM: The hippopotamus is something that pops up in my dreams a lot. I would have these dreams with the hippopotamus in them when I was at some sort of transitional time in my life, or there was some type of thing that I needed to understand, and the dreams were always pretty much the same. In the dream, the hippo never actually spoke, but it left impressions or ideas. That song is the introduction of that and you have a lot of transition in it, where it’s a playful sort of situation of crossing sleep with this hippo and moving into this really intense emotional understanding of the preciousness of life.
posted by Scott at 8:54 PM
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