 by Steve McPherson
“I’d like to get a piano that works, and I’d like to play piano a lot. And I’d like to work on the farm a little more,” offers Cloud Cult leader Craig Minowa, discussing his plans for the future. It’s a room temperature early summer evening and I’m sitting with Minowa and the rest of his band on cellist Sarah Young’s deck in south Minneapolis.
Download an mp3 of Cloud Cult’s song “Living On the Outside of Your Skin.
For a band that’s known as the brainchild and vision of one man, Cloud
Cult seem more like a family. Also in attendance are drummer Dan Greenwood,
bassist Mara Stemm, violinist Theresa Hanley, and Young and Hanley’s partners
and children. It certainly doesn’t seem like the rock and roll lifestyle;
where are the limos and the piles of drugs? All we’ve got here is some
delivery pizza.
 At
the beginning of the interview, Minowa touches on that. “Success on that
level was never a goal and I don’t want it to be a goal. As far as anything
that happens with the music, it’s kind of by chance, so, with [2003’s]
They Live on the Sun, it just needed to be created. It wasn’t that
there needed to be a lot of listeners behind it, [but] once the listeners started
coming on board, it sort of felt like there was a good combination between what
we wanted to do and having people enjoy it,” explains Minowa, “Which
is rare for bands: to not feel like you have to go out there and shove it down
people’s throats. To have cities that I’ve never been to have really
good charting and sales is just so mystifying.” He seems genuinely awed
by it. In person, Minowa is soft-spoken, hiding the heart-on-sleeve singer whose
voice pitches somewhere between Isaac Brock and Conor Oberst on record. Cloud
Cult make an unabashed effort to be environmentally conscious, printing all
their CD’s on recycled material and donating 100 percent of their profits
after expenses to environmental charities, and Minowa sees that as an essential
part of the way they make music. “The fan letters tend to be [from] people
[whose life it impacts] in a really positive way,” Minowa says, “so
then there’s a certain sense of personal responsibility to continue to
perpetuate that.”
So they’ll have to pardon me if I say they have no right to be as good
as they are. I’ve met plenty of bands (mostly jam bands) who were plenty
psyched about saving the world and their music was mostly bland, but Cloud Cult’s
is thick, layered, listenable, resonant and—seemingly impossibly—hip
and “O.C.”-worthy. Their mish-mash of influences include Rasputina,
Radiohead, Polvo and Kate Bush. “I always got made fun of for the stuff
that I liked when I was younger,” says Minowa, explaining his own influences,
“I liked Art of Noise a lot and the wrestlers in my hometown didn’t
like that I had Devo scratched onto the front of my folder, but they (Devo,
not the wrestlers) were just creative: visually and musically.” They’ve
been garnering not unfair comparisons to the Flaming Lips recently, although
Minowa stoutly refuses even one listen to The Soft Bulletin. “I
don’t want to end up in a spot where it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re
so obviously influenced by such and such,’” he explains and Greenwood
breaks in: “I came really close to forcing him one night; I was like,
‘You gotta listen to them, man!’ And he said no.’” But
Minowa has kept abreast of current music like the Polyphonic Spree and the Arcade
Fire, which he likes for the “celebration element” they bring to
their music.
Bringing that element and being creative visually as well as musically is something
that Cloud Cult does as well. Joining them on their upcoming tour out to New
York and then back across to the West Coast will be several different painters
who’ll paint live on stage during the shows. “There’s a lot
of bands that just kind of get up there and do it, but when it comes to art,
you’ve got five senses going. You’re sipping on a beer or a tea
or something, you’ve got one taken care of, you know.  You’re
listening to the band; why not fill your sight with something?” asks Minowa
rhetorically. Imagery is important to his own writing as well, particularly
with the menagerie that inhabits their latest, Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus,
including bumblebees, hummingbirds, horses and the titular hippo.
“Well, the hippo’s been weird just because I know everybody’s
got their totem animal and most people’s are really romantic like tigers
or snakes or things like that, but when I moved up to Duluth I started having
dreams about a hippopotamus. It’s inspired so many different lyrics that
it was kind of time to let the hippo out. It seems goofy and loony, but there’s
something about a hippopotamus: it’s really Jurassic, just kind of a giant
pig—half-pig, half-crocodile,” says Minowa, and when I point out
that they’re actually supposed to be super mean he goes on, “The
artist (Scott West) didn’t like it either. He was working on the album
art and I’m like, the name of the album is Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus,
you’ve got to put the hippo on the cover. And he’s like, ‘Hippos
are unattractive, you can’t use the hippo on the album art.’”
West eventually relented, though, and the hippo made it on there in addition
to being in there as a lens through which Minowa can explore weighty issues
like mortality. With a couple of children in attendance at the interview, it’s
hard not to think of Minowa’s own son Kaidin who died suddenly at two
years of age, but Minowa seems to have reached a place of acceptance: “Kaidin
is a big message, too, or a big sort of inspiration behind everything. On the
last album (2004’s Aurora Borealis) there was a big struggle in trying
to understand where he went and why he left and the darkness involved with that
and trying to just accept it.” Now though, it’s about “feeling
him here and also taking that gift of his life and trying to make it as huge
as possible. Saying, ‘Okay, you had two years here’ but I want to
take those two beautiful years and share that with everybody and try to do the
best dang thing I possibly can with his life.”
It’s not just the tragedy, but the acceptance of it that gives Minowa’s
music weight and depth: this isn’t Oberst whining that at 22 he should
have figured out more about life. Knowing his story, it’s almost impossible
not to get a little choked up listening to him sing, “I’m just wondering
what comes at the end/ I hope I meet you again,” in “What Comes
at the End” and his desire to turn all his “stupid question marks
into simple candy canes,” in “Bobby’s Spacesuit” doesn’t
seem like escapism so much as acceptance that some of those big issues in life
may never get answered. The most important thing is taking advantage of what
you’ve got right now.
Finishing his answer to what lies in the future for himself and his band, Minowa
says, “Musicwise, if it’s gonna go, it’s gonna go. I think
one of the good things about the whole crew is that we’re all doing it
because we like what we’re doing. In the music industry, there’s
so many people that are really caught up in ego or a superficial kind of success
or wealth or attention. It would be nice to be to a point where we’d know
that we could cover our basic bills and everything and live a good ethical life
on top of that, but beyond that, I don’t really care; as long as we’re
all just being good, it’s gonna be all right.”
Cloud Cult performs the CD release show for Advice From the Happy Hippopotamus
on Fri. June 3 at First Avenue with Ida and Fitzgerald. 6 p.m. All Ages. $8
Adv/$10 door. 701 First Ave. N., Mpls. 612-338-8388.
Find out more about Cloud Cult on their official website
at CloudCult.com.
Head on over to our mp3 page to download hundreds of mp3s, including Cloud Cult’s song
“Living On the Outside of Your Skin.”
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