Day Twenty-Four, Part Two: No One Said It Would Be Easy

My second film fest movie was the one I'd known about longest and was most looking forward to at the festival. It's a documentary all about Cloud Cult, which in my opinion is the best Twin Cities-based band currently recording and performing, and which has become one of my favorite bands in the last year. It was almost exactly a year ago, in fact, that I first saw them in concert. I had known about them and half-intended to check them out for a while, and when I saw they were performing at First Ave I decided to give them a listen. I bought tickets to the concert after listening to two songs on their Myspace, something I have never done before or since.

Cloud Cult's music is just amazing--beautiful, raw, heartfelt, inspiring. It comes from a place that I think few artists allow themselves to convey: deep pain and grief arising from the lead singer and lyricist's loss of his two-year-old son, as well as general confusion about our place in the world and the cosmos, and hope that there is a plan and a pattern. Their lyrics have been a definite inspiration to me in the past year. Certain lines I repeat to myself: "'Please send us a miracle so I know that there is meaning.' He said, 'I think that it's a miracle just to be breathing.'" "You came up from the ground--from a million little pieces; have you found where your place is?" "Suck up, suck up and take your medicine. It's a good day, it's a good day to face the hard things." I've been considering getting a tattoo of the lyric "take your medicine" for almost a year--I remember telling people about it when I studied abroad in Rome last summer--because I feel like I could use a reminder of the message that I'm only a small part of this giant fabric, that countless people have it worse than I do, and that I need to face up to my problems and my past and take what comes to me.

Though I knew a little about Cloud Cult's back story--specifically, the death of lead singer Craig Minowa's son and their environmental focus--the film went into detail about how the band formed and how they work. I didn't know that the lineup I've seen them perform with twice is a relatively recent development, and that the band started as a solo project and for a while was a three-piece group. I didn't know that even the band members themselves, and the filmmakers, treat Craig Minowa like an enigmatic, insane genius. I didn't know--though I could have guessed--that their music has been especially important to people who have experienced loss, and that the band has received many letters from fans who have been touched specifically in that way. Most of all, the film celebrates their wonderful music, and it made me desperately want to see them in concert a third time--which is why I'm glad I have tickets to see them in a week and a half.