Cloud Cult's Craig Minowa Navigates Self-Transformation in the Midst of Upheaval on Metamorphosis

Cloud Cult had been working on Metamorphosis for five years and were nearing completion when COVID-19 sent the world into an unpredictable period of dramatic upheaval. Though Metamorphosis was initially supposed to come out in 2020, around the beginning of lockdown, the group decided to take a step back and re-evaluate the songs. With the additional time brought on by the pandemic, Minowa reworked the album into an exploration of our potential for inner growth and transformation amid personal crises and challenges. In an interview with AllMusic, Minowa discussed the inspirations for "One Way Out of a Hole" and Metamorphosis, the development of the album, and the medicinal power he hopes it evokes for listeners.




AllMusic: What is the principal message or theme in "One Way Out of a Hole," and what effect do you hope the song will have on listeners?

Craig Minowa: The song is all about looking through the divisiveness and recognizing that we're all going through hard stuff of varying types right now, and that humans evolved as an organism that thrives when we learn to lean on each other. In a nutshell, you're not alone. Even though the stranger behind the cash register or on the bus or at work puts on a happy and friendly face, you can bet they've got a deep story of life unfolding around them right now. If we can collectively recognize that we're all going through challenging lives, it makes it easier to lean on each other and lift each other up. The "hole" in this song can represent anything from relationship problems to cancer to climate change to the pandemic. Fill in your blank. Whatever it is that you see as the hole in your life right now, there's only one way out, and as cliched as it sounds, that is in working together. The first step in working together is empathy, and in an increasingly polarized and cynical culture, we need to fuel the opposite direction...reminding ourselves how to trust and how to feel hope in bigger things outside of ourselves.

---

AllMusic: Could you describe your songwriting process for "One Way Out of a Hole"? How did the idea for the song come about?

Minowa: The song was originally inspired by life challenges a really close loved one of mine was going through. The struggles felt unfair and were overwhelmingly detouring the life plans she had worked so many years to build for herself and her family. It seemed I was running into more and more people who were having these huge life challenges, like literally everyone I REALLY talked to, would ultimately open up and share the fact that they had some kind of big life changes going on. As global crises seemed to accelerate environmentally, socially, politically and with the pandemic, the song morphed into the story of literally everyone's lives being uprooted and changed...I think by forces that go even deeper than just the pandemic or politics.

AllMusic: How does "One Way Out of a Hole" fit into Metamorphosis? Does it serve a particular role within the album as a whole?

Minowa: That's a wonderful question. I really see an album as an opportunity to serve the listener a multiple course meal. So there needs to be certain dishes in that meal to keep it feeling like a full and balanced experience. If you were listening on vinyl or a cassette, this song would finish off side number one, so it's a sort of rallying anthem that closes up the first half of the listening journey. It's an opportunity to get supercharged before taking things down into the darker depths of the self, which is where the following songs go.


AllMusic: Transitioning to a few questions about Metamorphosis as a whole, how does it feel releasing a new studio album after six years?

Minowa: We used to have a goal of releasing a new album every year, and we stuck to that with pretty good fervor for a long while. But we've got a pretty thick discography now, and I feel like it's a time in life where it's okay to put more time into making something the highest quality as we possibly can. And when I say that, I mean to create something that personally feels really fulfilling and medicinal, not necessarily something that would win critics' favor. Every album has served as a sort of mental and spiritual pharmaceutical in my personal development, and, in some ways, writing these songs in the woods felt like being some kind of alchemist trying to find the exact formula for medicines that could help me get through some hard inner crap I've been dealing with for so many years. In order to do that, it meant having time to lose my mind on occasion, like getting obsessed with repeating a series of piano chords for weeks, and feeling like they were some kind of personal talisman to the epicenter of the self. Having this many years with these songs really allowed me to spend time with them and let them grow up and become who they need to be before letting them out into the world...making sure every word was exactly what it wanted to be. Some of these ditties went through some pretty radical changes in their later stages, and if we would have rushed the release, it would have been a very different album, and in most ways a less fulfilling album with less personal medicinal value. As it stands, these are all herbal remedies that I desperately need to repeat daily if I'm going to get better.


AllMusic: What were the sources of inspiration for the album?

Minowa: All of these songs were deeply affected by a driving hunger for personal change and a recognition that everyone around me is also going through massive personal change. I guess that journey is like a vision quest of sorts. When you decide to write songs about fundamentally changing yourself, all you're left with is you and your monsters, and you have to argue with them, listen to them, scream at them, accept them, learn from them, and repeat and repeat and repeat until you start learning why you have them in the first place and learn to let them go. The real metamorphosis happens with a radical change of the inner self. It's such a fundamental change, you can't even recognize the old you. It's like shedding skin every day and taking a moment to look back on the old you and see how foolish you've been and how silly so much of my sense of "me" has been in my life. I spent a lot of time trying to shut off my mind and wait for things from outside of myself. And I spent a lot of time literally imagining myself staring in the window of my house and watching me interact with family and career as my actual day is unfolding. There was just a lot of time trying to get an outside perspective on myself and watch my behavior and thoughts as if I was a stranger on the outside. I think I learned that I write about death so much in past albums because I also hunger for a dying of the self, and I really needed that as of late, not on a suicidal level but on the level of truly letting the old patterns of ego and mental habits go. The inspiration for the album, it being called "Metamorphosis", was feeling like this caterpillar is ready to do the hard work of digging down into the cocoon, dissolving, surrendering, and becoming something bigger than I have been. We have a lot of global crises in front of us and the only way we are going to be able to confront those huge issues is to make a huge step in our evolution as human beings, and that massive, cosmic, big change starts with the little self you look at in the mirror every day.


AllMusic: How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect your songwriting and your goals for Metamorphosis?

Minowa: The album was actually slated to be released around the time that everything was shutting down from the onset of the pandemic. So we put a pause on it. The pandemic actually bought us time to re-look at these songs and decide what we liked and didn't like. I honestly was feeling rushed about releasing the record back in 2020, and I don't think I even fully knew what it was about at the time. But my gut was telling me the lyrics were not what they wanted to be. They needed more time to figure out who they were. In late 2019, I thought this album was about listening to the call of the ancestors and their desire for us as a species to step up to the plate and make the big changes we need in order to survive some of these global crises. So there were songs on the album that were blatantly about things like Climate Change and nuclear proliferation. The pandemic allowed me to see that the big evolutionary change we are being called to do all starts with the individual self and the many habits and illusions we allow ourselves to live in and be trapped in on a daily level.

AllMusic: Why were many of the songs initially composed for Metamorphosis cut and replaced?

Minowa: I spent decades working for various nonprofits on environmental and social issues. I believe that is important work that we can all be involved with. And I think that's the platform the album was initially sitting on... a call for global change. What interferes with healthy societal growth and change is a collection of individuals who are perhaps feeling stagnant in their growth or are caught in a rut. That is all of us. The songs were changed because it's becoming amazingly clear that there are so many people going through big life changes and struggles right now. No matter who you run into... family, friends, a stranger on the street... everyone, if given a chance to share, will tell you about wild challenges going on in their lives right now. That kind of personal life upheaval is also an opportunity for positive change if we take the time to really look in the mirror and be honest with ourselves. So songs about big global change got cut in favor of songs about big personal change, because I think a call for global change falls on deaf ears when everyone is struggling. But if everyone is personally struggling, and we confess it, then we can lean on each other and help each other make positive individual changes. Collectively, that ultimately results in global change.



AllMusic: In what ways does Metamorphosis demonstrate continuities with Cloud Cult's previous albums? In what ways does it diverge?

Minowa: All of the albums are pretty transparent about being self-help songs. It's what I like to write about...not because I have the answers, but because I'm as broken as the next guy, and if I'm going to sing something on stage over and over each night it should be a mantra that can maybe help me change for the better. I've always loved to write music as a personal medicine to help me get through hard stuff in life. Songwriting has literally saved my life many times. I'm lucky that there are a few other people who like the songs and who maybe get a little bit out of it too, so I feel like if someone is going to take the time to listen to something I've written or said, I should see that as a responsibility and try to let those words have some kind of positive intention. Whether that actually works or not is not up to me, but ultimately the same effort has gone into all of the albums, a hope that our craft can have at least a tiny little hand, along with everyone else's, in helping make things a little better.


AllMusic: Finally, what do you hope listeners will take away from the album?

Minowa: The greatest honor I ever receive in this profession is when someone says they've felt some kind of medicinal value out of the music. So as always, that's my hope with this album.

---

Listen to "One Way Out of a Hole" here and pre-order Metamorphosis here.