Facing another ‘journey of loss and hurt,’ Cloud Cult turned to fans to help spark new album

Ever since the death of his 2-year-old son in 2002, Cloud Cult's Craig Minowa has maintained an unmatched ultra-personal connection with fans, who reacted to his disarmingly spiritual and searching songs by sharing their own experiences with loss and tragedy.

In the making of Cloud Cult's new record — during which Minowa faced his biggest personal struggle since the 2002 tragedy — the orchestral rock band's frontman did not wait to hear his audience's reactions.

Many of the songs were actually written or rewritten based off of things his listeners told him in regard to the drama he was processing in his music.

Titled "Alchemy Creek," Cloud Cult's 12th studio album came out last month accompanied by tour dates along both the East and West coasts. The mostly Twin Cities-based band will come home to celebrate its release with two concerts Friday and Saturday at the Palace Theatre in St. Paul.

Many of the 11 tracks on "Alchemy Creek" grew out of the online Patreon group that the Minnesota/Wisconsin-based band developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, like so many other music acts looking for a revenue source in lieu of concerts. The website allows bands to set up paid membership levels giving fans access to unreleased music, videos, blogs and lots more.

"The whole way through, there was this Patreon audience with people who were going through their own stories and sharing them," Minowa recounted.

"I was going through this journey of loss and hurt, and the more I shared that pain, the more other people shared their journey of loss and hurt that then became growth and beauty and joy."

This time, the pain came from divorce. The singer and his wife of more than two decades, Connie Minowa, split up around the time the band's last album came out, 2022′s "Metamorphosis." Connie was a part of Cloud Cult almost since the beginning, serving as one of two onstage painters during their live shows as well as a co-vocalist.

Craig understandably did not want to discuss the particulars, both for privacy reasons and their three children's benefit but also because he wanted to emphasize the universal nature of divorce. That's part of what helped him get through it.

"It's amazing to think about how widespread it is in our culture," he said. And yet he admitted a naiveté of sorts over how to handle it.

In the aftermath of the separation, Minowa, 51, said he wound up moving "from a garden shed to the back of a van to the mud room of a house, anywhere I could go." One of those makeshift locations was a family home with a piano he knew very well.

"It was my grandma's old piano that I first learned to play music on," he said — a sweet fact that explains the many prominent piano parts throughout "Alchemy Creek" (later played by the band's longtime keyboardist, Minneapolis music school proprietor Sarah Jane Perbix.)

Eventually, Minowa wound up moving into a tiny home he placed next to a creek that flows near his kids on their scenic, woodsy property in Viroqua, Wis. — another formative element to the way the record wound up sounding.

Listen close, and you can actually hear the creek flowing in some of the new tracks. The tiny home also added to the album's intimate vibe as Minowa turned it into a functioning recording studio.

"Even though it was small, the acoustics inside were really amazing because there aren't really any parallel walls in it," he said. "It was unlike any of the other places I've recorded, and really lent itself to an intimate and quiet sound."

New songs like "One Human Being" and "Over and Out" are among Cloud Cult's quietest and most stripped-back songs — a sharp contrast to the last record, which had been recorded with the band's then-pending Minnesota Orchestra gigs in mind.

Those hushed moments give way to crescendoing, sometimes even frantic-sounding songs such as the first single "I Am a Force Field" and "Something in Me Is Changing," during which you can feel the desperation Minowa was experiencing.

"I can't stop hurting, because something in me is changing," he sings, "and I don't know how to do this anymore."

The album ends on a positive, hopeful note in "Different Kind of Day," one in which you can literally hear the kind of exchanges Minowa had with friends as well as Patreon members: "Tell me what makes you hopeful / Tell me what makes you hurt ... You get so dang hard on you / It's time to feel OK."

Minowa said he really began to feel OK once he started working on the new tunes with the other six members of the band — most of them multi-instrumentalists who flesh out Cloud Cult's orchestral tones with horns and strings in addition to the usual rock 'n' roll gear.

"We've often talked about how being in a band that tours together is a lot like being in a marriage in and of itself, as you share so many joys and struggles together," he said. "We've worked through this period together, too, and come out stronger."

As for the other close bond that has long defined Cloud Cult — the one with its fans — Minowa simply said, "To be back in front of our audiences playing these songs has been the most healing thing to me yet."