Photo by Cody York

I had the opportunity to talk writing process with Craig Minowa, the philosophical sage and environmental superhero behind the Cloud Cult moniker. In addition to penning ten remarkable albums for his band, Craig has also scored a series of hour-long documentaries for National Geographic and even soundtracked a full-length independent film, “The Great Alone.”

In this article, I ask Craig a series of questions to better understand the process by which a Cloud Cult song comes to life. Through his answers, Craig shares valuable advice and helpful insights for songwriters of any level, Cloud Cult fans of any sort, and any other curious souls who ever wonder how a good song just suddenly emerges from the ether.

To start it off, do you have a favorite place to write?

In the outdoors, back at our home, which is also the base of Earthology Recording Studios. It’s a really hilly, woodsy area with water flowing through it and a good creek side spot to sit. It’s a place where you can be really routed – and not be distracted by human-made things so much.

The preference is usually to be actually physically outside, working, or having just finished working. It seems like the best things come when you’re physically exhausted, and you’re in that quiet space afterward.

What do you do when you write? Do you use an acoustic guitar? A pen? Or does an idea emerge before you even pick anything up?

The preferred method is that the idea comes first. The inspiration process is sporadic and can happen any time – often times, in the middle of the night – but the physical working on the song is a scheduled period out of the necessity of parenthood.

We’ve got two kids now, so I can’t have the same freedom of schedule that I might have been able to have with the earlier albums, so, now, you have to have an allocated studio time during the week that you know there are certain hours during the day that you go and be creative.

Usually, I treat the scheduled studio time as the time to physically create the recording of the thing that presented itself at some weird sporadic other time.

The unfortunate thing for me, as far as being a parent who needs to be well rested, is that inspiration usually comes in the middle of the night and so you end up getting up and you have a really hard time getting back to sleep because, at that point, it’s really flowing well. Then, your kids get up at 6 AM and you’re spent, you know, because you’ve been writing all night. It used to be that I could just sit up until 4 in the morning every night and just let everything happen.

For the older albums, the middle of the night would just be that quiet time where you’re not getting phone calls or you’re not doing your office hours and so there aren’t expectations for anything – and you can also go out and sit underneath the stars. There’s so much inspiration in the vastness of the universe that it really brings you into the present moment, which is where you need to be to write in a really good, routed fashion.

When we had our kids, in the early days, they would be up at night a lot, and so, as a parent, you’re walking them to try and call them down, and that would be where a lot of the ideas came for Light Chasers and the Love album – literally just pacing with the kids in the middle of the night while they’re trying to fall back asleep.

When these ideas come to you, what form do they take? What does having an idea mean to you?

Oh, it can vary quite a bit. With “You’ll Be Bright,” it’s a whole song that came into being over the course of a very short, concentrated period of time. With other songs, just half of a verse came. You just wake up and say: ‘Oh, there it is!’ “Forces of the Unseen” would be an example of that, waking up and having a line for the bridge and going out and writing that down and going back to bed.

With “When Water Comes To Life,” we were on tour, and we were driving through the country in Kentucky. Everyone in the band was asleep and it just came at that point. It was all just there. It was just a matter of documenting it. With the drone of the road, and the hours there, the more attention I gave it and just sat and listened, the clearer it got until it was really quite apparent as to what it was. Then, in that case, when my driving shift was over, I just went in back and wrote down the music composition portion of it and wrote out the lyrics and then it was ready to go other than being recorded.

Usually, ideas come when you just don’t have the distractions, but you can’t really count on when one’s going to manifest itself.

Hypothetical situation: A songwriter really wants to write a song, but has no ideas. What’s your advice? Do you have any methods of jumpstarting your inspiration?

I think that there’s a lot to be said about putting some effort into setting all sense of self and ego aside – whatever method works for you – to kind of separate yourself from your identity and all the stories that you have inside of you that make you yourself. Those, first and foremost, are going to constrain you.

It’s all these quiet little things that you might not even notice. Thoughts about ‘How’s my girlfriend going to respond to this song?’ Or ‘How is this music reviewer going to respond to this song?’ Or ‘What does my best friend listen to and wishes that I would write more like this?’

There are always these different things that subconsciously cloud your way, so if you have a method of kind of getting really centered and getting out of your physical identity, that’s always a good first step.

I feel like a lot of art already exists in the universe on a deeper level, and that we, as humans, are just a very thin layer of concrete reality. About 99.99% of the universe is this dark matter that is un-manifested, and that dark matter, in quantum physics, manifests itself into physical things like rocks and planets and humans and birds, but it manifests itself into us as thoughts and ideas.

So, as of the example of “When Water Comes To Life,” it was such a long period of time of driving and being in this zone, I wasn’t caught in being Craig anymore, and so it just kind of opened up the channels for deeper things to come out. And I think the more you exercise that – your ability to communicate what you’re hearing and seeing on the inside, and communicate that to the outer world – that’s when songwriting gets to be easier because you realize that you’re not the thing that’s creating it, so you just step aside and let it happen.

In a place as chaotic and busy as New York City, it can be so hard to step away from it all. What advice to you have for someone who has trouble shutting out the city and getting into that centered, creative zone?

It’s really just a matter of being in a space that you personally find comfortable enough that you can just let go. You’ve gotta be in a spot where you can comfortably scream and sing in ways that you’re not paranoid that the neighbors are going to hear, even if it’s the inside of a car or something like that, and a place where you can control the environment enough that it’s going to be quiet.

At least for me, if there are good ideas coming in and there’s loud music all of a sudden around me, I just lose it all. I can’t hear the difference between what’s on the inside and what’s on the outside, which is why writing on the road for me usually doesn’t work, because there’s always music in the venues somewhere, or in the van.

Just find a place where you’re comfortable and completely letting go of yourself – and where you can be as loud as you need to be so you can experiment.

OK, so: An idea comes to you. You write it down and then go back to sleep. What’s your next step when you get back in the studio? Do you pick up an instrument? If so, what?

The two biggest instruments that I can tend to work with on the initial process are the guitar and the keyboard, and I guess mostly it’s the keyboard because I have a lot of instrument emulation software that I use. So, if I know what the French horn line is doing, I can pull up the French horn and just play that out on the keyboard and get it down. That’s what works out really with me with the orchestration process.

If it’s more of a straight-up singer-songwriter kind of thing than it will just be sitting with an acoustic guitar, but that happens a little more infrequently these days because I feel like I do a little better on the piano than the guitar. I can come up with more unique ideas that way.

When you are playing guitar, do you consciously learn new ways of playing? New scales? Chords?

“There’s a lot of ongoing education. That can vary from taking a short personal theory lesson for the day or going to YouTube and learning a new way of fingerpicking.

One of the easiest ways to fall into a rut as a songwriter is to not continue to learn new ways of approaching your instrument. That can be something as basic as learning a new style of fingerpicking – and that all of a sudden opens up this new world of how you can create a new song – or it can be learning some new tricks that your recording software will do – arpeggiation or little things like that.

Has a sonic discovery been a point of inspiration for any of your songs?

“Sleepwalker” – that middle bridge, like just the tone and sound of that was the first thing in that song. There were a couple of days of just sitting in the sonics of that tone and sculpting the shape and percussiveness of the different measures in there, and the song just kind of built out, front to back, based on that.

On “2x2x2” on Meaning of 8, there’s a really abrasive tone that sort of carries that song – and that started with that tone and just living with it for a bit.

It’s interesting that you mentioned Meaning of 8. When that album was released, I was struck by how many more sounds were present compared to your previous work. Was that sonic expansion a conscious decision, or was it the result of new equipment? Or did it just kind of happen?

I think I was learning how to embrace the technology better at that time. Most of the orchestral software emulators in the early days of Cloud Cult were really bad, so if you wanted to have a synthetic string, it sounded like a synthetic string, but there was a period there where computer memory capacity got high enough to really carefully sample the textures and intonations of some of these instruments, so all of a sudden you have, on your sound palette, a pizzicato violin that sounds pretty close to the real thing – or a glockenspiel – all these things that are suddenly at your fingertips. So, that technological growth has been very beneficial to the band.

At what point does the band enter this process? Do you write most of the orchestration yourself?

With past albums, up through Light Chasers, I’d develop the orchestration. Most of the songs will be recorded in the studio but with emulated instruments. Then, I’d just give (the musicians) sheet music and they’d just play that straight out.

But, with the Love album, with songs like “Meet Me Where You’re Going,” we sat down and I just played the guitar line and let go, letting the creators around me create with me.

That’s actually the process we’re looking at doing with this next album, which will be the first for a Cloud Cult record, of having some concentrated recording sessions during the writing process instead of just me being alone working at it.

Are there any other songwriters that you look up to? Anyone who inspires you?

Lyrically, as of late, I’ve been inspired by reading a lot of philosophers and people who write about spirituality. Musically speaking, I’m inspired by a lot of soundtrack compositions.

When I was a kid, my parents had Superman 3 on vinyl and I would just sit and listen to that score over and over again. There are certain elements of that score that are so just musically empowering that, as I was going through my teens, if I was doing something really challenging, that music would come up in my head and I started to realize how empowering music could be, even without lyrics or anything.

Your music has been such a powerful force in so many people’s lives. With that in mind, do you ever feel any pressure to write music? Does the thought of doing so ever make you anxious?

The songwriting has always come really naturally. That flow, thankfully, has been pretty steady through the years. Whenever an album is finished, I always wonder if it will turn off. So much of it happens from an inspiration manifesting itself, and I don’t know if I can count on that always being there. I’m not sure if that’s just a temporary thing that’s happening or that will continue.

But, so far, I’ve been lucky enough that the flow has been steady. So, when fans are hoping there’s another album, I’m not worried – but the demands of touring are more difficult. I can spend a lot of time in the recording studio, but with a family, it’s not as possible to spend as much time with the touring.

When you go back through all of the songs that you’re written, what percentage of your work appears on a Cloud Cult album – or is released in some way?

Well, it depends what you consider completed songs. I think another really good tip for songwriters is that you need to create a massive amount of content in order to distill that down into hopefully just the good stuff – and be comfortable with calling a majority of your stuff crap.

There’s so many times that I’ll record something and be like ‘Oh! This is going to be the second track of the album!’ Then a week later, I’ll realize that it really wasn’t what I thought it was, so that goes to rest somewhere and never shows its face. I don’t think any of us can expect that we’re interested enough in this day in age that somebody would want to hear everything we create, so you have to assume that the majority of the stuff that you create, which you may personally find interesting, isn’t interesting to everyone. I’d say, overall, about 10-20% of the songs that I write make it on an album.

What other tips do you have for songwriters?

It’s an incredibly competitive field, so you have to be in it for the love of the art and respect it in its sacred form. Music in the present day and age fits a lot of different facets, but tens of thousands of years ago, when humans were originally using it, it was for medicine and it was for connecting to deeper things. Music is a very, very powerful tool and, as a songwriter, the more that you can respect the sacred form that you’re working with and have a true passion for it, then it gets a lot easier to take the blows with all the nos.

On a personal level, what songs are you most proud of?

There are songs that I’m particularly proud of on what they did for a personal level of growth, and then there are songs that I become proud of by getting feedback from fans about how that particular song might have helped somebody in a hard time. And so, at this point, those are the ones that are my little secret golden trophies.

“Forces of the Unseen” would be an example, where you get a letter from a fan that says that they were really close to calling it quits on this whole journey, and then that song came up on their iPod in the random shuffle and got them through, you know? It’s those little things that make you realize that no matter what the critics end up saying – if they end up deciding that your album is garbage or whatever – if there’s one song that can go and do something like that, then I’ll keep working on this.