WATCH: Reina Del Cid, “Goodbye Butterfly”

Artist: Reina Del Cid
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “Goodbye Butterfly”
Album: MORSE CODE
Release Date: October 4, 2019

In Their Words: “I wrote ‘Goodbye Butterfly’ a few years ago. I couldn’t sleep one night, so I fired up Logic and started playing around with beats and synths, and out came this lush, wistful song that begged to be re-recorded with real, vibrating strings and percussion. So rather than releasing it as an electronic song, I kept it in my back pocket for an acoustic album.

“For the music video, I had the pleasure of working with Dan Huiting (Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso, Trampled By Turtles). We decided to film most of it on Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior, in towns like Grand Marais and Schroeder along Highway 61. Dan used a drone to get sweeping views of the lake and me, as small as an ant in some frames, performing the song on cliff faces or the base of a lighthouse.

“I have strong ties to the North Shore and have been going up there for years, both to perform shows and to escape into the woods and hiking trails. ‘Goodbye Butterfly,’ with its roots in the layered digital grid, ended up being the biggest, most intricate sounding song on the new album, and the mighty Lake Superior was the perfect backdrop for it.” — Reina Del Cid


Photo credit: Nate Ryan

LISTEN: David Huckfelt, “Everywind”

Artist: David Huckfelt
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “Everywind” (featuring Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath)
Album: Stranger Angels
Release Date: February 22, 2019

In Their Words: “At the Mishipeshu Trading Post, named for a mythical Ojibwe underwater panther, at the foot of the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I found an old postcard with a woman wrapped in a blanket… Photographed in 1907 by Roland Reed, and standing on the shores of what surely must be Lake Superior, the card simply read ‘Everywind.’

“Nothing else was written and nothing more could be found on who she was, or where, or how she lived. Immediately the wheels began turning on how this woman over a hundred years ago was part of this royal, nurturing, fierce and life-giving lineage of women who have endured all that men have done to them, and this planet, from time immemorial. I flashed ahead to Winona LaDuke, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tara Houska, Faye Brown, and the countless women I know who have stood up and spoken up for the Earth from Alcatraz to Standing Rock in North Dakota; to Louise Erdrich whose novels are staggering in their beauty and whose Birchbark Bookstore in Minneapolis stands as a beacon of truth-telling of a deeper American history vibrant in its resistance ‘Everywind’ is about then and now, the link, from mother to earth, and this moment in our culture when it’s time for men to say to women: ‘You talk. We listen.'” — David Huckfelt


Photo credit: Graham Tolbert