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With 'The Seeker,' Cloud Cult Makes A Movie To Match Its Music

Few bands can match Cloud Cult for multidisciplinary ambition. The Twin Cities group's live shows are uplift engines — complete with strings, horns, and onstage artists who craft paintings for auction as the musicians perform — and now Cloud Cult has its own narrative feature film, The Seeker, which has been making the festival rounds. Not surprisingly, the movie (directed by Jeff D. Johnson) and its soundtrack build on Cloud Cult's larger themes: wholehearted love, the embrace of both optimism and pain, and an overarching belief in the greater good of the universe.

The story of a girl whose life is upended by a tragedy, The Seeker is both a film drama — albeit one with no dialogue — and a standalone album about self-discovery. The film, set to roll out digitally on June 16, functions as both its own story and a set of free-standing music videos like this one, for a characteristically cathartic song called "No Hell."

"Most of the time, I write songs just because I love to write songs," singer-songwriter Craig Minowa writes via email. "But 'No Hell' came into being during one of those moments in life where I write a song not just because I want to, but because I need to in order to get through particularly hard times."

The Seeker comes out through VOD services on June 13, but available for pre-orders now; its soundtrack is available via the band's website.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)