Marina Allen‘s surreal new folk song “Red Cloud” unfolds as both fairly tale and travelogue, making no distinction between sweeping discovery and rude awakening. The Los Angeles songwriter’s voice remains resolutely gorgeous and ethereal as she traverses the vast American plains with wide-eyed inquisition. The gorgeous music video for “Red Cloud”, directed by Eliel Ford, deftly traces the song’s lyrical narrative with stunning imagery, ranging from modern structures to the unbound vastness of nature.
“The imagery surrounding Nebraska has always been really vivid for me. My mom would tell me about how my grandma would ride a pony to school named Daisy. I guess it brought an awareness of how much the world has changed in such a short time, but it also really tripped me out as a kid,” she says. “We’d be watching The Wizard of Oz and I felt like Dorothy was my heritage. So much of your family narrative defines who you are, and so much of it isn’t true, or you hear it wrong, or you only pick up this one part, passed down by somebody else who only picked up one part. I wanted to play with that. I had all of these images swirling around me, with me at the center, and none of the sources were reliable.”
We follow Allen dragging around a string of rags, handling both her toils and her triumphs with an unwavering grace. She hitchhikes through the pouring rain, drinks a slumber-inducing brew stew in the cold, but also weaves baskets (“with baskets come bounty they say”) and the hair of fellow roving women, her trek ending with a majestic cliffside view over golden waters. It’s a song that clutches love, trust and generosity like a Northern star – gentle and soothing in sound, yet resilient and unearthly in its quest to relish the fruits yielded from chasing down experiences that feel novel and mysterious.
“Red Cloud” is the first single off of Allen’s upcoming LP Eight-Pointed Star, which arrives on June 7th via Fire Records (preorder it here). “As much as you can have will and ambition,” Allen says, “those things often get in the way of a fluidity to life, and where you’re supposed to be. You can make yourself dizzy wanting to be somewhere you’re not. My first album, Candlepower, had this sparkly energy around it – I think of it very fondly. With Eight-Pointed Star I’m trying to harness that beginner’s mind again, while having the scars and wisdom that come from biting into the fruits of knowledge.”
Watch the video for “Red Cloud” below.
