Song Premiere: Kelly Hunt, “Clouds”
🎼“I crave long drives through the plains, the infinity of sky unfolding as far as the eye can see.”
Kelly Hunt’s new single “Clouds,” from her forthcoming album ‘Requiem for a Sleepless Night,’ playfully captures the changing character of that sky on a recent drive. Driven by Dirk Powell’s fiddle and buoyed by Amelia Powell’s lilting harmony vocals, Hunt’s breathy vocals—close your eyes and you’ll think you’re listening to Joni Mitchell—envelop us, witnessing the “kaleidoscope of shape and size” of clouds that shift “right before her eyes,” testifying to their “constant state of change.”
The song’s brisk tempo—it opens almost as a hoedown—mimics a road trip, the blurring of scenery, and the shape shifting motion of towering clouds viewed through a windshield.
Hunt reflects on the song: “I wrote ‘Clouds’ on one such dead-ahead drive through the Midwest—late summer afternoon, storm brewing. I’d been driving for hours, lost in thought, when my eyes suddenly focused on what looked like mountains rising in the distance. I quickly realized they were only clouds—a string of thunderheads weighing heavily on the horizon with all the seeming concreteness of a mountain range. The fleeting shock of this moment got me thinking about the power of illusions, how real illusory things can feel at times, and of our capacity to both create and dismantle stumbling blocks in our own minds.”
Kelly Hunt’s “Requiem for a Sleepless Night” will be released on September 18 on Compass Records.
