The Emergence
Cicada Hymns released their first acoustic EP, ‘Echo Storm,’ in early February
SIMONE REAL hadn’t been on the streets for long, but he knew the rules of “hobo politics.” If someone gives you something for free — some LSD, for instance — you take it in front of them or ruin your reputation.
Real’s reputation in San Francisco might’ve been “that music guy” as he was known to play everywhere he went. Real following the music. Leaving Taos fresh out of high school on a hippie bus with some musicians who needed a guitar player, his soul telling him to Go, Be Fearless, Walk the Earth like Your Ancestors Did. The music following him. How he’d have a guitar stolen and another one would show up days later. How the music had accompanied him since he first played the traditional hand drum at eight-years-old back home on the Taos Pueblo.
Then his head cracked in half. Not literally, but, post-bad-acid, he couldn’t remember how to play a song, or that music runs in his blood (his grandmother a violinist in Vallecito; his greatgrandfather a composer of Pueblo pow wow and round dance songs). Instead a million energies attached to him. (“We learn our ABC’s, but not how to deal with that,” he says.) He felt lost, like all these faces he’d seen so far in his travels. Lost and looking for home.
He called his mom. Almost seizing, he asked her to sing something in their language. In Tiwa, she talked about her day. “She wasn’t even saying a prayer, but my body started to relax. I could cry, breathe, think,” says Real, now 25. “That’s what got me the next ticket on the Greyhound. I had to come back to the mountain and heal. To come back to mama and forgive.”
Real’s musical endeavor, Cicada Hymns, is an offering to the land, which he says he received much medicine from upon his Taos return. The sun, the springs, the river, the magnetic
PLAYLIST Cicada Hymns
fields here all aiding his system which had been too-tuned to the city. The cicada — which he heard on the mesa once when it was so hot the heat waves looked like water. Their hum sounded like God’s very own voice. Hymns.
Real is part one of the Cicada Hymns duo: singing, performing, writing chords. Miles Davis Ironwood, Navajo but living in Taos his whole life, is the foundation on bass and percussion, and rounds out the recording and production. Ironwood found Real one day when he was busking in the plaza. (Real’s grainy voice and dedicated strumming are staples outside of Manzanita Market. Though, Real says he feels like a cicada trying to find his place in the Taos music scene — still underground, up and coming, wanting to fly beyond the John Dunn shops and into the TCA.)
“It was like finding my lost brother,” says Real, who feels the weight and simultaneous pride of being a native representing natives. “We balance each other out.”
Ironwood, who’d long been a deejay, was intrigued by Real’s soulful sound. The two started learning songs by Redbone and other old-school music they pulled from Ironwood’s fat stack of records. The two started amping up the Cicada Hymns project last summer, right as that huge emergence of cicadas covered the east coast. (The symbolism isn’t lost on Real.)
The music on the latest EP, “Echo Storm,” is spiritually empowered, the sound raw (acoustic with rattles, flute, drum) and inspired by Delta blues picking guys like Robert Johnson who travel the cosmos with a guitar and a knapsack, and the potent voices of Aretha Franklin and Etta James. The high-reaching harmonies feed the whispery, ambiguous vocals over the stripped-down guitar sing to a lostness, a listlessness.
Like in “Know Name,” which is about asking tough questions of the past and working through that pain, whether self-inflicted or ancestral, so we can better know where we’re going. “Over My Head” is based in historical injustice (like reservation schools) and how it’s still happening today all slyly or shush-shush. (For example, this town’s bought-out gentrification is a hot flame under Real’s brown skin.) “Why don’t you turn around and face it?” Real sings on “Told Me,” a song about being yourself.
The album is a callback to oneself, one’s ancestors, one’s sense of home, a higher power, a simpler sound. For those kids that can Google all day, but have no real culture to connect to, no elder of whom to ask questions. “I write these soothing lullabies to calm their slumber,” says Real. That, and to wake them up.