Black Belt Eagle Scout’s latest album celebrates home
When the 2020 pandemic struck, Katherine Paul, who records as a black belt Eagle Scout, was about to tour to support her burgeoning career.
But when everything shut down, the indie rocker relocated from Portland, Oregon to Washington state’s Swinomish Indian Tribal Community instead. Her latest album, The Land, the Water, the Sky, is out Friday and was inspired by this move.
Why we wrote this
The pandemic has provided more time to reflect on the spaces we live in. With their latest album, Black Belt Eagle Scout celebrates how their own perspective on a familiar place has changed.
The cover, which features the musician, shows her connection to the lands of her ancestors where she grew up. It is an extended meditation on what makes a true home.
“I love how sparse the music is. There’s this calm confidence,” says Sterlin Harjo, showrunner of hit TV series Reservation Dogs, describing the artist’s style. The show, set on an indigenous reservation, has featured several Black Belt Eagle Scout songs. “She’s a very humble person,” he adds.
This spring, Ms. Paul will tour Europe and parts of North America. And then she returns to the land of Douglas firs and green camas. She feels grounded there.
“Home is just another word for connection and love and family,” says Ms. Paul. “This is where I belong.”
The cover photo of the new Black Belt Eagle Scout album shows a waist-deep woman in Washington’s Puget Sound. The seawater behind her ripples in paisley patterns. A fleet of clouds looks like it has escaped gravity’s last grip. It should be atmospheric.
“There are waterways and beaches with beautiful rocks and shells,” says Katherine Paul, the Native American indie rocker who records as Black Belt Eagle Scout, of the area. “And then there are our people. Our people are here too.”
The album, her third, debuts Friday titled “The Land, the Water, the Sky.” Ms. Paul is the woman on the cover, representing her connection to the lands of her ancestors where she grew up. The album was inspired by her relocation from Portland, Oregon to Washington State’s Swinomish Indian Tribal Community during the pandemic. It is an extended meditation on what makes a true home.
Why we wrote this
The pandemic has provided more time to reflect on the spaces we live in. With their latest album, Black Belt Eagle Scout celebrates how their own perspective on a familiar place has changed.
“I love how sparse the music is. There’s this calm confidence,” says Sterlin Harjo, showrunner of hit TV series Reservation Dogs, describing the artist’s style. The show, set on an indigenous reservation, has featured several Black Belt Eagle Scout songs. “She’s a very humble person,” he adds.
Black Belt Eagle Scout’s music is often quiet. But her guitar can also roar like a lumberjack’s chainsaw. She initially taught herself to play by studying pirated Nirvana videotapes. After graduating from college in Portland, Ms. Paul stayed in town where she was employed by local music venues who valued her great organizational skills. She also developed her singing craft. Her first two albums “Mother of My Children” (2017) and “At the Party With My Brown Friends” (2019) catapulted her towards indie rock. Then her momentum came to an abrupt halt. The pandemic shattered her first US headlining tour plus shows in Europe.
“It was devastating, to be honest,” she says via Zoom. But her career woes were eclipsed by worries about her parents’ ill health. She was also newly married to her drummer, Camas Logue, who has two children. Since they couldn’t perform live, money was tight. “I had to think about my family and think about what was important to me,” she says. “Kind of a shift.”
So Mrs. Paul, her husband and children moved to the reservation in July 2020.
“The difficult element moved back in the pandemic when we couldn’t really get together,” she says. “My tribe generally likes to have a lot of events. … And they didn’t happen. So the challenge was being alone a lot and not having that sense of community.”
Mrs Paul’s family belonged to a drum group, the Skagit Valley Singers, and her father, a totem pole carver, had sung traditional tunes to her when she was a baby.
“One of the lessons Dad passed on to him from my grandfather is, ‘When you sing, sing from your heart. You sing well and you bring good medicine,’” she says, adding that her parents are fine now. “Strength and healing, I think that’s always something I try and incorporate into my music.”
Her father sings backing vocals on a softly strummed song called “Spaces”.
“He does it his way. If you cut out the whole song and just had him sing those notes, and maybe there’s a drum, it would sound like a Coast Salish song,” says Ms. Paul. “But because I’m making my own form of indie rock music, there’s this way it can come together at times, too.”
Most of the songs on the album are about her longing for connection and finding solace in her natural surroundings.
“Because I couldn’t be close to physical people and bodies, I went out into nature,” she explains. “I went to my other relatives. I went to the plants. I went to the trees, I went to the water. And I have found these forms of relationships.”
A key song on the album, “Salmon Stinta,” expresses how the challenges of moving made Ms. Paul “scream to the sea.” It’s also a song of healing. Ms. Paul wrote the song on a classical acoustic guitar with an open D tuning, which she rarely used. While she was playing, she fixed a painting in the room entitled “Salmon Stinta” that her husband had made for her.
“Then this tune came to my mind and I started singing what I saw in the picture,” says the songwriter. “I sang to it because I love this painting. Here is my offer for this painting that was created for me.”
Upon hearing the song, Mr. Harjo introduced it at the end of the second season of Reservation Dogs.
“Something about the elements of their music is great,” says Mr. Harjo, who first discovered Black Belt Eagle Scout while filming the documentary “Love and Fury” (available on Netflix) about Native Americans expressing themselves through art. “It’s something that just fits so well between their music and a really emotional scene by the water, the ocean. Just a really nice combination of visuals and music.”
This spring, Ms. Paul will tour Europe and parts of North America. And then she returns to the land of Douglas firs, green camas, and bushes of salmonberry, blueberry, and foxglove. She feels grounded there.
“Home is just another word for connection and love and family,” says Ms. Paul. “This is where I belong.”