Outside-the-box is the comfort zone for Nashville-based cosmic roots music trailblazers Coyote Motel. They’ve earned a reputation for fearless live performances and a highly original sound, even as they embrace the deep traditions of American music. Now, the five-piece have made their debut, feature-length film, The River: A Songwriter’s Stories of the South. And you’re getting the first preview, with a look at the trailer and a listen to a song from its soundtrack.
About “Keep Me In Your Mind” Ted Drozdowski states, “I’ve been fascinated with the lore of the Mississippi River’s levee work camps for decades— especially after hearing the levee camp songs passed along by Fred McDowell and CeDell Davis. The labor was brutal, the pay was thin—especially if you were Black, and time spent away from home was long. This song is from the viewpoint of a worker in a levee camp.”
The crowdfunded film is a journey through the lives, lore, and locales along three great rivers of the American South: the Cumberland, the Mississippi, and the Tallahatchie. Written and conceived by Coyote Motel pack leader Ted Drozdowski and directed by Richie Owens of Parlor Films, it embraces performance, storytelling, and cultural history, and is a radical psychedelic and musical experience. The film also features the light-art of Darling Lucifer Productions and the aerialists of Suspended Gravity Circus and has already been awarded Best Original Soundtrack and Best Experimental Film laurels by the Queen City Film Festival in Cincinnati.
“It’s an amazing package,” Grammy-winning music journalist Anthony DeCurtis writes in the soundtrack’s liner notes. “But the impact of The River is so much greater than even the sum of those extraordinary parts. The film is a visionary autobiography grounded in the telling details of Drozdowski’s own personal history, ‘the river of my own life experience,’ as he puts it, but ultimately it becomes a dream journey that teases out why and how music means so much to so many of us.”
Coyote Motel features Ted, bassist Sean Zywick, drummer Kyra Lachelle Curenton (all three were members of Scissormen, Ted’s previous band), vocalist, guitarist and percussionist Luella, and Laurie Hoffma on Theremin and glockenspiel. “Keep Me In Your Mind” is inspired by the lore of the levee camps along the Mississippi River, following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It features vocals by Ted and Luella, and an incendiary slide guitar solo from Ted, as its story of life in the camps unreels.
For more about Coyote Motel and The River: A Songwriter’s Stories of the South head here.
