Video Premiere: Sonya Cotton “Hunters"

Awesome west coast singer songwriter has her self-released new album hitting stores today... Tour dates below, too.

By Blurt Staff

Released, today, September 1, songstress Sonya Cotton's new album Red River includes the luscious track "Hunters" - and we've got the video for it right here at Blurt. Just click on the link or scroll down to our Blurt TV video kiosk to view it.

Meanwhile, here's some deets you need to know about the young lady. She'll also be doing selected west coast tour dates starting this weekend; see below for her itinerary.

***

"I'm going West, you should come."

It was a cold winter morning in Connecticut. Sonya Cotton looked out over the frozen lake as her mind flooded with visions of the open road. Her best friend continued: "It would be good for you, to get away for a while." The timing felt like a sign, a call to rise after a year of tumult.

Over the past year, Sonya watched as the most important and defining loving relationships around her, including her own, dissolved. Reeling from the dismantling of these unions, she felt herself the victim as well as the perpetrator of a great deal of destruction and betrayal. Living in the suburbs of the northeast, she perceived this destruction paralleled in the dead animals along the roadside that she passed every day. She saw herself and loved ones in the dead deer: innocent, inflicted upon, and disregarded. She also saw herself and loved ones in the perpetrators of their deaths: self-consumed, unconscious, and untrustworthy.

She began to have dreams of the wreckage. These dreams inspired the first songs that would become Red River, Sonya Cotton's album to be released this July. Deer appeared night after night, broken and bloodied, strewn on the living room floor, buried like secrets at the bottom of a canal, lying in the stained hands of a hunter, or inside of her own belly. These haunting dreams did not wane with time, for vestiges of the wreckage remained all around her. The escape to the west held promise:

"I'm coming with you."

The 11 songs of Red River chronicle this journey from the darkness of the east towards the promise of the west. In the course of this journey, redemption and faith are found in the midst of the destruction, and beauty is pulled from the darkness through song: "In this broken body is a red river, we will wait with our faith for this pile of bones for to rise."

Once in San Francisco, Sonya actively immersed herself in the folk music community there, refining her dream images into songs, and befriending the musicians who were to become her band. The tight three-part vocal harmonies and lush orchestrations that emerged from this cooperative effort produced the sweeping, distinctive sounds of Red River. Mirroring the emotional space from which the songs were born, the album was recorded in the legendary Hyde Street Studio C (David Crosby, The Grateful Dead) a reputedly haunted space, where Sonya's sessions were often recorded in the dark. From this haunted darkness Sonya and the band voiced the nightmares carried from the east, and transformed them, bringing to light the gentle beauty and the power of Red River.

In June ‘09, Sonya Cotton embarked on a 45 mile walking tour of the California Coastal Trail, playing nightly shows throughout Marin County. She is currently preparing for a September '09 tour by train and foot. These alternative modes of touring are in keeping with the main theme of the album ­ that of rising out of the patterns of destruction that we inflict upon one another, and choosing instead a more reverent and life-affirming path.

Tour Dates:

sep 05 - Portland, OR - The Woods (3 Leg Torso)
sep 05 - Portland, OR - In Other Words Women's Books and Resources (early performance, 3pm)
sep 06 - Olympia, WA - The Finger Complex (7pm, FREE!, 203 Rogers St. NW)
sep 07 - Ocean Shores, WA - Galilean Lutheran Church (Concert Fundraiser for Garden by the Sea)
sep 11 - Chico, CA - Center for Peace and Justice (Ma'Muse)
sep 12 - Davis, CA - Rominger West Winery