Black Belt Eagle Scout’s New Record, Mother of My Children

Indie band Black Belt Eagle Scout is multi-talented Katherine Paul, who has released new record Mother of My Children, out today via Saddle Creek. This is her first album since 2014’s self titled EP.

Paul has created a fantastic full-length, one that boasts both breadth and depth—enough variety in sound that each track is interesting, but with depth in emotional intensity felt in every track. Paul reflects, “I wrote this album in the fall of 2016 after two pretty big losses in my life. My mentor, Geneviève Castrée, had just died from pancreatic cancer and the relationship I had with the first woman I loved had drastically lessened and changed.”

“Soft Stud,” the first track off the album, was released over the summer and has already garnered over 200,000 hits on Spotify. Crooning “need you, want you, I know you’re taken,” this track is well on its way to becoming the “queer anthem” that Paul describes it as, exploring the dynamic of open relationships in the queer community.

In “Indians Never Die,” Paul gets quieter and more serious, an intimate track that references the artist’s Native roots and a profound sadness for a colonized earth, slowly dying. Growing up on the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community reservation in Washington state, Paul cites indigenous music and her identity as a radical queer indigenous feminist as a foundation for her work and a source of inspiration from a very early age, in combination with influences she discovered in her later teenage years-- Riot Grrrl, Sleater-Kinney, and others.

Thinking back to Standing Rock, Paul states, “Our treaty rights weren’t being honored. Imagine hearing on the news that the government doesn’t support you as a human being and never has. They don’t care about the water, they don’t care about how they are destroying what is around them. Indigenous people are the protectors of this land. Indians never die because this is our land that we will forever protect in the present and the afterlife.”

“Keyboard” is another slower-paced track, with light vocals over an attention-grabbing beat. The album transitions well into “Mother of my Children,” another intimately emotional song, this one exploring emotions of loss and absence. With “Yard,” the album begins to adopt a slightly different tone. It starts quieter but builds in an absolutely beautiful way, with Paul humming over a soft guitar that gets louder and heavier towards the last minute of the song.

In “I Don’t Have You in My Life,” Paul sings about fickle human nature with a thinly veiled rage that gives the song an addicting emotional punch. “Just Lie Down” is the starkest departure from the rest of the album, opening with heavy distortion and violent percussion before settling into a more calm, but still heavy, fuzzy guitar while Paul sings with an exquisitely controlled rage. You can feel the emotion boiling under your skin as you listen. This track in particular gives the album a sense of diversity in tone.

The final track, “Sam, A Dream,” begins with the quieter feel of the first half of the album but shifts to something different, adding in heavy guitar later as the lyrics end and the album closes on a somewhat reflective note.

This is a stellar album from an artist that will undoubtedly go on to produce more great work in the future. Mother of My Children is available for purchase here.