Hi. It's been a while. Like, a year and a third. Which is a long time in blog post time. But, since my readership was always somewhere between small and non-existent, this long layoff shouldn't affect overall page views.
So, since June 2020 when I wrote about John Prine's "Crooked Piece of Time" (and also about Todd Snider's cover of the song), a whole lot has happened. First, I wrote a book about John Prine's music, called John Prine One Song at a Time. It's certainly not a best seller, but I'm proud of it, and I hope (and think) that it will become an important part of the historical reference to John Prine, who is my favorite singer-songwriter of all time. And, second, we—Boo Rits & The Missing Years—released a new album, called Marshmallow Jello, which includes nine original songs + three covers, including our version of John Prine's "That's the Way That the World Goes Round."
So, how does this relate to Reina del Cid? Well, here's how: I was not a Facebook member. But it was suggested to me that Facebook would be fertile ground for promoting the book, so I joined. I don't have many Facebook "friends," and I rarely go on the site, but it did prove to be a good place to let folks know about the book. There are a number of very popular John Prine fan pages on Facebook, so I was able to do a little bit of book promotion there. And—here's the part where we get to Reina—on one of those John Prine fan pages I stumbled upon Reina, along with her musical partner Toni Lindgren, doing a cover of John Prine's "Fish and Whistle." It was among the very best John Prine covers that I had ever heard, so I immediately dug a little deeper to see who these very talented young women were. And I quickly found a whole lot of cover songs and originals that they both, but especially Reina, had done. And those songs were spectacular. All of them. So I was hooked. I downloaded Reina's albums, listened to them again and again, and I slipped down the rabbit holes of both Reina's and Toni's YouTube pages to see the treasure trove of videos that they've made over the years.
I learned that Reina's real name is Rachelle Cordova, but she goes by Reina del Cid because she selected that name as her YouTube user name back in 2007 and the name stuck. I also learned that Reina and Toni often play together, sometimes with others, and it seems as if the full band plays under Reina's name, so I'm not sure if Reina del Cid is also the band's name or if the band doesn't really have a name. Either way, their music is terrific.
Reina is usually the lead singer when she and Toni play together, but not always. And Toni is usually the lead guitarist, but Toni is a very, very, very talented musician, whose lead guitar work is sublime and who also plays bass and a whole lot of other instruments. And they're both from the midwest, Reina from Minnesota, and Toni from my home state of Wisconsin.
It's hard to select just one song to feature from Reina del Cid's outstanding batch of original songs, but since this post is called "One Song at a Time," it seems that one is the number of songs that I should select. So I'm going with a song called "This One's Gonna Hurt," which is an upbeat, infectious rocker. Here's Reina and Toni doing an acoustic version of the song. And here's another version of "This One's Gonna Hurt," featuring Reina, Toni, and a couple of bandmates.