Meels Is Writing Music For A Critter Country Bonanza
Songs for surviving gently.
Meels does not write folk songs so much as she releases small, living things into the world. Critter country, she calls it. Songs populated by raccoons, vultures, flies, redwood trees, and the quiet ache of wanting to go home. Across the Raccoon Strait, her new EP, feels less like a debut moment and more like a return. Not to a place, exactly, but to a self that existed before ambition, before cities, before noise.
Raised in Northern California among redwoods, creeks, and a borderline-unreasonable number of animals, Meels’ songwriting is rooted in observation. Nature is not aesthetic here. It is language. Animals become metaphors not to hide truth, but to soften it, to make it survivable. Her songs carry the lineage of classic folk and Americana, but they are unafraid of modern specificity, mental health, migration, longing, and the strange humor that comes with staying alive.
Critter Country as Confession
If Tales from a Bird’s Bedroom felt like an introspective sketchbook, Across the Raccoon Strait is a widening of the frame. The sound leans more firmly into classic folk and Americana, pulling from 60s and 70s traditions while keeping a distinctly contemporary nerve. Songs like The Wizard and Vultures balance whimsy with weight, often pairing jaunty melodies with lyrics about OCD, self-surveillance, and emotional reckoning. There is a deliberate lightness to how Meels handles heavy material. She has described her songwriting as “happy at the end of the world,” a fairy-tale logic where darkness is acknowledged but never allowed to fully consume the story. It is not avoidance. It is craft. By making pain digestible, even playful, she invites listeners in rather than daring them to flinch.
Between Redwoods and Skyscrapers
Meels carries two geographies at once. Northern California gave her the imagery and instinct. New York gave her urgency and edge. Studying at NYU and living in the city sharpened her sense of self, even as it quietly starved her creativity. Many of the songs on Across the Raccoon Strait were written in a New York apartment while dreaming of the West Coast, the EP becoming a document of longing before the move even happened. That tension animates the record. The California self tugs at the sleeve, but the city-trained writer knows how to finish a song, how to trust when something is done, how to let it go. Folk music, for Meels, is not a museum tradition but a living practice. One that evolves by telling the truth of the moment you are in. Across the Raccoon Strait arrives January 30.
It is intimate, funny, vulnerable, and quietly radical in its softness. A reminder that folk music still has room for small creatures, strange metaphors, and people who are learning, slowly, how to trust themselves.
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