Her real name is Rachelle Cordova.
Her nom de plume (de plectrum?), Reina del Cid, is a little mushy in its application (remember Alice Cooper: A person? band? both?). It belongs properly to her own brand, but also seems to have been franchised, de facto if not de jure, to her partnership with badass guitarist Toni Lindgren as well to the gaggle of bandmates that she performs with and features on her many, many YouTube posts. They’ve included Carson McKee, Josh Turner, Nate Babs, Andrew Foreman, and many other guests, friends and associates.
I’ll be writing some of them up in separate posts on their own merit. Smartly, Rachelle has surrounded herself with some solid talent.
It’s not her voice, which is serviceable and certainly self-aware: her range is sub-alto, there’s little vibrato or other acrobatics, and her pitch is table stakes.
It’s not her guitar play, again serviceable: mostly strumming, first-position chords, a capo for the ‘black’ keys, and no spotlight solos on offer.
It’s not her performance or stage presence: she’s rarely unseated, rather shackled to her chocolate acoustic guitar and broadcast-quality mic, and she offers scant interaction with her listeners beyond a ‘Happy Sunday morning everyone!’ or ‘Coffee Cheers!’ (which is directed more at partner Toni than the viewer anyway).
No, it’s something else: her musical sensibilities are positively off the chart.
Lets start with her range of style, which itself is astonishing. She’s Folk. And Country. And Bluegrass. And Rock. And Blues. And Pop. And Jazz. And Prog. And pretty much bloody everything else including their subgenres. Her canvas just goes on forever and she’s comfortable anywhere on it.
More amazing than that is that she writes and posts a breezy, seamless selection of original music and cover songs to her channel, regularly and in an unapologetically random mix. Her own songs share a marquee with those of Neil Young, Tears for Fears, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Diana Krall and dozens of other legends. It’s dizzying.
Most amazing of all is that her songwriting craft is far beyond the skillset of almost every tunesmith that’s been in the business of composing for their whole careers. As of this posting, she’s 34 years old.
The first of her originals that I heard was What I’m Losing, posted in a couple of versions to her channel, but never released on any of her four full-length albums. This one was recorded on location (her locations are usually outdoors, with top-shelf recording gear in schlep) with her smooth-playing, angel-voiced buddy Josh Turner. It’s a bittersweet confessional with an uncomfortably lovely guitar hook, and a lyric that could make a caretaker laugh and a lawyer cry. Her maturity in matching the musical story arc to the strophic drama is just plain sage.
There are very few perfect songs in the anthology of recorded popular music. This is one.
A second was the studio recording of Seasons from her current release Candy Apple Red. A murmur of a song, this – she knows like no other how to shout by whispering. And again, what she lacks in technical acumen she makes up for in seeing inside the soul of the guitar; Toni’s opening riff is creative, rhythmic, simple and could only have been composed on something that has a neck, strings and frets. Which is why the violin doesn’t play it.
The knockout punch is a song she wrote when the kids set out in a van to ‘tour’ the southern US. She explains it in the post, but the gist of it is that their vehicle broke down in Roswell, NM and they were stuck there for as long as it took for fix the jalopy. So they made lemonde, and the result was a song that captures a block of the town’s folklore (Roswell is only known for one thing, of course) and sets it to music. And not just any music, mind you: this song features the captivating historical drama set against two completely different musical settings and moods in verse and refrain. In each, her tonal dexterity is expert. Joni Mitchell herself could never have written its equal.
And to cap this all off, the cover songs that Rachelle and Toni lovingly curate and arrange for such wonderful, intimate settings all at once capture the musical essence of their originals, and make you wish you were sitting there, just chilling out with these uber-cool, gifted, impossibly beautiful people. Here’s a tiny sampling:
