Great Southern Brood

About

The project

Great Southern Brood is a music project by Jordan Krueger. The lyrics, music and voices are made with AI, under his direction.

The South in these songs is one Jordan knows: he lived in Arkansas for seven years and has deep family ties to Florida. He came to this as a listener, drawn to songwriters who can hang a whole song on one image. He has also spent thirty years running a collaborative fiction community, where a story belongs to whoever happens to be standing in it.

The name belongs to the 13-year cicadas of the American South. They spend most of their lives underground, then come up all at once, loud enough to drown out a conversation.

The music is slow Southern Gothic: tremolo guitar, church organ, tape hiss. Jordan shapes the stories and directs every part, from the first lyric draft to the final mix. No human singers or players appear on the recordings.

The debut album, "The Girl in the Creek," is a mystery in nine songs. Each is sung by someone who knew the girl, and no two of them agree.

The name

Brood XIX

Plate I

Magicicada, Brood XIX

Figure 1: a periodical cicada seen from above, wings spread, with numbered parts: compound eye, simple eyes, pronotum, fore wing, wing veins, hind wing and abdomen.1234567

Fig. 1. The adult, seen from above.

  1. Compound eye, red
  2. Three simple eyes
  3. Pronotum
  4. Fore wing, clear
  5. Wing veins, red-orange
  6. Hind wing
  7. Abdomen, black
Figure 2: the thirteen-year cycle drawn as a ring with five stages: eggs in a twig, the hatched nymph dropping to the ground, thirteen years at a tree root, digging up out of the soil, and the singing adult.abcde13YEARS

Fig. 2. The thirteen-year cycle.

  1. Eggs laid in a slit in a young twig
  2. The hatched nymph drops to the ground and burrows in
  3. Thirteen years underground, drinking sap from tree roots
  4. Comes up when the soil warms to about 64°F
  5. Sheds its skin, sings and mates, and lives about a month

A brood is a population of periodical cicadas that comes out of the ground in the same year, all at once. Brood XIX, the Great Southern Brood, keeps a thirteen-year clock across the South, from Missouri and Arkansas to Georgia and the Carolinas.

The nymphs spend those years underground, drinking sap from tree roots. In the thirteenth spring, when the soil warms to about 64°F, they climb out, shed their skins and fill the trees with song for about a month. Their eggs hatch in the twigs, the new nymphs drop to the ground, and the clock starts over.

Brood XIX last came up in 2024. It is due back in 2037.

Credits

Jordan Krueger, songwriter and producer.