To celebrate the announcement they share the first single, “Put Your Feathers On," a call to dance that references a Cree ritual for preparing for a powwow. Get Your Feathers Ready is set for release on October 24th.^.

Listen/Share: Blue Moon Marquee & Northern Cree “Put Your Feathers On”

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The bone-shaking beat of a drum is the very first sound that emerges on “Put Your Feathers On," while Blue Moon Marquee set the tone with A.W. Cardinal’s raw, vibrant six-string riff with Jasmine Colette's soulful vocals to match. The communal voices of Northern Cree take their own verses with joyful, wild-eyed power. But all orbits around the drum, sonically and spiritually. The drum is not there to simply keep the beat; its voice is the voice that weaves all elements, all bodies in the room together.

"That driving rhythm is the heartbeat of this earth," Cardinal says. "That is what the Native drum is. The Native drum has its own spirit and its own soul and that's what we wanted to focus on."

To some, the traditional Indigenous powwow music of Turtle Island may not immediately come to mind as sonically syncing with the gritty wail of the blues sprung from the Mississippi Delta. Until one remembers their shared rhythms—steady, simple, heavy, like a pulse that predates music itself.

Cardinal and Colette were reminded of this as they watched the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, and saw Tuscarora/Taino activist and songwriter Pura Fé singing along to a recording by legend Charley Patton, known to many as the father of the Delta blues. The clip helped Cardinal connect the dots between his Woodland Cree heritage and his love of blues music. In Halifax at the 2024 Juno Awards, the duo and Joel Wood of Northern Cree were both celebrating wins—for Scream, Holler & Howl and Sing. Pray. Love., respectively—and collectively decided Joel would join them in the project.

Get Your Feathers Ready is the music that manifested. After getting together to run through songs during an afternoon near Maskwacis, Alberta, the album was recorded in a swift eight hours the following day, live off the floor.

For Cardinal, it was both a dream and a homecoming of sorts. He's from the same area as Northern Cree—Treaty Six territory—and is a longtime fan: "Every time I see Joel and listen to Northern Cree's music, it makes the hair stand up on my arms, you know?" Growing up in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, Cardinal guarded his Indigeneity to avoid trouble, but Get Your Feathers Ready is the result of a steady transformation of identity.

"Over the years, through music and meeting Northern Cree, it's given me strength and pride in who I am and that side of my culture," Cardinal says.

Making music together—and especially in this case, bridging the slim gap between two long-running and profoundly spiritual traditions—is a kind of collaboration that provides fertile ground for transformation. It helps one see themselves not as an individual but part of a human lineage that extends millennia into the past; here, held together by the power of the drum.

"As a child I attended powwows but lived in town—I wasn't immersed in the culture," Cardinal says. "So to be able to be part of something like this is an incredibly soul-nourishing opportunity. It was one of the most fulfilling musical and spiritual experiences I've ever had. I've devoted my life to music, and the best way for me to get in touch with my roots is through song—Get Your Feathers Ready is the sound of that full circle moment."

Carving a path through blues, jazz, jump jive, folk, country, swing and Indigenous soul with an authentic spirit, Blue Moon Marquee’s sound does not idle easily in one certain category.

Their gift is they bring all these elements together without anything sounding out of step. They collect the roots and smoothly braid them with lyrics that often touch on the underbelly of society, woven with elements of Indigenous storytelling and poetic cadence. After picking up the 2024 Juno for Blues album of the Year and a nomination in 2025 for the same category, with Get Your Feathers Ready alongside Northern Cree, they deliver a stylish & spellbinding sound that freely reaches back into tradition but is entirely unique.