Black Belt Eagle Scout - Fantasy

New Music 2026 Q4 W46

Black Belt Eagle Scout – Fantasy

Katherine Paul started “Fantasy” alone with an acoustic guitar, singing into the voice memo app on her phone. On that recording you can hear her hand shuffling against the guitar, and the sound stayed: the snare and hi-hat on the finished song follow it. That keeps the rhythm close and physical, like it’s still coming off her hands.

It’s the first Black Belt Eagle Scout song since 2023’s The Land, The Water, The Sky, and the first since Paul, who lives in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, shared her multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2024. Claire Glass and Nay Mapalo of the band Hikes produced and played on it. Paul wrote the guitar solo specifically for Mapalo, borrowing the fast licks that are part of Hikes’ own sound, and it’s out now on Saddle Creek.

Paul wrote it while leaving the Native nonprofit world to make music full time, worn out by the pressure to be “some kind of superwoman” for her community inside systems that didn’t fit. The lyrics picture a halo somebody else wants her to wear, then break into a blunt string of refusals that ends with her wanting to go listen to the trees. I expected that outburst to be the peak, but the line right after it hit harder: she catches herself, admits she isn’t the trees, and tells herself to remember them. The freedom she sings about only fully arrives inside the dream of the title, and the last lines have her admitting she’s falling.