Interview: Cave In | Reunited, And It Feels So Good

Photo by Jeremy North-Lewis.

Cave In have been gone a long time. Since their hiatus in 2006, the four members of the seminal Boston group have gone their separate ways, some forming new bands, some joining others, and most starting families and entering life outside the tour van. Bassist Caleb Scofield masterminded his doom rock project Zozobra with members of Isis and Old Man Gloom, guitarist Adam McGrath toured heavily with riff-rockers Clouds, drummer JR Conners joined Doomriders, and prolific frontman Stephen Brodsky kept himself busy with his solo material in addition to forming bands like Pet Genius and The Octave Museum, to name a few.

It was to my surprise, then, when Brodsky informed me that the band had been rehearsing again since the summer of 2008. Unbeknownst to their cult following, the quartet had been back in the jam space, hammering out the songs that would eventually make up 2009′s Planets Of Old, their gloriously heavy comeback EP. I spoke with each of the members to find out what brought them back together as well as what ultimately drove them apart. It turns out that it was as simple as being in the same place at the same time.

“All it took was a couple phone calls, really,” deadpans Brodsky. “All it took was us to be in the same place. JR was living in Germany for a while, and Caleb had moved to the west coast. He moved back that spring, and we’ve been rehearsing since that summer [of 2008].”

“There was some apprehension, because we were pretty burnt out after the last touring cycle,” says Scofield in reference to the band’s rigorous touring regimen prior to their hiatus. “I don’t think everyone was super excited about getting back together and writing new songs, but once we started, we were all very excited. It wasn’t like this magical moment or anything, we’re just friends. It felt like good friends getting together and hanging out. None of us really had any big anticipation for anything. It just was what it was. It feels natural and it’s comfortable.”

“People probably made a bigger deal about it than we did,” McGrath jokes about reactions to the reunion. “It’s like an old shoe. It was very collaborative. The first thing I noticed was how hard JR hits. He’s even better than he ever has been. Caleb still has it, and we all know Steve still has it. We’re not washed up yet.”

The reinvigorated outlook the members have on their band is a far cry from how they must have felt at the time they decided to give Cave In a rest. Once the band hit the road in support of their major label debut, Antenna, the space-rockers virtually never stopped playing. Their downtime was spent writing their follow-up, which their label, RCA, famously refused to release, subsequently buying the band out of their contract. These frustrations were vented on the follow-up, Perfect Pitch Black, which saw both a return to longtime label Hydra Head and yet another rigorous touring cycle.

It was around this time that Conners injured his wrist, prompting what seemed like the beginning of the end for the band.

“I fell off my skateboard and hurt my wrist, but it didn’t feel like it broke,” Conners explains. “I ended up going to the doctor and finding out my wrist was broken and I had been playing with a broken hand. At the time, I met my current wife a bit before that, and things were getting serious. I had the choice of going back to Boston and sitting there like an ass while my hand healed, or I could head off to Germany and spend time with my future wife and get my life together. I decided to go to Germany.

“The doctors at the time said they weren’t sure if I’d ever be able to play drums again, and while I was there, Cave In finished the recording process of Perfect Pitch Black. There was a lot of tension between me and the rest of the guys, because everything was kind of abrupt. They got Ben [Koller, Converge] to play with them, and as far as I knew, he was supposed to be the new drummer of Cave In.”

“When Cave In disintegrated, we had really burnt ourselves out at the end of our major label run,” McGrath elaborates. “When that ended, everyone kind of wanted to go on with their lives because the band had consumed it for the past three and a half years. Everyone did different things, and people just weren’t ready to get back together at that time. We started Cave In when we were 15 years old, and at that time, it consumed us. Being consumed by one thing is not good for anybody.”

“We definitely spent as much time as we possibly could together for a duration of four or five years straight,” says Brodsky. “Coming off of that, it was important for everyone to branch out a little bit and do other projects with other people. A couple guys are married and have kids now, and life is far bigger than just music, and that’s something that we all learned together.”

The break seems to have been the best thing for the boys, as Planets Of Old finds them sounding much more comfortable, with a loose feel they haven’t displayed since 2000′s Jupiter. The EP follows the blueprint of Perfect Pitch Black in that it incorporates the aggressive, experimental and melodic tendencies of all the incarnations of Cave In, yet each style meshes seamlessly, with none of that record’s thematic or personal tensions bogging it down.

Interestingly, the group spent little to no time trying to re-learn their old material, instead diving into the writing process for the songs on Planets Of Old. Recorded in just two nights, the new material benefits from both the members’ time with other projects as well as their determination to keep things fresh.

“It’s hard to keep playing the same songs for ten years,” Scofield exhales. “It sucks the life out of them. On some of the final tours we did, it was boring playing that stuff. The last thing we wanted to do having gotten back together was try to remember how to play ‘Big Riff,’ you know? No thanks. We got moving forward as soon as we could.”

“It came out awesome,” says McGrath excitedly. “We did the music one night, and the vocals the next. We know from doing records in the past, doing records for so long sucks the life out of it. We did all this so fast and it was so simple, but it sounds awesome.”

“It was very fluid and it went very quickly,” adds Conners. “We were so used to playing the songs, we didn’t really have to think about it, so there was a very excited energy to be back in the studio again, and I’d say that comes through on the recording.”

“You can definitely hear a bit of what everyone’s been doing, but at the same time, it ultimately sounds like Cave In,” concludes Scofield. “Sometimes I wonder what people mean by that, because, what is our sound? I always feel like we’re borderline schizophrenic at times. There’s certain things that I don’t revisit, and I’m not anxious to ever play certain stuff for my kid, but for the most part I’m pretty proud of everything we ever did.”

The aspect that may strike listeners upon first listening to the new material is how brutally heavy it is. Opener “Cayman Tongue” is easily one of the heaviest songs the band has ever written, and “The Red Trail,” driven by McGrath’s banshee wail, is the closest thing to “metal” the band have written since Until Your Heart Stops. It’s a curious progression, especially considering the conscious effort the group put into distancing themselves from their metalcore roots around the release of Jupiter and Antenna. Ironically, it seems Cave In have ultimately outgrown those who constantly cried for a reversion to their first album’s metallic sound.

“At the time we were doing Tides Of Tomorrow and Antenna, we did want to distance ourselves from that because we wanted people to take the new stuff more seriously,” remembers Conners. “All certain people wanted to see was the old stuff, but all we wanted to play was the new stuff, because that’s what we were writing. We never stopped listening to heavier music, we just didn’t want to play it. Now, we’re just playing what comes naturally.”

“It’s something we’re all very proud of,” says Brodsky of Until Your Heart Stops, which continues to be the record cited by fans as the definitive Cave In album. “But the older we get, the more we realize how much of an anomaly that record was for us. The new stuff is heavy, too, and we can still play those songs, but in terms of creating new music that sounds like that record, you’d have to introduce me to a time machine.

“The spirit of playing music in Cave In is not that different, ultimately, from when we started. At this point, none of us have lost our love for heavy music. There’s still great heavy music that’s being made out there that is new and exciting to check out, and that is always when Cave In have been at their best – loud and heavy.”

“At this point of our lives, we don’t really care,” states Conners. “We’ve been doing this for so long that we just want to do music that’s pleasing for us. It’s important that the fans like it and enjoy it, but at the end of the day, we do it so that we enjoy it and so it’s fun for us to do. I think people understand what the band is about now. The fans that listen to us now, they get it. We don’t have to fight and have people try to figure out if they like us or not. There’s at least two or three people out there that will like what we’re doing.”

The four men of Cave In seem to be settling into a groove that looks to be the new model for independent bands – that being, play when and if you feel like playing. Given the current state of the music industry, the careerist mindset bands used to have is rapidly becoming antiquated. Six month worldwide tours are becoming less of a reality, especially when families and jobs are involved. Though activity may become scarce, it makes the band’s output that much more special, making Cave In a labour of love rather than just labour.

“I’ve been in that ‘professional musician’ mode before, having been in this band when it was on a major label,” recalls Brodsky. We’ve been lucky to survive the experience of being on a major label. You go in one end, and you come out the other, and I do feel a sense of freedom now, having been on a major label in that scenario. Right now, I just try to focus on my own reality. This tour, this record, these songs, in the moment. The more in the moment you can be, the better you’ll find yourself reflecting upon that situation in the future.”

“I can’t say what is going to happen,” answers McGrath when asked about Cave In’s future. “It’s been very regimented, like we have a block of time, so let’s do what we can with it. There’s family and all that involved now, and I’m fine with doing it that way. We had a great run. We’ll keep writing music and playing shows, but as of right now, there’s not a whole lot planned other than that. It’s kind of like a marriage. You just have to pace yourself. I can’t complain, though. I’m lucky. I asked for it, too. This is what I wanted.”

Though they may not know exactly what they’ll be doing, the morale of the band seems to be at a considerable high, and judging by the reception to their reunion shows (with the first of these selling out in less than 20 minutes), it doesn’t seem like Cave In as a live entity is out of the question. As for right now, the four members seem excited to be writing and playing together again with a rekindled love for their band, and that’s all fans can ask for.

“There is no pressure we’re holding ourselves under when we’re writing songs now,” says Scofield of the band’s new mentality. “There’s very little tension and disagreement in our writing process now. If it’s a cool song or cool riff, we just do it and don’t think too much about it. It wasn’t always that way. Scheduling is always an issue, but it’s not difficult. We had four or five practices before we had enough songs to make a new recording, so we do know it’s possible. With the way things are now with our personal lives, it is possible, at the very least, to keep recording and putting stuff out. Beyond that, we’re just taking things as they come.”