A "Terrible " time with Dave Cahill.
A "Terrible " time with Dave Cahill.
Article by Ryan Woodring
Photography by Brian Hewitt
I had the chance to chat with Dave Cahill of The Almighty Terribles on a cool and dark Wednesday evening while he was at SMT Studios in NYC. Here’s what he had to say for himself:
RW: I really dig your band’s name. It’s right up there with other awesome band names “…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead,” “Doctor Teeth and Electric Mayhem, and “The Gentleman Farmer’s Union”. What is the origin of your band’s name?
DC: The name was blurted out one late evening by my brother Rich in November 2005 to describe how absolutely terrible we sounded that night. This was before I sang and we played mostly instrumental music. "We're like the Almighty Terribles or something,” Rich said, as a light bulb materialized over my head. That was it. That was to be our name.
RW: What are you currently listening to?
DC: I am currently listening to Radiohead, "The King of Limbs".
RW: Have you managed to keep your original line-up together?
DC: We’ve had a few different members over the years. The current lineup is myself, Ryan Decker on drums and Nate Powell on bass. Ryan and I were in a seven-piece band live trance band from 2003-2005 called Foolz. We performed all over the Lehigh Valley before I left the band in 2005. We were known for our late-night long jams, improvisation and partying. It was a lot of fun, but I had this other sound bouncing around my head. I became friends with Nate in 2008 while performing solo at Pearly Baker's where he works. I scared him with my black Mohawk and over the next few months we began talking about life on other planets, had a few jams and Nate officially joined the band in August 2009.
RW: So when did you officially form?
DC: We formed after the release of my solo album, The Huddled Masses. The idea for the band began in rural New Jersey as a loose collective of musicians that I was associated with. It was never meant to be a three-piece Prog-rock band, but more like a large collection of random musicians, playing whatever needed to be played that evening. Realizing that it was hard to schedule in so many talented musicians, I decided to let go of the original idea of a collective and focus more on a rock outfit, and to start saying what was on my mind. Besides, looking for a singer was too frustrating, I decided to just learn how to sing and write and do it myself.
I wrote and recorded The Huddled Masses in 2006 with the help of my brother Rich on drums and Myke Tarlazzi on drums and bass. In 2008 I wrote Fascists to Ashes and recorded it with the help of Myke and our engineer friend Shauhn Wilson up in the Poconos. We used lots of old, sometimes broken equipment to record a monster of an album. Myke and I performed all the instruments, and after we finished we realized we needed a drummer to pull the songs off live. That is when we welcomed Jeff D'Amore to the band.
In late 2008, drummer Ryan Decker moved back from Colorado and asked if he could be in the band. It was the spark that the band needed to propel itself into the local spotlight. We began recording Hope-nosis in January 2009. The first weekend of recording sessions, during the middle of recording "Bailout" Ryan and I saw a giant, red, UFO circling overhead. It was silent, it was triangle shaped, and it was unlike anything I have ever seen. After mentioning this to a few people, I realized that, no one believed me. Luckily about a month later, I saw a news report of a 20-year veteran pilot who saw the same exact flying vehicle that night in the same county as we were in. Anyway, we blasted the music from the open doors of our studio that night so that whoever was flying in the giant red triangle could hear it. The album was finally released in August 2009, and Myke left the band shortly thereafter. I thought the fate of the band was over.
Luckily, bassist Nate Powell was immediately available and showed up to the first band practice together knowing every song and every chord. He really reignited the flame that was almost lost, thankfully his dedication really motivated both Ryan and I to push even harder.
RW: What’s your process for recording? Does it vary from album to album?
DC: In the past, I have always engineered and recorded all of my music. This changed in 2010 when we hired the help of brilliant friend and engineer Brian Herman of SMT Studios in Manhattan. The new album was recorded like a live album, and it really defines the sound.
My obsession with the multi-verse and Carl Sagan fed the songs and Brian's unbelievable producing and engineering abilities allowed these feelings and ideas in my head to transcend into the music. After many months of tweaking and late night metaphysical experiences, We're Not The Only Ones was finally completed in April 2011. The album will be released this summer.
RW: What can you tell me more about the latest album?
DC: We're Not The Only Ones is a hopeful call for peace and unity on this planet and all the others. I am sure that we are not the only ones, and that this current reality is just a small slice of what is actually real. It wasn't until I realize how truly small we are that I found pure happiness and love for everything around me.
Brian Herman and I are putting the final touches on it now. Brian is a true genius at what he does, I am sure he would disagree if he knew I said that, but believe me, it's true. I have spent the majority of my life recording music, and this project by far was the most enjoyable, experimental, and mind altering experience I have ever had. It is as if we tapped into another dimension somewhere, and listened to the music they had and took some of it home with us. It is hard to describe this all in words, but I can honestly say, my life has been forever changed after recording this album. It'd kind of like a near death experience packed into wave of audio. I cannot wait to begin the next album. I cannot wait to do this forever.
RW: Sounds pretty conceptual.
DC: Overall, the album is all about the infinite complexities that surround us, the feeling that we are not alone in this universe, and that there are an infinite number of alternate realities and multiple dimensions that we will never fully understand.
RW: Walk me through some of the tracks.
The album starts off with "Algorithm" which is a tribute song to all our fans and friends who have supported us through the years. They know who they are; they always come to our shows and tell their friends about us. It was fitting to write a song for them to begin the album.
The second track is "Don't You Know". We had help from vocalist, Maigin Blank, who was just visiting the studio the night we were recording vocals for the song. I wrote down some of the lyrics and just let her do her thing. The song is upbeat and about the experiences between two lovers who love each other so much, they end up pushing each other away, like reverse magnetism.
The third track, "Blood For Fuel", was written for all my friends in the peace organization, We Are Change. Over the years I have taken part in many events and protests with people from all over the world. My friend Luke Rudkowski founded the group. It began in his room in Brooklyn and has spread to a worldwide peace organization with chapters in over 80 countries. It’s a siren song for the troops, to lay down their weapons and disobey the unconstitutional orders given to them by our tyrannical government. I plead for them to stop and think about what they are involved in, and realize that everyone on this planet are in fact, one people. From chaos, comes clarity, as much as it will be horrible if society crumbles, I hope that humans will realize how fragile our seemingly meaningless existence is, and how we need to do everything we can to survive and continue our species into the next century.
"Escape" and it is about a man who falls in love with an extraterrestrial. Luckily, we had guitar virtuoso, Joe Lawler perform the lead guitar part. He has been a friend and inspiration for years. Having him on this song and on "Something Ain't Right" is definitely one of my favorite parts of the album.
The song "Medicine" is about someone’s eternal love for marijuana. And "Methodology" is about going through madness but prevailing with important thoughts and ideas as the madness takes over. The title song "We're Not The Only Ones" was a collaborative effort between the band and producer & engineer, Brian Herman. We actually went out in the streets of New York at 4am and recorded sounds of the city and imported them into the track. It gave a sort of hyper-reality type of sound to this epic finale. It sounds like a civil war song on Mars or Gliese 581g, but it also kind of feels like God is sitting on your face, or maybe that's how it feels to me.
RW: What’s the first album you ever bought?
DC: They Might Be Giants, "Flood".
RW: What is your favorite lyric?
DC: I have two by Chris Whitley: "So hard to get warm now, so easy to get burned." & "Well the mist shall be your blanket, While the moss shall ease your head, As the future is soon forgotten, As the dirt shall be your bed. "
RW: You recently did a show with someone pretty famous. How did that unfold?
DC: I performed with Tim Reynolds on stage recently; he plays with the Dave Matthews Band. He is my favorite guitar player, and it was an honor playing with him and his band, TR3. He has been a friend for several years, and I have learned countless things from him over the years, he is one very special musician and person.
RW: What song do you wish you wrote?
DC: I wish I wrote the song, "Big Sky Country" by Chris Whitley or "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead.
RW: Any thoughts on how this album will be received?
DC: I never thought I would experience the feeling I have while listening to these final mixes. I feel empowered and joyful that we were able to create something so powerful, so beautiful and really capture the late night metaphysical experiences we lived through. I hope people all over the world get to hear this album. I am also going to be beaming the album into space with radio waves at the speed of light, hoping that someone out there will hear it. Or perhaps, when we die, we just wake up on another world somewhere else. In that case, perhaps I will be able to recapture this work in the next life. If there were no other life beyond, it seems like it would be a terrible waste of space. Of course life in the Universe is abundant, but really this experience we are having right now is just a hologram, there is no end to what we don't know. We have much to learn and I hope we make it through the growing pains of being human. Only a very small portion of nuclear weapons must be detonated before everything is washed away, as if it never happened. Everyone you ever knew, every song ever written, every paint-stroke, every novel, poem, letter, conversation would be wiped from existence in an instant, forever. Of course, no one wants this, but we need to be ready to fight until our last breath to prevent it, it is our destiny to travel to the stars and share our stories with the others out there. We Are Not The Only Ones.
RW: One last question: is Nate’s middle name “Danger”? What’s the most dangerous thing he’s done?
DC: Nate's middle name really is "DANGER". One time Nate was brutally attacked by a vicious feline which he battled for twelve hours before finally screaming, "UNCLE!" He then left the scene of the crime with his bass between his legs.
For information about upcoming performances, to view the band’s videos, or purchase albums hit these guys up at thealmightyterribles.com.
In This Issue....
The New Pioneers
Young Trailblazers in the Valley
Hagedorn Lost
Where do we go from here?
Andrew Cassano: Leading Zoellner's New Vision
View: I'm not sick, but I'm not well.
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