PATCHWORK

It’s always cool to see a great band emerge from your own home turf. It’s been quite a while since any metal band from Rockford, IL ,home town of CHEAP TRICK, has put out an album I would truly call great. The two records from THE HEAVILS in the early 2000’s would qualify and maybe BEYOND THRESHOLD as well. But the metal scene here is just not what it once was.

That’s why it’s so awesome to hear the record “Scars” from PATCHWORK. But wow, all the adversity these guys had to endure while putting it together! If pressure makes diamonds, “Scars” is a 100 carat gem for sure. A great bridging of classic thrash metal with modern groove and intensity, coupled with emotional intensity that could only come from pure crisis.

I had to get the story on both band and album. I met drummer Dave Caruana at local landmark The Olympic to hear things right from the horse’s mouth. You’ll find this to be a more intense discussion than most Wormwood interviews...

WORMWOOD CHRONICLES:  I’m here with Dave Caruana from PATCHWORK and I want to thank him for hanging out with me tonight. Now I understand the history of the band goes back to 2010…

DAVE CARUANA:  Yeah, that’s correct. We started out as a cover band around here. We were all local and played places like Whiskey’s Roadhouse and Bar 3. We started practicing in early 2010 with the original lineup and we only played out for about five years or so. We got a new singer about half way through that, around 2013 and put out our first album in 2015 called “Exit Wounds”. Then a bunch of bad things happened, I guess. (chuckles) Our lead singer decided he wanted to do something else and then our lead guitarist Mark Sheets passed away a couple of years ago from cancer. He fought that for a while...he fought harder than I’ve ever seen anybody fight. It was pretty intense. He was our brother and best friend. But because of that, this new album “Scars” took a long time to get out. We haven’t played out in 10 years, quite frankly. Louisville was the last show we played.

WC: That actually answers several questions I had at once. (laughter). I was going to ask what the biggest change was in all that time. Well, obviously, losing your lead guitarist is as big as it gets. And I would imagine he was a songwriter as well.

DC: On our first album, we each wrote a third of the album. Me, Brad Carlson and Mark each wrote a third of it. He was fighting cancer, he had some other things going on in his life and he lived two hours away from us. So it was hard for him to get over here and do any writing or practicing. He didn’t have as many contributions on “Scars”, Brad and I did most of it.

WC: I was interested in how you did the songwriting. Was there one guy who was “the general” that writes everything? But it sounds like it was a pretty democratic process.

DC: It really is! The way it usually works, Brad and I would meet every Thursday or once a week for a few hours and he’d throw some riffs at me. I’d say, OK, this will be the first riff, then this will be the chorus riff and we’d go off like that. We’d build a “riff library”, a lot of thrash bands would do that. A lot of the riff-driven genres would do that. We’d stitch things together, come up with transitions. So yeah, there are a couple of songs in there where he’d write the verse riff, I’d write the chorus riff and the bridge riff, he’d write the solo riff, I’d do the outro...things like that.

WC: Was there a drastic change in style between “Exit Wounds” and “Scars”?

DC:  We took a bit of a different creative approach to writing the songs. First, we involved technology because we really weren’t a full band anymore, we couldn’t bring something to a band practice and say “here, this is what we’re going to do”. It was just me and Brad. So we both set up home studios. His is called the Scarred Studio and mine is called the Junkyard because it’s always a total mess. (chuckles) But we’d record those riffs and then share them with each other. This time around, the approach that we took is we did things more straightforward. “Exit Wounds” had more of a progressive influence to it and that’s where Mark’s influence was really felt. He really liked the chord changes and a lot more technical stuff. We still like the technicality, but we’re not afraid to slow it down, we don’t speed it up just for the sake of speeding it up, you know. We’re looking for more of that pure metal sound.

WC:  I could detect different influences from different bands but there wasn’t really one that predominated. I couldn’t say “oh, here’s another PANTERA band” or another EXODUS band. Was “Scars” kind of a hard album to record, then?

DC:  It was definitely different. We actually played the songs through a couple of times as a two piece, just to get a feel for what it would sound like, and then we recorded all the guitars at the Scarred studio. We did the main recordings at TVR Studio with Jason Z, who co-produced the first album with me. This one I produced myself, with Jason as the recording engineer. Then we re-amped everything. We’re very old school in how we do things. Some bands say “well, we grew up. We turned the mids back up because that’s the only way you can hear it.” No! I’m old school in that regard. We have our high-low-high bass going on and then the treble. Once we got the guitar sound we wanted, I went back in and did the drums. We played all the drums with a click track, the whole album. I think most people do these days. You can tell when something is not recorded to a click track. Then I started recording a little bit of the bass and we brought in Lisa Sanchez to play bass. She’s just a phenomenal talent, she moved here from L.A. with her husband,who’s one of Brad’s best friends. She’s played on stage with all kinds of bands, mostly cover bands. She’s in a band called DIA, which is an all-female cover band who do DIO tunes. I think she’s still in SABBATHA, same kind of deal, out of Chicago. Just a phenomenal musician...we brought her in to do the bass and the rest of it.

And then Dan Fernandez, our lead singer, decided to bow out. He just wasn’t feeling it any more. So we got Heith Gruner, an old friend of ours from the band BY TOMORROW’S END. He was in a band called POWERIDE that used to play with L.O.C. back in the day. So he was a guy who’s seen it all. Right now he’s also singing for a band called DEAD MAN’S HAND.

WC: I’ve kind of got a personal quirk where I don’t see cover bands unless somebody drags me to them. I get so much new and original music, I just don’t have time for bands that don’t do any heavy lifting and write their own material. Now when I first got the PATCHWORK promo, it just had a picture of two guys in it, you and Brad. But the most recent communication has the line-up of a whole band.

DC: Yeah, yeah, we’re still missing a lead guitarist, which is one reason why we had so many guest guitarists on the new album. Brad had to learn how to play lead solos after Mark passed and he’s done a great job. He did the leads on about half the album. But it was a good opportunity to take advantage of the name PATCHWORK, because we created a kind of patchwork band. We had Bobby Gustafson, formerly of OVERKILL...unbelievable that we were able to get him to do a couple of the songs. And then there was Michael Gilbert from FLOTSAM & JETSAM. These guys were heroes of ours growing up. We loved the songs they wrote, the music they did.

WC: That was going to be one of my questions...how did you wind up with so many quality guest performers on the record?

DC: Yeah, we had Kragen Lum, who played in EXODUS for ten years, now he plays in HEATHEN…

WC: You also had Dallas Toler-Wade who was lead singer of NILE for a long time.

DC: Yeah, yeah! He sang on one of our tunes and played on another. Well, Dallas was Brad’s old guitar teacher, so that really helped. Part of the reason for getting those guys was Covid and part of it was Brad being fearless. When Covid happened, all these guys came off the road and they became more accessible. Some of them wanted to start teaching, they needed to earn money to make up what they were losing. Brad started taking lessons with Kragen Lum and eventually moved to taking them with Dallas. Really, it was just a matter of befriending some of these people and showing them that we were not just crazy fans but we’re serious musicians like you, just at a different level.

WC: It sounds like it was based on personal connections. A lot of times, when I see “guest appearance by so and so”, it turns out that the band never met the person in the flesh, they just sent files through the internet. But it sounds like you had a strong connection to the guests on “Scars”.

DC: Well, some of them we do. We never actually met Bobby in person. But Dallas and Kragen, yes, we met and knew them well.

WC: You had Todd who was in BEYOND THRESHOLD forever play on a track with you…

DC: Yeah, Todd Paluzzi. He was Brad’s neighbor for a long time. Todd did a solo on the intro track to “Exit Wounds” as well. Brad first saw him as the rhythm guitarist in BEYOND THRESHOLD.

WC: I’ve seen that band many times. I go back far enough to remember when they were called POWER TRIP and I think they were even something else before that.

DC: I know they were just called THRESHOLD at one point.

WC: They had to change that because there’s a band from England called THRESHOLD, who had been around for 25, 30 years.

DC: Todd’s an incredible talent. Darren Moon, the new guitarist for BEYOND THRESHOLD, is amazing. Him and Todd are two completely different styles. Todd plays by feel and Darren’s more the John Petrucci type...very technical. He approaches guitar in a different way, but I think he’s able to maintain the groove BEYOND THRESHOLD has. I’ve heard some of their new stuff because they were recording it at TVR Studios.

WC: They’ve had to overcome a lot of challenges. And that leads me to you and “Scars”, because a lot of that album was inspired by overcoming adversity..

DC: It’s thematically related to our first album “Exit Wounds”, which was about a lot of tragedy in our personal lives. There was Mark losing his brother to a heart attack, Brad gradually losing his mother to Alzheimer’s, a lot of other things we went through. Life has a way of emotionally opening exit wounds when you suffer tragedy. But when you survive those wounds, you have scars. That’s where the the idea of the new album comes from. You have physical trauma, mental trauma, emotional trauma because of the scars. The opening song, which is the title track, has a different approach than the rest of the album. Let your scars define you. Because they will...you really have no choice. But leave yourself open to the possibility of improvement as well. The rest of the album deals with the different outcomes from these emotional scars. This is what they can lead to.

WC: Was there one song that maybe meant more to you than the others? Or was the title track that song?

DC: One song that meant more to us than any of them was the last song on the album, “At The End”.The video for that will be out tomorrow, when the album is released. “At The End”, the way that came together was almost divine intervention. I wrote this riff in 6/4 time, which is the main riff of the song. We started building around that. Brad wrote this kind of frantic riff that appeared during the chorus. We got kind of pissed off, we need to write something behind that, some kind of melody, something for Heith to sing to. At that time, he wasn’t in the band but we knew we’d get somebody like him. So we just hit play and Brad played these holdout notes, that’s the chord progression that’s in there now. And as soon as we finished playing it all the way through, the lyrics came to us. Everything came to us. This is the song that’s going to finish the album, it’s called “At The End”. Mark hadn’t passed on yet. Mark was still fighting the cancer at this point. But the verses are basically God telling him...”I’ve got you.”  You have a home to go to. At this point, he was just exhausted from the fight. And the chorus is basically all of us standing around him saying “we can’t let you go”. There’s this tug of war between us and God over Mark. That’s also the fastest song that we have. Overall, this is the one that meant the most to us.

WC: One song I thought was interesting was “Methuselah”. That was a little bit longer than the others. What was that one about?

DC: “Methuselah”, I like to call that a power chord boogie. Brad wrote almost every riff in that song. I wrote the lyrics to it afterwards. We got the main part out of the way, we did “verse-chorus, verse-chorus” and then we went into our riff library and started to play with it. “This riff goes with this part, that riff goes with the new riff” and so on. We actually had to stop ourselves. This was gonna wind up being a 12 minute song with back to back chord bangers and riffs. We’ve got to put a stop to it.

WC: Save some for later!

DC: Exactly! (laughs)  We thought there was a nice build up at the end where it comes back around. Something we’ve always wanted to do is give each song a theme and come back around to that theme.

WC: That’s one of the things that struck me when I listened to it, how well rounded it was. There’s a couple of moments where the intensity drops, but it’s a metal album all the way through. A lot of times, a band will put a ballad on an album and you can tell, they are pushing it hard because they think they have to.

DC: Well, we tried real hard not to do that. (chuckles) It was fairly easy to do. We knew the second song on the album had to be faster and heavier than the first one. We had that strategy in our minds the whole time.

WC: Are you ready to start playing live or is that going to take a little while yet?

DC: It’s definitely going to take a while. We don’t have any plans yet but Lisa is a live performer, Heith is a live performer. We talked about it last night and Brad asked the same question. I looked at Brad and he said, “well, never say never”. (laughs) When we wrote this album, we didn’t really have the intention of playing it live. Which is one of the reasons we felt free to go out and ask other performers to play on it with us. But the thought is kind of growing on us. I mean, if we get the right people and also the right audience. When we changed from being a cover band to an all original band, we lost a lot of people. We were covering songs by the Big Four before. We were playing SLAYER, METALLICA, MEGADETH, ANTHRAX and people wanted to come see that. But we stopped doing that, things changed. There just not a lot of desire around here for original music.

WC: No, not around here, that’s for sure.

DC: No, you gotta go up to Wisconsin. They love metal in Wisconsin. Also in Chicago. But you know, never say never. If there was a demand for us to play live, we’d love to give it a shot.

WC: These days, there’s so many bands dressed up like vampires, pirates, ninjas, Vikings, it seems hard for just an honest band to get anywhere. Guys like you who just plug in, play and kick ass.

DC: That’s just what we do. I mean, I wear cargo shorts when I play! (laughs) You ever see HERE COME THE MUMMIES?

WC: Yeah, I actually saw them at the very last On The Waterfront. They were something else. They were great musicians...even while dressed up as mummies!

DC: I don’t know how they could play dressed up that way!

WC: I’ll be headed up to Milwaukee Metalfest tomorrow and I expect to be 90% dead by Saturday night…

DC: (laughs) Oh, those festivals can be killers. We went to Rockville a couple years back, me and my son. MEGADETH was supposed to play, but they didn’t because of lightning. I saw SEVENDUST for the first time, MINISTRY...a lot of bands I had never seen before. I was about two months removed from having a stent put in so I had no energy. My son had to drag my ass around, it was pretty bad! (chuckles).

WC: At my age I shouldn’t be doing it. It’s kind of a paradox. On one hand, it makes you feel old. But on the other hand, it makes you feel young.

DC: It does. 

WC: A lot of my high school classmates are stuck in 1981. They think METALLICA is a new band. (laughs). I still like a lot of the classic rock I grew up with, but I advance with the times. I listen to everything from BOSTON to NAPALM DEATH and everything in between.

DC: I still like the classic rock, too. BOSTON was pretty amazing. Tom Scholz came up with a lot of innovative stuff.

WC: The sound quality on that debut record was superior to what else was around at that time. That record is still one of my all time favorites. I bought it in 1975...the first real record I bought. I played it so much that the black vinyl turned grey.

DC: Wow! I didn’t know you could do that! I played some old cassettes until they fell apart, but I’ve never done it with vinyl. That’s amazing.

WC: I played it a ton. But my favorite band from that period was RUSH.

DC: Same! 100% the same...we’re on the same page.

WC: On my list of Top 10 records, numbers 2 through 10 are always changing. But #1 always remains the same and it always will be “A Farewell To Kings”.

DC: “Farewell To Kings” was amazing.

WC: “Xanadu” is probably my favorite song of all time.

DC: Oh! Oh God, what a song!

WC: It told a story even without the lyrics. I loved RUSH, but when they discovered synthesizers, they went off the rails. I go back now and I like some of that era more, but there were two or three albums they did where you couldn’t even hear guitar.

DC: Yeah, there were some that were too synthetic.

WC: When Geddy Lee had a mullet, that’s when it was bad. (laughter)

DC: I’ll tell you what’s interesting. I had this conversation when I went to see NARCOTIC WASTELAND...that’s Dallas’ “new” band that’s ten years old. We were hanging out with him in West Chicago, Brad was a student of his. The whole time, we were talking about this. One of the things we had in common was a liking for the RUSH album “Grace Under Pressure”. There’s a couple of songs I fast forward but most of it is pretty good. The guitar is still heavy. There’s still a lot of bends, a lot of squeals. Alex was trying to make up for all the synthesizers.

WC: It finally got to the point where he told them, you need to put on more guitar or I’m gonna quit the band!

DC: And that’s when they put out “Counterparts”, which is another one of my favorite RUSH albums.

WC: Their very last album, “Clockwork Angels”, was probably their all-time heaviest.

DC: The chord progressions on some of those songs, particularly the first couple of songs, were like...holy shit, where did this come from?

WC: Most bands couldn’t touch it.

DC: And especially at their age!

WC: RUSH was the first real concert I ever saw. 1977 at Alpine Valley, they played with SWEET and URIAH HEEP.

DC: That would be a great show!

WC:  I like URIAH HEEP a lot but their reception was not that great. They got the flying beer lid treatment. They got chased off.

DC: Oh, that’s too bad! 

WC: The crowd was rabid for RUSH like people used to be for SLAYER.

DC: Yeah, no one else takes the stage until SLAYER does. (chuckles)

WC: Do you have any idea what might come after “Scars”?

DC: Yeah! As I mentioned, we tried to make “Scars” a more straightforward kind of record. But we’ve already been talking about what could come next and that probably will be more progressive. We’re still gonna keep the same speed and intensity. Probably more time changes, more tempo changes. FATES WARNING is one of my favorite bands. “No Exit” is still a record I listen to all the time. Love “No Exit”, love “Awaken The Guardian”. Our next record may be not quite to that level, but we want that mentality in our next record. We’d mix that with that SLAYER, METALLICA, PANTERA type of approach.

WC: If you could have dinner with any three people from history, who would they be?

DC: I’d say probably Shakespeare. Jesus Christ...I want to hear what he has to say...and Devin Townsend. He’s the only realistic one, I suppose. I started getting into him just as STRAPPING YOUNG LAD was breaking up. He’s obviously a great musician, but he seems to be a real character, too.

WC: He doesn’t care about the business aspect. He does something when he gets the inspiration and not until.

DC: Yeah, he does what he wants. I love that, I actually love that.

WC: In the history of PATCHWORK, have you ever had a Spinal Tap moment where things went crazy or haywire?

DC: Oh yeah. We were playing Bar 3 downtown, in 20ll, I think? We were playing “Seek And Destroy” and we were the only band playing that in Rockford at that time. All of a sudden, all of these people dressed up like Santa Claus start dropping in. They had a big Christmas event downtown and we had almost 100 people dressed like Santa in the bar. A lot of them were throwing the horns up. We finished the song and the whole place goes nuts. There was a picture of it taken by Brad Henry, who was a local musician and Harley rider who did photography. The picture wound up in the Register-Star. We weren’t in it, it didn’t show us, of course, but it had all the Santas in it. I also played in a band called SHATTERED SANITY a long time ago and we played the Cherry Lounge. You remember the Cherry Lounge?

WC: Yeah, and I think I saw SHATTERED SANITY, too.

DC: We played the Cherry Lounge and it was a small show. It was an all ages show down in the basement. The power went out three times on us and our bass player Matt Malone popped a string. Then MIRRORED IMAGE went on after us. They were playing their last song “Horace Pinker”, which was their big one, and Jared their bass player shoves the headstock of his bass right through the ceiling. The whole place goes frickin’ ballistic and they start attacking the ceiling and tearing it up! (chuckles) Our lead guitarist Tom Parrott was in the crowd, wearing no shirt, with fiberglass all over him. The dividers in the ceiling came down and Tom was all cut up. There was blood and fiberglass and water everywhere.

WC: That’s rock n roll…

DC: It sure is.

PATCHWORK