NATE NEWTON POT FULL
NATE NEWTON POT TRIAL

It contained lyrics, writings, and drawings that she felt could be of some use to us. At some point, Caleb’s wife, Jen, gifted us a notebook that belonged to Caleb. “One night at rehearsal, Nate turned on his bass amp and the main parts for this song seemed to just fly out of him. In just eight lines, I did my best to capture a picture of driving along the Pacific Coast Highway at golden hour several years ago, and what it felt like to share that moment with someone I was in love with at the time.” Later on, Nate wrote the heavy, chugging bridge part and Adam came up with the artificial harmonic guitar line that sounds kind of like the music you might hear coming from an ice cream truck on Mars.

“Out of the five or six songs from my initial burst of writing, ‘Blinded by a Blaze’ was the one that got everyone in the band equally hyped. On a lighter note, one of the bands that Cave In fully embraced as an influence on this album is Into Another, and here it really shows in the whole spacey midsection of the song-that’s totally us worshiping the Ignaurus album.” Their words were like careless offerings to an already fucked-up situation, just being thrown like raw meat to people for the sole purpose of creating destruction. During the George Floyd protests, I was seeing people with significant reach on social media use these platforms to encourage excess violence, and I felt this was the last thing we needed.

“I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, which I guess officially makes it a protest song. I think it’s a nice return to the vibe of having segues between songs like we did on the Until Your Heart Stops album.” Most of the overdubs are from the original remote demo recording, either flipped backwards or made into some audio mutation. This Interlude takes the five dominant notes from that song and spins them into a kaleidoscopic foundation created by J.R. took to the song ‘Heavy Pendulum’ so much, he insisted that we make it the title of the record. Kurt thinks it sounds kinda like ‘Fever Dog,’ which is fine with me because who doesn’t like Almost Famous?” If AC/DC had jumped on the ’90s grunge bandwagon, they may have pulled this one out of the ether before we got it. We demoed it remotely at a time during lockdown when people still didn’t feel comfortable getting together in a room.

NATE NEWTON POT FULL

“This is the first song that materialized as a full band demo when writing the album. I had a whole concept for a music video using helium balloons printed with skulls attached to headless uld be a cool stage prop, actually.” Lyrically, this is probably one of the more lighthearted songs on the record.

NATE NEWTON POT TRIAL

It took several trial runs before we got into Deep Purple’s Burn territory and it finally started to click. It was originally in a different key, different tuning, different time signature, with wildly different lyrics. “Musically, this one had a pretty wild trajectory. Lyrically, this relates to the heated political nature of 2020, but it’s not as direct as, for instance, the song ‘Searchers of Hell.’ This song is also a call to action against anyone in your life who throws around their weight in a way that’s disruptive or destructive to your well-being-basically, bullies and assholes who need to be confronted on their bullshit.” This one goes there musically-channeling Channel with a member of the band. “We’re all fans of Nate‘s band Channel from his pre-Converge days. I thought this was a beautiful way to illustrate how we keep Caleb in our memory.” Even after its collapse, it’s still part of the state imagery. There’s mention of the Old Man of the Mountain, the face of New Hampshire. I always remembered it, and ‘New Reality’ seemed like a good opportunity to give it a home. The verse riff was something he wrote years ago during the White Silence days. “A song about the new reality of Cave In without Caleb on this earthly plane. The result is Heavy Pendulum, Cave In’s first album recorded by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou since their 1998 classic, Until Your Heart Stops. In doing so, they breathed new life into Cave In and soon wrote an album that combines the band’s killer metallic hardcore and breathtaking space-rock eras with new and exciting musical forays.

Conners, and guitarist/vocalist Adam McGrath enlisted their old friend and Converge/Old Man Gloom/Doomriders member Nate Newton to help them play benefit shows for Scofield’s family. Instead, vocalist/guitarist Steve Brodsky, drummer J.R. The band’s beloved friend and bassist, Caleb Scofield, had passed suddenly during the recording’s early stages, and it seemed-understandably-that heartbreak might prevent them from carrying on. When Cave In released their 2019 album, Final Transmission, many thought it might be just that.

Nate newton pot