InterviewsJanuary 13, 202510,776 views

25 in '25: CAVE IN talk 'Jupiter'

Stephen Brodsky, JR Conners, and Adam McGrath look back at Cave In's shapeshifting classic

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By Colin

25 in '25 is our series of in-depth looks at classic albums hitting their 25th anniversary in 2025, told by the people who created them.


In 1998, Boston-by-way-of-Methuen, Massachusetts-based band Cave In released Until Your Heart Stops, a technical metal/hardcore mosaic that became one of the cornerstones of the late ‘90s underground, as well as for the emerging creative force of their record label, Hydra Head Records. On it, the band had shifted from the five-piece lineup of their earlier, more hardcore-centric sound into a four-piece format, one that would remain for nearly two decades, until the tragic passing of bassist Caleb Scofield in 2018.

In the time between Until Your Heart Stops and its follow-up, Jupiter, the band had embraced a new direction. Though it was hinted at with their Creative Eclipses EP, the less abrasive sound came as a shock to most. Jupiter was polarizing within the hardcore community, with those looking for Cave In's Slayer-meets-Converge riffs abandoning the group, and the ones that embraced the new ideas being taken for a sonic journey.

“At that time, we were in transitional periods of our lives,” guitarist Adam McGrath says. “Until Your Heart Stops, a lot of that stuff is us moving to the city, moving out of our parents' house, and I think Jupiter is even further down the road of that—us growing up and getting into different musical influences.”

On Jupiter, Cave In dug deeper into influences like Nirvana, Failure and Pink Floyd, adopting a more rock-oriented sound, and further exploring the spacier elements that had laced their previous album. And though Until Your Heart Stops had been recorded with the same four-piece lineup, Jupiter was the first to be written in that format, laying the groundwork for the direction the band would follow in the subsequent years.

With Relapse Records recently releasing a 25th anniversary reissue of the classic this month, guitarist/vocalist Stephen Brodsky, drummer JR Conners, and guitarist Adam McGrath took the time to reflect on the album and everything that went into its creation. 

R.I.P. Caleb Scofield


PART I

What was the mindset you guys were in during the transitional period between Until Your Heart Stops and Jupiter?

McGrath: The biggest thing I think for that transition time is, us solidifying the lineup of Caleb Scofield, Steve, JR, and myself. That was the biggest thing. Until Your Heart Stops, we had two different bass players, different singer; we started off writing that record as a five-piece. We were transitioning into a four-piece band while we were recording that record and Caleb was kind of plugged in later on after a bunch of songs had already been written. Jupiter was solidifying that lineup, writing all the material together, and having a common mission together. It was the four of us with no other people involved, and it was very much the lineup that would go on for a bunch of years. 

I think that being pigeon-holed as a metal band at that time bothered us, and also Steve—he can speak for himself, but my perspective was Steve singing like that was just thrashing him. Being 19 or 20 years old, trying to take care of yourself on the road and perform like that every night wasn't really working out for us, so we had to find a better way to carry on as a band and perform in a way that we could get through it.

Brodsky: Yeah, to Adam's point, I never envisioned myself being the front-person or lead vocalist of Cave In. That was never the design of the band from the get-go. We were always a five-piece and I was like the Flava Flav to whoever was the Chuck D on the mic. When it came to having Caleb in the band and feeling like the four-piece was the thing, everybody was super supportive of me just stepping up like, "You got this, just crouch down a little bit, get in your James Hetfield stance and do your thing."

I don't know that I would have approached vocals like what you hear on Until Your Heart Stops right off the bat if I was the singer of the band from the get-go. JR and I had done bands prior to Cave In where I was the lone vocalist, or main vocalist, and the vocals styles are very different. They're more like what you hear now in Cave In. I had to kind of get through Until Your Heart Stops. The recording was brutal; you can hear my voice kind of getting shredded. I can hear which songs my voice is more fresh on than others. It just wasn't a sustainable thing for me to do that, but the silver-lining being, if we just kind of open up our musical universe a bit more in ways where we can invite more melodic singing, that could be cool. Having Caleb in the band really gave us the sense of freedom to do just that, really, and then beyond for nineteen years or whatever.

Conners: I remember it was more in my wheelhouse to play the Jupiter style stuff, as far the drumming went. I was always more of a rock drummer than a metal drummer, so the Until Your Heart Stops stuff was really tough. I wasn't ever really that super comfortable, so I remember being kind of stoked that we were moving away from that style and into more of a rock n roll, punk rock territory because that's where I felt more comfortable. I remember going into a lot of that stuff with much more confidence in what we were doing, and it felt really comfortable once we started getting into the swing of things writing that stuff, it felt more natural to do that stuff.


Were there active discussions on making a shift in sound or what you wanted to do going forward?

Brodsky: Well, we did a record called The Sacrifice Poles, and I don't think we knew that we were making this record at the time, but it was the accumulation of jamming on stuff post-Until Your Heart Stops and just trying to get a feel for what sounds good outside of that particular realm. I think those 4-track recordings sort of informed us of what would be possible. They were pretty cool and raw reflections of where we were going, just getting our gear set up to make demos of songs. There were songs that we were actively exploring in terms of the very beginning stages of ideas that became something bigger. Just getting the machines running and making sure that the microphones were placed in the best spots in our little basement rehearsal in 49 Appaloosa, Methuen. 

It was just cool hearing back some of that stuff, the stuff that became The Sacrifice Poles and being like, "Oh, this is kind of fun." Just us being free and making sure our gear works and getting our levels, but then these random jams would pop up. I feel like that kind of informed us just how comfortable we were as a band because we never really jammed like that in Cave In prior to Caleb joining the band. Or if we did, it was very rare or it didn't have much depth, and our songwriting was much slower at the beginning. It was just a group of people not fully on the same page about things, and we were also younger and it was just harder to mesh in with each other, I think.

I think we were just really blown away by doing some shows with Neurosis. They were supporting Times of Grace; that record had just come out. I think at the time we wanted to still be somewhat of a heavy band, and loud, and that's just naturally how we played. We strummed hard, JR hit his drums hard, we had to turn up loud in order to hear ourselves, and growing up playing places like The Red Barn, or VFWs, or Knights of Columbus', where you couldn't hear yourself—there wasn't proper monitors, so you had to be right on the mic and singing as loud as you could, it's the only way you could hear yourself. We were just conditioned to play hard and loud, and I think we wanted to figure out a way to continue doing that beyond Until Your Hear Stops, but in our own way, I guess—in a way that kind of felt fresh to us, and hopefully fresh to other people. Neurosis doing Times of Grace and touring with them and getting to hear them play those songs, and just seeing how they handled themselves and the way that they presented themselves, really gave us the confidence to do that sort of thing with our band. 

McGrath: I also think at that time we were in transitional periods of our lives. Until Your Heart Stops, a lot of that stuff is us moving to the city, moving out of our parents' house, and I think Jupiter is even further down the road of that—us growing up and getting into different musical influences. I remember very vividly all of us sitting in my basement apartment watching Pink Floyd's Live at Pompeii and it was mind blowing to us. We would watch it over and over again; watching "Echoes" with the hair blowing in David Gilmour's face, very inspirational to us. Also at this time, I remember vividly Steve bringing a delay pedal to practice, which I had just used a distortion pedal before that, and that opened up a whole new world which was lighting the fuse of us getting into more effects and trying to bring that dynamic into the band, which was new for us.


Were there new things that you were being exposed to that were changing the mindset of how you wanted to approach things?

Brodsky: Absolutely. It was kind of an interesting time, to kind of expand on what Adam was saying. Three of the four of us were living in Boston, and JR was still living in Methuen at the time. We would take the commuter rail from Boston and JR would pick us up in Andover or Lawrence, and then we would drive to my parents, which, I just mentioned it earlier, was 49 Appaloosa in Methuen, and we had this little basement practice space. There was this new scenery that we were immersing ourselves in, and we also had one foot in the old, which was kind of cool. For Caleb, his whole world changed. He moved out of New Hampshire and was living in Boston and had a total scenery change.

I remember we were getting booked more at the Middle East upstairs and Karma Club, which isn't around anymore. We were just exposed more to the Boston rock scene. We were these kids from the 'burbs that were now living in the city, but we grew up going to punk and hardcore shows at VFWs and punk spaces, so we had all that energy and upbringing that we were taking into hanging out at bars and stuff. We weren't even really drinking or smoking pot or doing any drugs back then; we were just hanging out and having a good time. There was definitely something different about us that I think traditional Boston rockers found interesting, and I think that set us apart from a lot of stuff that was happening in the city. It was an exciting time, things were new for us and we were new for other people.

McGrath: I remember around that time [Radiohead's] OK Computer came out, which was hugely influential on everybody at that time. That hit hard on everyone, I feel like. Being around Aaron Turner, he had Hydra Head Central. He had a place up in Mission Hill and you'd go up to his house and he had a very vast record collection and he'd be turning you onto new stuff or playing bands that were on Hydra Head at that time. It was a really exciting thing to be around, almost like a community clubhouse, and getting into all of the stuff he was putting out and the stuff he was listening to. There was a band Barbaro at the time in Boston that was really cool, which Andrew Schneider, who would record us later on, was in. They were a really awesome Boston band that we were in inspired by.

Brodsky: The Cancer Conspiracy.

McGrath: The Cancer Conspiracy, definitely. We did a ton of shows with that band.

Conners: That time period was really weird because, like Steve was saying, all of those guys lived in Boston, but I had yet to move there. I was kind of removed from what they were experiencing at that point. I moved to Boston a little later on from them, but it wasn't until just prior to us signing to RCA. It was a while still that I was in the Methuen area, so I was just still listening to all the old standbys and kind of holding down the fort on that side of things. But I still listen to Barbaro. All the Hydra Head bands were really influential at that time. I wasn't exposed to a whole lot because I wasn't going to shows back then, except the ones we were playing at that time because all of these guys had moved out of town. I wasn't going to the hardcore shows around town, so it was really just what I was getting from them almost second-hand. 


PART II

How were these songs being written, and had the process changed from the earlier days?

Conners: Definitely. Like Steve was saying earlier, I think we were getting more into recording ourselves, especially with the jams of Sacrifice Poles, but before that, I don't think we were really doing a whole lot of that. We would write parts and riffs and then record those, but really piecemeal, and then put those together, but I think with Jupiter it was a lot of demoing ideas and jams, and then working off that. It was a little bit more organic in that way.

McGrath: Steve has certainly always been the bandleader, and he would bring in demos of a good foundation of songs. I remember "Jupiter" in particular was pretty formed, and "In The Stream of Commerce" I remember being pretty formed up. But what I also remember about that time is Caleb really coming into his own of the style of what he's known for. He really was coming into his own as a really amazing bass player. Really, one of the best bass players I've ever seen, and he was shaping his personality as a player.

Brodsky: With Until Your Heart Stops and maybe even before that, I could conceptualize riffs and guitarmonies and transitions. I would make these sometimes really goofy sounding demos with keyboard drums and direct guitar, and it sounded like Atari Teenage Riot if you drowned it in a bathtub full of mud. By the time Jupiter came around, I was still doing that kind of thing, but I was getting really excited about what was happening naturally. 

Adam mentioned effects pedals, and we started to build our boards up and that was exciting. We got these Boss pedal boards that had like six or eight [pedals]; they looked like a futuristic suitcase. We'd throw that down, pull the top off and plug it in and be like, "Oh, what pedals you got today?' The effects started to write the songs, which was kind of fun too. Especially "In The Stream of Commerce," the pitch shifter really started to become part of Cave In's sound. 

I don't remember exactly how it came, maybe it was an idea I had, but we started covering "Dazed and Confused" by Led Zeppelin, and what was great about doing that song is, there's a whole section in the middle where every time we played it, it would change. The length of it would change, the way that we would bounce of each other doing little tricks and sonic inflections, and playing with our pedals, or me ripping off David Gilmour in Live at Pompeii and soloing and singing over whatever lead. I think playing that song as much as we did—and we played it a lot—that really informed us of what we were able to do within our wheelhouse of tricks. It helped us learn our pedals and how to play with each other getting into improvising a little bit more. Zeppelin are the masters and they certainly taught us.


Did that idea inform how the instrumental breaks in "Big Riff" have morphed over the years?

Brodsky: Maybe. That started as a kind of noisy thing, or almost atmospheric thing over this really cool off-time drum and bass thing that I think Caleb and JR came up with. I love that. Over the years, Adam and I just like to flex and rip a little bit. We did a remaster of the record for this 25-year anniversary that Relapse is doing, so I think that's the first time I listened to the recording in a while, and it just took me off guard. I was like, "Whoa, it's so spacious and it's more about the drums and the bass," but now in 2024, leave it to the guitar players to just fucking shit all over it. It's fun. I love those moments. It's like tightrope walking. The solos change every time; I don't think I've ever played the same lead over that part.

Conners: I think also we were kind of exploring more to do with the dynamic feel of songs too. I remember the song, "Requiem," it's got this rolly tom part that happens in the middle and it's kind of really quiet, then it gets revisited shortly afterward and it gets a lot louder. We were just trying to play a lot with volume and dynamics in that way too. That comes straight from listening to a lot of classic rock and stuff like that growing up.


These songs don't follow traditional chord or riff structure, and a lot of them are really driven by what the bass and drums and doing underneath these spacey guitar sounds. JR, what was your mindset for trying to write the rhythms to these?

Conners: Honestly, that was mainly me learning and enjoying, and realizing how nice it is to play drums and bass how it "should be." Before then, we would always write songs and I'd be playing drums and writing drum parts along with Steve's riffs or Adam's riffs, because we were kind of transient with our bass players. We never really wrote the songs with the bass and drums in mind, but when we had Caleb start, and really started writing the stuff for Jupiter, it was like, "Oh, we can actually play off each other and let those other guys do their own thing." It's the first time that I was actually able to play with a bass player that knew what he was doing, and explore that whole idea behind drums and bass as the foundation. I remember for a lot of the drum parts, it was easier in the Jupiter style to bring in more of the influences from Failure—there's a lot of that sixteenth note kick drum thing. I was able to bring more of that into the Jupiter stuff than Until, so it was nice to be able to explore that stuff.


Something that has become a bit of a key element in Cave In is the snare rolls you do underneath the spacier elements, and it's heard throughout Jupiter. Any idea where that came from?

Conners: I don't remember, it was probably just an idea. It usually comes up when we can't think of something else to put over something [laughs]. It's kind of like, "We don't know what to do, let's try this," and it's usually the snare drum roll. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it seems to lend itself well under really atmospheric stuff.

McGrath: I always thought the snare drum thing came from Nirvana Nevermind, all the snare rolls on that record. I could be wrong, but that's where I thought it descended from.

Brodsky: Oh, a hundred percent. I have memories of listening to that record alone in my pink bedroom at 47 Cypress Ave, where I basically grew up and met these guys. [Listening to] "Stay Away" and just trying to drum along on a pillow, not even with sticks, just beating my hands on the pillow trying to play at that tempo and trying to see what my body feels like moving along to this song that just gave me so much fucking energy and made me feel like a maniac. It was like a sugar rush of music. 

There's that, and with Until Your Heart Stops—I think I learned this from Kurt [Ballou] writing songs with Converge, this was back in 1997 when we were writing When Forever Comes Crashing—Kurt sometimes had this funny way where, there'd be like a trick and he would kind of write the song around the trick. If it was an odd-time thing, or it was a weird tom beat, or like a little strange guitar noodle, that would be the nucleus and all the existing parts and arrangements would sort of attract themselves to that thing. For Until Your Heart Stops it was like, "Let's write songs in Drop D." There were no Cave In songs in Drop D prior to Until Your Heart Stops, so we need some songs in Drop D. So that was a trick. We were totally obsessed with the song "Dittohead" on Slayer's Divine Intervention, so we needed our own "Dittohead," so that became "Moral Eclipse."

So, I think the trick with the snare roll stuff, in addition to the Nevermind worship, it was like, "Ok, let's write a heavy song that's mostly snare roll." The running title for "Juggernaut" was " The Choo Choo Train Song" [laughs]. I don't know; it just became a thing.


These songs don't follow traditional rock structures either. "Requiem" plays out like a prog-rock song, and most of the rest of the songs have some unorthodox structures. How were you guys compiling the parts into full songs?

Conners: I would hazard to guess that a lot of that is the hold over from writing Until Your Heart Stops style of music. It was like riff soup, but we were trying to get a little bit more fancy with is.

Brodsky: We still had some cans of riff soup in the cupboard, so we had to use it before the expiration date. That's part of it. I think it's the carry over from Until Your Heart Stops with those A-B-C-D-E-F, some parts wouldn't ever repeat. Our brains were still kind of hardwired to that way of working and it actually made for some interesting stuff on Jupiter. I think Neurosis, especially Through Silver In Blood, it was more about the headspin of where a song took you than creating this very predictable map of how to get from Point A to Point B. It's more about the journey. 

A song like "Requiem," if we could play that all the way through without fucking up too much there was a real sense of accomplishment at the end of it. That was always a nice feeling and I think we were always striving for that too. We had our young minds and the energy for it.


As far as the effects were concerned, did you have sounds in mind that you were looking for, or were you more tweaking knobs and finding what worked?

McGrath: I remember there were sounds that we loved. Failure, the song "Heliotropic," with the whammy sound. I know for me personally, I loved some of the Jonny Greenwood sounds on OK Computer that I was going for. Some of the David Gilmour stuff from Pompeii I thought was great. I think also we were inspired to try to make guitars not sound like guitars if that was possible. But, Steve was the person who introduced the Boss PS-3 option 7, which, that's the Cave In thing to this day. Steve brought that in, but I think Kurt showed him that.

Brodsky: I don't know; I may have shown it to Kurt, actually. I may have shown Kurt something, if you could believe that. I don't remember exactly how the pedal fell into our world, but it started with the Boss Harmonist. We got really into the octave settings on the Harmonist, and that's what you can hear in the beginning of "Luminance." I may have just needed a backup or something, or maybe my Harmonist broke—I got the Harmonist from Pete [Cortese] from Overcast—but something may have happened and I may have just been looking for a replacement and I heard that the Pitch Shifter does the same thing with some delay options in it too. Playing around with it, we stumbled upon the PS-3 mode 7, and it's cool because that sound, there's like a staticness to it that I kind of had in my head for a long time when I think about music or ideal tones of guitar. It was the closest pedal that did something like that that wasn't just distortion, and it was also unique.

You weren't really hearing bands using that pedal, or at least to the level we took it to. It was fun, Adam and I could just make this angry bees nest of notes that were kind of up here, and the fact that JR and Caleb were locking in and there was this interplay and they were vibing in a whole world down here. It actually left quite a bit of room for vocals, which are right in the middle. Traditionally, guitar tones being very mid-range, they can conflict with vocals and that's always the engineer's challenge, to carve room with one for the other without sacrificing too much tone or integrity. But if we just threw the guitars way up in dogwhistle zone, and the bass and the drums were rumbling in the sub-fucking-earthquake-frequency layer, vocals had this whole area to work with. Trying to develop a singing voice in Cave In, that was actually really helpful.


Every Cave In record since this one has the big, dramatic finisher. When you wrote "New Moon," did you know that that was the closer?

Brodsky: It's just a guy thing, the big climax at the end [laughs]. Out of everything, that was probably the obvious closer song. I don't know where that song came from, probably some OK Computer worship, but we wanted to be harder than OK Computer. It's mid-tempo, it builds, it reuses a lot of the same ideas but they keep getting bigger and louder and heavier as the song goes on, and that's fun and cool. It’s very Jupiter. Out of everything, I can't think of another song that would end the record, it has that closer kind of feel or vibe.


PART III

What are your memories of being in the studio?

McGrath: We should mention Brian McTernan. I think he helped us carve that record out.

Brodsky: Absolutely.

McGrath: We recorded the music live in four days and there was a really good vibe. I think he was really instrumental in cheering us in and giving us confidence to move forward in what we were trying to do. We knew we were changing, and we knew that we were taking a chance, but he definitely gave us a lot of confidence. It was a really fun record to work on with Brian. It was the first time we were in a big studio. We recorded it at The Outpost in Stoughton, it looks like an old mid-80s metal recording studio. It was one of our first experiences going to a place like that, but I remember it being a lot of fun. It was done pretty quickly.

Conners: I remember that room in particular sounds very unique. Nothing else sounds like it. It was cool that we could get Brian to go in there and get some music done in that place. But that room, that's a lot of the sound of that record, in my opinion. That drum room is amazing. It was reel-to-reel too, before we started using ProTools.

Brodsky: Yeah, 24-track two-inch tape. That was the second, and I think final time, that we went to The Outpost. The first time was for the Bad Brains cover that we recorded, and I think we did "Inflatable Dream" that same session.

Conners: The Jupiter sessions weren't the ones where the tape machine was slowing down, right?

McGrath: It was. Brian was like, "Holy shit, something is going weird."

Brodsky: I remember a couple things. We were using Mesa Dual Rectifiers and we set them up—we'd been playing with them. That's how we wrote the record, we were playing shows with them; we were very used to them. We hadn't really done a studio recording with them, so that was the first attempt at recording with the Dual Rectifiers, both Adam and I. We switched from using Marshalls to those things. Brian miced them up, tried a few things, but when we were listening to playbacks, the performances were good, but the guitars were super grainy sounding and Brian was not feeling it. We weren't really feeling it either. We tried different settings, we tried different pedals. Then at some point I got another 800 and Adam got a JMP and we set them up like how we had been using the Marshalls before the Rectifiers, and then we did another play through and all of the sudden it was like, "There's the sound." 

That's one thing. Brian was suspecting that Jim was coming into the studio after we had left and, not only listening to the mixes—we wouldn't zero the board because we were the only band that was recording during the time we blocked off—but we would leave and then we'd come in the next day and Brian would notice things that were off. He was suspecting that Jim was coming and listening and maybe tinkering with things, maybe he didn't even realize he was doing it, maybe it was just a habit. But in any case, it felt kind of strange, especially to Brian. He felt like somebody was looking over his shoulder or something, and it felt kind of violating. 

Then we had an issue mixing. Brian was taking the mixes out of The Outpost and he was getting so tripped out. He was like, "It sounds so different in there than what I'm hearing outside of the studio." So we just powered through. I think a lot of his decision-making was just sort of guessing. As a result, the bass kind of suffered. The bass levels were a lot louder in the studio, so Brian turned them down, and then listening outside of the studio, the bass was too low. But by that point our time had run out. 

I think we were getting more sensitive to working with deadlines with Hydra Head. They were trying to run things differently. It wasn't as wild west as it was before. They wanted to release the record at a certain time, and we wanted the record out at a certain time, so we had to deliver it as is. There's a remix of the song "Jupiter" [released on Moons of Jupiter] that Brian did at Salad Days, his studio in at the time Washington D.C., it's now in Baltimore. He was like, "Here's how the record could sound." The bass is louder. We just didn't have the time. In this remaster, James Plotkin really worked to bring out the bass a little bit more. I certainly hear the difference and think it sounds better.


Mixing issues aside, was the overall recording process different than what you had experienced prior?

McGrath: Until Your Heart Stops was done in the basement of the Piebald house, which was one of Kurt's really early versions of God City where he was trying to figure out his studio while working a 9-5 job. So we recorded in the middle of the night in the basement of the Piebald house while those guys were upstairs cooking dinner and doing their day-to-day lives. It was a much different vibe than going into a studio where it's just the five of us, Brian included, working on a record. I look back at both experiences very fondly, but it was definitely a much more professional experience because it was much more of a real studio than, no offense to Kurt but, his setup at the Piebald house at that time. 

Conners: I remember the Until Your Heart Stops session in that basement, at least for the drums anyway, there was a lot of punch-ins and a lot of, "Let's do this part and then punch in the next part," taking sections of the song and getting it done that way. I remember with Jupiter, it was very much like, let's try and get through the whole song and keep the bulk of the song, especially with the drums and bass. Let's try and get the foundation solid in a single playthrough. Before that, it was getting the parts down and then figuring it out from there. In Jupiter, that's when we really started trying to get the performance takes. 

Brodsky: Kurt was not the producer back then that he is now. I think Brian had more miles on him. He had worked with far more bands; he had started earlier as a producer and engineer. He was just more of a documentarian recordist when we did our first few sessions with him, the stuff that eventually become Beyond Hypothermia. But he worked with Texas Is The Reason; that was kind of a big deal back then. Brian's also a drummer and I remember he was much more invested in what was happening with the drums. He would make suggestions every now and then. I think he understood where we were trying to go with things vocally, so he was interested in that as well. 

That's the first time we ever sent somebody demos in advance on making the record. On this Jupiter reissue, almost for the whole record, there exists a 4-track demo version of the songs. I don't know about all of them, but most of them have vocals. Some of it is just me singing gibberish or experimenting with different words or melodies. It was the first time we advanced somebody our music going like, "Here, what do you think we should do?" There wasn't really that with Kurt. Like Adam said, his operation was still in its developmental phase at the time. I don't even think he was doing it full-time. He was still working a day job, where as Brian, that was his full-time thing. It really did, in a lot of ways, including the studio atmosphere, it just felt like major steps forward.

Conners: That was the first record that I used a nice drum set. Prior to that, it was always piecemeal drums from friends or that I had collected over the years. Just prior to starting to write for Jupiter was when we had the van fire that allowed me to get a new drum set. Silver lining there. So I got that Yamaha drumset and it was really nice to be able to play on a newish kit. That thing was only probably six/seven months old by the time we were in the studio. We were really mindful of the heads we were using. It was just a proper recording of a proper drumset at that point.


PART IV

Was there ever any concern about delivering a record to Aaron Turner and Hydra Head that was such a departure from the previous sound?

McGrath: I think because of Creative Eclipses, Aaron kind of knew we were headed in a different direction. I also feel like Aaron, as an artist, is very supportive of an artist's endeavor. He was very supportive. I remember we handed them the record and Aaron was into it, Mark [Thompson] said, "I think it's good, but I don't think I'll ever like it as much as Until Your Heart Stops." His opinion would later change. I think Aaron, having a very artistic mind and his own artistic vision of things was supportive of us going for it in a whole new way.

Brodsky: Jupiter was the first record that he did design and layout for, so that speaks in volumes. It really kind of solidified our bond with Hydra Head at the time, and I think it signaled his connection with the band to be pretty deep and trustworthy. He made it look different from other records, because it was a different record for Cave In, and I thought that was cool. I remember playing him some of those 4-track demos. 

Again, this is around the time when Times of Grace came out, and just hearing about Neurosis making a record with Steve Albini, just trying to process that information and trying to imagine what it sounded like. I remember Aaron got an advance copy before it was even mastered. That was the first time I heard that record, in his office, listening to an unmastered version. I feel like those moments, and Adam alluded to this earlier, hanging out at Hydra Head where we're all just listening to music together and hanging out. There's conversation about music and what we liked about new things that were happening and things that were gracing our ears for the first time, and how it'd be cool to adopt that into our own lives somehow with our own bands and our own instruments. These were all conversations we were having. I feel like Jupiter was an accumulation of these experiences and these conversations. While it was a surprise still to some, it made sense at the same time because we were all forward thinking together.

McGrath: I remember we all were into The Cardigans’ record Gran Turismo, and if you look at the cover of Gran Turismo, that's an influence on the cover of Jupiter


What do you remember as the general reaction to Jupiter?

McGrath: It was pre-internet, so I think we saved ourselves on that. It was mixed. We had new people coming into the fold. New people were interested in our band, new people that weren't interested in Cave In before were coming to our shows. We had opportunities to play with different bands that we never really would have been able to play with before. We played with Jets To Brazil and Rainer Maria. We got offers to do different types of stuff.

Then there was the people who were hardcore or metal fans who were upset about it and they told us. It's funny now, 25 years later, people tell us these stories like, "We went to see Cave In and you guys didn't play any of your old songs and I fucking hated you for it." We laugh about it, but it's also like, man, we were such assholes. We'd start Until Your Heart Stops songs and not finish them [laughs], things like that.. But I also think we were laying into our new vision.

Brodsky: It was a wild time. It just added to the list of all the crazy changes that were happening in our lives, and you just throw that one in there. It was kind of reflective of what was going on; everything was different. I live in a new place now; I'm in college now; I'm in a space rock band now [laughs]. I think people in Boston rock proper were pumped on it. It was really exciting for them. Like I said earlier, we were from the 'burbs and we had these hardcore/metal/punk roots, and we were becoming an attraction to Boston rockers that had never really seen a group of people with that type of energy get together and play. We were fucking loud, too; we hit it hard. Someone told me once, "You guys were so loud my teeth hurt." 

I think another thing that gave some confidence into laying into it, like Adam said, is we tracked the record mostly live. There weren't really any punch-ins or overdubs. There's some maybe some acoustic guitar just fleshing some of the arpeggio stuff, there's obviously acoustic guitar in "New Moon." That's a Failure trick—if you have an arpeggio that's swimming in effects and delay and nonsense, you can add a spine to it, a skeletal feeling to it by just playing the same thing on acoustic. Vocals were mostly one vocal track through entire songs. "Innuendo [And Out the Other]," we do some harmonizing towards the end, sort of like a wordless ethereal vocal thing. Most of it is just one track, no harmonies, and the idea was, that's how the band sounds. That's how it sounds when we play it just as raw as we can in our rehearsal space, and we just wanted to prove that this is the thing, there's no tricks to it. I think because we were able to play this stuff a lot tighter than a lot of the Until Your Heart Stops stuff, it came across more powerful. If you saw us play in a small room when that record first hit and Jupiter was all that embodied our minds and our bodies, it just came out harder because we were really feeling it.

I think that created this bubble around us of positivity about the record, and we kind of literally just blasted people that weren't into it into the back of the room. We always had that idea of just putting our heads down and playing because we've been doing this since we were fucking 15. There's that too.


What's your favorite song on Jupiter and why?

Conners: I would say for me it's changed. Forever and always it was "Innuendo." That's the one song that I vividly remember recording in that studio, the last portion of the song where it's on the ride. I think about it every time we play the song live; it's a very solid memory that I have. That's the only memory I have of actually recording the record. But recently, listening back to it a few times over the last few years, my favorite has become "Requiem" mainly because of that middle section. I think it's just so cool. For me, it's a tossup between those two, and they both happen to have, in my opinion, the most dynamics of the whole record.

McGrath: I've probably played "Big Riff" more times in my life than any other song, but if I had to pick a favorite, I'd probably say "Innuendo." I think it has everything the band Cave In has to offer. It has dynamics, it has spacey guitar rock stuff, great vocals, cool tom "Heliotopic" Failure drums in the middle, and then the ending that could be a firework show. I always thought every time we played it, it really went over well. When that record first came out up until this day, I think it always goes over really well. Very signature song for the band.

Brodsky: Those are great picks. I have to mention "Big Riff" only because I feel like, for old school Cave In fans, if there was a chance to like Jupiter, I think "Big Riff" pulled them in. I think if we wrote that song now, I would just add more Caleb; I would suggest that we do that vocal part even more. I think "Innuendo" is a great choice for many reasons. I also have some pretty vivid memories of writing that song. Coming up with that arpeggio part, I think it was one of the first Double Drop D songs that we did in Cave In; it may have come before "Jupiter." In addition to dropping the top string to D, you drop the high E string to D. Just playing with that tuning came up with that arpeggio, the four chords that make up the verse.

I just have a vivid memory of being in the basement of our practice space, and showing Caleb the rough idea I had for the bassline and then he morphed it into his own thing. We just played that for maybe, I don't know, it was a long time, like a half hour straight. It just was this magical thing where we were all into it, and there was no other parts written for the song, we were just vibing on the new tuning and the effects swirling around, and Caleb taking this bass idea that I had and, not only doing his own thing with it, but building his own thing—in real time he was building his style to what people would come to know Caleb as. 

We did a demo version of that song with Kurt where there's a different riff, there's a whole different section at the end of the song with Caleb on lead vocal and we changed it later on, I think just to fit more the vibe of Jupiter. I think if we worked on that ending a little bit more it could have been cool, but I do think it was the right choice. We put it out on the Anomalies record and I think it's cool for people to hear. That main part, the chorus, that's something I wrote on a piano when I was like 12 or 13. My grandparents had a piano and whenever there were family gatherings there, if I was bored I would just play on their piano, and I remember coming up with that on their piano. It's this kind of creepy sounding thing. It has a sort of John Carpenter vibe to it, I guess. I transposed it to guitar because I thought it could work for Cave In, and it did. Lots of memories associated with that song and people seem stoked when we play it live, so you can't argue with it.

McGrath: To this day I have to concentrate very much to play that stupid fucking intro that I wrote.


What's your thoughts on Jupiter 25 years later?

Conners: I think that was really the record that it felt like things were picking up with the band, for me. Like Adam was saying earlier, we started playing shows with bands that we never would have prior to that, and it just felt like things were more exciting and things were happening. Looking back on it, that was a game changer record for us, in more ways than one.

McGrath: Just answering the general question of what do I feel when I hear Jupiter, I just miss Caleb. That's the biggest thing. That was the Cave In lineup and we really came together at that time, and it makes me miss him terribly, and he was such a great bass player. He was amazing, and I was very lucky to be in a band with him.

Brodsky: I'm very thankful that I got to know him and that he threw himself into our band. He truly did. I said this earlier, and I don't think it really dawned on us at the time, but he came from this Concord, New Hampshire hardcore scene that was kind of small, but very tight-knit, and getting to meet Caleb and some of his friends and just getting a vibe of this scene up north that we didn't really know growing up—we were very constricted to Merrimack Valley and our immediate area. Even just to go to Boston to see a show was like an event. So, just getting to know him and his friends, and getting the gist of their vibe. He was absolutely someone who was very highly regarded in that scene, and for him to just pick up and leave and move to Boston and hang out with these Massachusetts weirdos. He has that story about how when we writing Until Your Heart Stops and he locked himself in a closet for three days and just spun all the demos of all the songs at the time trying to wrap his head around that shit, and going crazy in the process. But it was so different for him. But he just wanted it. He wanted to own it, and he did.

So I'm very thankful, and we learned so much from him in our band. We wouldn't even be having this conversation if Caleb wasn't in the picture. That record is very much a celebration of him really, not just being in our band, but him starting to come into his own. Like I said, with "Big Riff," when I hear that song I wish that part happened two more times with him on vocals. Even "Innuendo," it would have been cool if we figured out a way to finish that ending somehow and have more Caleb in our lives. The record is what it is, and in the end he put his stamp of approval on it, and that's how it should be.  


7 comments

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anonymous 36 days ago

Great interview! One of my top 3 favorite records ever. Never gets old! RIP Caleb.

Bortslob 36 days ago

This band was good up until this album. The interviewer has always sucked.

anonymous 36 days ago

Yeah, I'm a writer. I do interviews on lambgoat.com and work for a guy who calls himself lurkcity. F*cking LOL

anonymous 36 days ago

One of my favorite albums. Such a great interview with stuff I've never heard or realized before.

anonymous 34 days ago

The best to ever do it

anonymous 34 days ago

Thank you for the interview with the mighty CAVE IN and their innovative genre-bending album "Jupiter".

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