Cadderwall

I think the circumstances of my childhood definitely had a role in how I got here. I was born and lived in Dublin, Ireland for the first couple years of my life; so much of Irish culture and history is rooted in music and poetry, and that definitely stuck with me. My parents were part of the New Wave scene in the 1980s and 1990s, so I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, ’Til Tuesday, The Smiths, Siouxsie, and the Banshees, and so many others. I spent my teen/coming-ofage years in suburban New Jersey, which had its ups and downs. On one hand, the town where I lived was a quiet Catholic community where there wasn’t much happening in terms of a music scene. This pushed me to take matters into my own hands and start learning how to play all the instruments I needed to make my own one-man-band. I felt kind of out-of-place as a teenager and spent a lot of time listening

to records by bands like Beach House, Rostam, Angel Olsen, and Slowdive in my room and really leaning into that particular brand of maudlin. I’ve been playing guitar since I was around 10 years old, so music felt like a natural outlet for me. On the other hand, I was only an hour by train from shows in New York City and just down the street from a developing music scene in Asbury Park, NJ. By going to cheap shows every weekend, meeting unusual people, hearing weird music, and reading really good poetry, I eventually realized I wanted to be part of that world. When I was lucky enough to move to Boston, Massachusetts for college, I started to put that idea into motion.