Cale Dodds

Cale Dodds grew up in Columbus, Georgia with music in his soul. “Music has always played a huge role in my life. It never really was a question of what I wanted to do,” he explains.

Cale was raised on country radio, an unfailing soundtrack to family fishing trips on the Chattahoochee River. These fondly-remembered bonding excursions shaped the man Cale would become. “It’s always stuck out to me as a very pivotal moment in my life of really discovering music and feeling something,” he notes.

Although Cale’s family isn’t musical, they always encouraged his passion. “My dad could barely play the radio, but he always played it,” Cale reflects. “I’m very thankful for that.” Growing up, he always wanted to play guitar like the cowboys he admired, and taught himself how on a guitar gifted to his grandfather, stationed on nearby Fort Benning. “Every time we went over to his house, I’d always just want to run and grab it and play it. I didn’t know why, I just felt drawn to it,” he says.

Cale wrote his first song at just 12 and it was, as he succinctly describes, “awful”. His first performance was the same year: a birthday party in someone’s garage. “We knew three songs and we played them over and over again for an hour and a half,” he recalls. That first gig, also “awful” for listeners, was eye-opening for the young musician. At that moment, Cale knew how he wanted to spend his life. “I didn’t really care about anything else,” he remembers.

Over time, Cale began gigging bands in Georgia before moving to Nashville in 2011 to further his career. “I always wrote songs by myself and I didn’t know what it meant to co-write until I moved,” he shares, but in Music City, Cale began getting cuts with other artists, including “(This Ain’t No) Drunk Dial” with A Thousand Horses in 2015. While he continued touring, Spotify’s constant support grew Cale’s fanbase and landed him a publishing deal.

He just wrapped up a radio tour in early June, immediately followed by CMA Fest and a summer tour, and with the January release of his newest single “Take You Back”, Cale has been busy.

A unique brand of country rooted in rock and inspired by classic musicians like Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and George Strait, Cale describes his music as “arena country,” with a “big chorus, big sound, [and the] feeling of a big drum.” His first two EPs, Wild and Reckless and People Watching, were released in 2014 and 2016, respectively. He has since released three song duos, starting in 2017 and leading up to the 2018 release of “Like We Do” and “Take You Back.”

Of all his songs, Cale is proudest of “Take You Back,” which perfectly captures the nostalgia of running into someone you used to love and wondering what your life would be like with them still in it. “It’s so personal, and I’m watching people relate to it, and I’m seeing people continue to sing it in different places that I go, and that’s important to me,” he imparts. “Everyone at some point has experienced that feeling, so it’s cool to see it translate and transcend across different places that I’m touring,” he adds.

The idea for “Take You Back” first came to Cale while living in a garage in Nashville. For months, “I woke up with this melody in my head and I didn’t know what the melody was trying to say to me,” he reveals. It wasn’t until he ran into an old flame

in Georgia over the holidays that the lyrics started coming together. “We picked up right where we had left off, and it just kind of wrote itself after that.”

“One reason I love writing so much is because it’s never the same. As an ADD kid growing up, I [realized that] there’s no monotony to songwriting,” he shares. When writing, Cale will sometimes hear a melody first, or a guitar part, a beat, or even a single line. While the spontaneity of writing first sparked his interest, storytelling is what kindles the flame. “If I tell my stories in song, that’s when they connect the most. My songs are my stories: where I’ve been, where I’m going, and anything I’ve gone through. I want my music to feel how it sounds, and to sound how it feels,” he explains.

From January to June, Cale lived on the road. While touring is exhausting, he admits, the chance to interact with supporters both old and new is worth it. “I love hearing their stories as much as I like telling mine,” he says. Since the release of “Take You Back,” Cale has heard from numerous fans who used the song to reach out to exes, which “is always cool to me, to hear how my songs are affecting people without me even knowing”.

What Cale loves most about music is the way it brings people together. “There are no walls,” he remarks. “Whether we disagree on what we like or not, we all agree on music.” Even arguments create conversation between adversaries, he points out. Conversely, “I’ve seen people be armin-arm, crying with a stranger over a song,” Cale adds. “They might never speak again, but in that moment, they have [a bond]. That’s always been a powerful thing.”