Cadderwall Interview by Carol Wright Photos courtesy of Cadderwall
Cadderwall is the not-quite-studio project of Clem Cahill. She only has a few songs out under this alias, but once you get a taste of her heartfelt and personal music about love and growing up, you are sure to be hooked.
Did your childhood or where you grew up have any influence on you deciding to become a musician? 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 listen21
ing 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. Since there are multiple streaming services and new technologies nowadays was it an easy process to start releasing your original music? It was definitely more complicated than I thought it would be. Around 2017, I put my first couple
of demos up on SoundCloud and then moved to Bandcamp, which definitely has a more artist-friendly interface and setup in general. Getting music on Spotify was a little different as I’m not signed to a label and don’t have a distributor. I enlisted some help from one of my friends (who is also a musician) and landed on using a service called DistroKid to put my songs out independently. Your music makes me feel like the lead in a coming of age movie (and I mean that as a compliment). Is there a certain feeling you hope to evoke in your music? First of all, thank you! Honestly, the main feeling I want to give people is the way I felt at all the shows I went to as a teen. That experience was the single most important factor in my decision to start making music. The distinct human connection between an artist on stage and a room full of people returning their energy is so powerful and bridges so many gaps in commu-
