“I’m gonna come clean.” That’s Twin Peaks guitarist Cadien Lake James. We’re talking on the phone late last Monday after failing to connect, as scheduled, earlier in the day. Some things came up in the CL office and James, 22, was driving around getting a friend’s apartment application settled, then told us he had to eat dinner.
“I was actually finishing up The Night Of,” he explains when we ask what he had to eat. It feels like a genuine confession, and you can sense a minor release of tension over the line. Pushing back work to finish HBO’s cliffhanger crime drama?
So normal.
And it says a lot about the guitarist, whose Windy City band seems poised to force itself beyond the consciousnesses of underground rock followers and into the ears and lives of anyone who ever got a warm and fuzzy feeling listening to their parents’ Rolling Stones records.
Twin Peaks arrive in Tampa on Wednesday touring behind Down In Heaven, a 2016 release in which James and his bandmates have distilled the childlike wanderlust and thirst for life from a pair of earlier LPs (2013’s Sunken and 2014’s Wild Onion) into something a little more refined, yet still bursting with the exuberance that has captured the adoration of critics and fans alike.
“We’re still a baby band,” James, who grew up in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, explains. “There are still some places where we play to just 30 people.”
It’s hard to imagine Twin Peaks feeling minuscule when looking at pictures of them in sold-out clubs or ripping for hometown fans at Lollapalooza in 2015. They’re about to be 4,000 miles away from home on another European tour, but the thought of an occasional thin crowd is quasi-comforting when considering the scene James and his band of childhood friends come from.
Twin Peaks (who chose the name without ever seeing a single episode of the David Lynch classic) came up in the DIY scene, and James still sounds mildly shellshocked when he talks about the day he realized the band wouldn’t be able to play non-traditional venues anymore. We talk about the recent closing of Tampa DIY venue Transitions Art Gallery and the idea that the kids who called it a home away from home for over a decade should be able to move on and rebuild relatively quickly.
“I dunno, I can’t really blame them for being a little angry,” says James, adding that he still frequents those shows back home. “I don’t buy the notion that there isn’t a need for that scene. I wish there was an easy answer for keeping it alive — we experience that a lot ourselves.” In the course of 45 minutes, that notion of “us” comes up more than almost anything. Maybe it’s because his dad, Michael, was a Berkeley student activist in the 1960s, but there’s not a lot James internalizes in the context of just himself.
Songwriting? He’s extremely grateful about having four guys who do that for Twin Peaks, since it’s impossible for anyone to write 365 days a year.
“At any point any one of us can slow down,” he says. “It takes away the stress of one guy leading a band.” His community is everything. A recent collab with online blogging platform Tumblr was all about the unknown spots Twin Peaks loves. He adores Chicago’s people and its band culture, which he says likely benefits from not having a huge industry feel to it compared to other big cities like L.A. or New York.
“There isn’t this air, like success is just around the corner,” says James. “People are sincere — we’re doing it because we love it.” He’s not in a hurry when it comes to the way the band wants to grow artistically, either. He refers to his label and management as a team, saying he’d much rather have a say, and partners in things, than rush to make big label jumps.
“We’ve been enjoying the slow build,” he says. “I like working with the guys to make decisions.”
Those guys — guitarist Clay Frankel, bassist Jack Dolan, drummer Connor Brodner, and keyboardist Colin Croom — are at the core of it all. Croom is the only one in the band who’s not 22 years old, but the others are high school friends who holed up in a basement four years ago and recorded a debut album using free Apple program GarageBand and two condenser mics. They didn’t go to college, instead opting to tour and grow.
They deal candidly with the little things that come with their growing profile. On “Stain” from Heaven, they all but admit that writing music is way more fun than some of the other industry and career-oriented things they deal with (“Shaking hands with sycophantic cunts mile after mile/And piling up all the money that never shows,” the lyrics go). What’s evident though, no matter how big (or irrelevant) Twin Peaks eventually become, is that James & Co. are going to do everything to hang on to their souls and each other. He’s got to actually go grab dinner at the end of our call, but before he heads out for a few pieces of hot chicken, James parts with a note about his friends, saying the weight of their relationships really dawned on him as other high school acquaintances started coming back from college.
“Everyone is coming home, but while they were at school we were on the road traveling, working, making records, hanging out in different towns and sharing everything,” he says.
“We went to ‘school’ with just four other kids — and we’re a lucky group because it’s all worked out so well.”
This article appears in Sep 8-15, 2016.
