Thrash metal has gone through periods of domination (the 1980s) as well as drought (the mid-1990s) when it comes to the fifty plus years that heavy metal has been in existence. Illinois’ Patchwork aim to keep this style primed and ready to be in the conversation for relevance even in 2025 – their latest record Scars infiltrating the scene with a mix of Bay Area thrash influences that can be energetic, progressive, and highly melodic in terms of the riffing and hooks. We spoke to drummer Dave Caruana and guitarist Brad Carlson regarding their journey from music discovery to metal, the reasons behind the decade long break between albums, the numerous guest guitar slots for the record, thoughts on the thrash genre and breaking through the noise, favorite albums / show memories, and what it would take to become a live band again.
Dead Rhetoric: What are your earliest memories surrounding music growing up in childhood? At what point did you discover heavier forms of music, and eventually the desire to pick up an instrument and perform in your own bands?
Dave Caruana: Both my parents were musicians. My dad played guitar, and my mom played piano. They honestly had me listening to easy listening stuff – I started listening to classic rock in my room, just hanging out. This was Journey, Foreigner, Styx, stuff like that. Kilroy Was Here was one of the first vinyl records my parents ever bought for me (laughs). The song “Heavy Metal Poisoning” off that album resonated with me. It’s one of the heaviest songs Styx ever wrote, even though the album it’s considered not that great. It opened my eyes at that point.
Moving through the 80s, it was the greatest time to listen to heavy metal music as far as I’m concerned. Eventually I heard Metallica my freshman year of high school, and the first song I heard was “Battery”, as things kicked in, I was completely hooked. That’s when I decided to pick my drum set back up. I took two years of piano lessons, and dropped that for drums when I was ten. When I was thirteen after hearing Metallica for the first time, it made me pick things back up to play the four-piece. Then I went out to get a job, worked six months straight at minimum wage to afford a brand new Tama Rockstar nine-piece kit.
Brad Carlson: There was always music playing in our house. Whether it was Elvis, my dad was a huge fan, and country which I do not like but was always there. I took piano when I was younger, played at recitals and was pretty good at it. In middle school I was in a band, playing French horn which was interesting. I have an older brother, he was playing Quiet Riot – Metal Health, and Def Leppard – Pyromania, stuff like that, and he had the cooler stereo system. I went from what I was listening to into that, and then he stopped listening to metal. I heard Metallica – “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” was the first song I heard in the eighth grade, and I was like wow! A cousin of mine came over, had a guitar, and played the riff for “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream, with Eric Clapton. I got a cheap guitar then, took guitar lessons for a month and a half, two months – but he didn’t want to show me Metallica riffs, he wanted to teach me theory, so I quit. I was self-taught from there.
I was in bands- Dave was in a band through high school, and we were all in the same group of friends. I would go over to our late guitar player Mark’s house and Dave played drums in that band. I played guitar but I wasn’t like them yet. That was the high school years. When Mark went to college, I got in a band after high school. We all got together years later after that.
Dead Rhetoric: Scars is the second album for Patchwork – and first in a decade. From what I understand, the songwriting process took seven years. Outside of the pandemic and a couple of lineup changes, what life events took place that caused such a long gap between records for the group?
Caruana: Well, let’s see. Outside of the pandemic and the lineup changes we went through, as Brad mentioned we also went through our late guitarist Mark being diagnosed with cancer. He fought harder than anyone I had ever seen, and we lost him after about three and a half years. Kinda going back and forth, he lived about two hours away at that time, and when we were playing live from 2010-2015, he would come up to band practice once to twice a week, driving all that way. After we stopped playing live shows, about six months after Exit Wounds came out, he got a little turned off at practicing every week the way we had before.
It was that primarily. Real life took over at one point as well. I ended up having a stent put in, that took me out of the game for a couple of months. It was right in the middle of recording, actually. Recording ended up going very slowly after that. It was seven years to create the album, but it took three and a half years to record this, almost. We started in January 2022 laying down the drums – and we had been recording guitars in the Scars studio here. On Valentine’s Day I had a stent put in, that was another thing that got in the way. It was medical issues, and we are raising small kids at that point. Small kids have large needs. We’ve each got three, and our kids were playing soccer and requiring dad in some way, shape or form. Coaching, helping with school, going to events. Not the most metal (thing).
Carlson: When Mark was initially having the struggles driving down to practice, that was before he was even diagnosed. When he got diagnosed, Dave and I were on hold, and we didn’t even know if we were going to continue writing. We had two really good, solid ideas, and other riffs/ structures. He got sick and it got hard, and we weren’t sure if we were going to still do this – but we said, absolutely, we have to do this. Mark wasn’t like, ‘if I am not a part of this, you can’t do it’. We took baby steps, that’s where it took off and that’s why it took so much time.
Caruana: The change from Exit Wounds is the three of us each wrote a third of the album. We had to change that next when it was just Brad and I. Brad wrote 60-65% of the riffs on this one, I filled the gaps. I did most of the arrangements and the lyrics, stuff like that.
Carlson: I also had to become a lead guitar player. Before it was Mark, I did some leads on Exit Wounds, but he was the main soloist – so losing him was pretty stressful for me. I was that narrow-minded, I want to be James Hetfield, so I wasn’t worrying about soloing at all. I forced myself to do that, which is fine – I sought out some great teachers.
Caruana: We did take some time to get better at our instruments, that is true.
Dead Rhetoric: How did you secure the guest guitarists that appear on this record – which include members formerly or currently associated with Overkill, Flotsam & Jetsam, Exodus, Heathen, Nile, and Malevolent Creation among others? Did you have specific spots in mind based on their skill sets?
Carlson: That’s very interesting how that happened. I met Ronnie Parmer, the drummer for Malevolent Creation, and he’s an amazing guitar player. I met him through an old friend of a band that I was in when I was in my twenties, who moved to Florida. He did a song with Ronnie, who is known in the death metal scene down in Florida. Plays drums for this band, he’s a drum tech for Immolation, guitar tech for this. I met him because he played up here, opening up for Cannibal Corpse here in Rockford. I met him for the first time, he was a down-to-earth guy, and we became good friends, text chatting with each other. That’s how he became involved.
He’s one of those guys that is connected with everyone on Facebook. Once I was on his friend’s group, other artists, if I would reach out to them, they knew if he was friends with Ronnie, he wasn’t just a fanboy. Kragen Lum from Heathen and Exodus, our bass player Liza used to be in a band with him in California. Liza is married to my friend Eddie – they moved back here to Rockford. I reached out to Kragen, took some lessons from him, became friends and the same thing happened with Dallas Toler-Wade. I went out to see Ronnie, he was playing in Malevolent in Chicago, and backstage was Narcotic Wasteland – Dallas’ band was playing on the tour. I had surgery on my hand, we talked about lessons once I got my hand healed up, same thing. I took most of my lessons from Dallas, I was experienced but he opened doors for me. “Divide” we were struggling for ideas vocally, it was kind of a death metal song the way I wrote it, I asked Dallas to do a guest solo and lyrics, he recorded it, and it was perfect. Strange how it happens. Bobby Gustafson – he released one of his Satans Taint’s first records, it sounded a lot like old Overkill. I messaged him, he replied, and he had a great demeanor. I asked if he wanted to do some solos, and he said yes as well. We are honored they did this – and they liked the music as well.
Dead Rhetoric: The lyrical content seems to be a mix of personal stories of handling grief/loss as well as failing to learn from history and the past. How do you develop these ideas – are you working hand in hand with the music, or does one part need to be completed before the other can be put into place?
Caruana: We are primarily a riff type band. Which is how most of the thrash bands were in the 80s. We start with that, and put things in from there. What I did this time is as we were writing the songs, for some reason it was easier because it was me and Brad doing this, is I could create the vocal patterns in my head as we were writing the songs. He would write a riff, and I would say that it sounds like a verse riff, or an intro riff without lyrics. Depending on the complexity of the riff, where it sat on the fretboard, that type of thing, we would get a feel for it. As we were arranging the songs, I am creating the vocal patterns and what the vocals are going to sound like.
As far as the content, if we go back to Exit Wounds – some people do concept albums, we’ve done concept themes, I suppose. Exit Wounds was about the tragedy that befalls us. They were very, very personal stories – the previous singer Chris Johnson was really good at writing lyrics that were simplistic in nature, but they told the story so brilliantly. Brad, Mark, and I had each gone through things in our lives, and so we got those down on paper. The tragedy that you go through in life leaves an exit wound. So, on this album, if you survive those exit wounds, what happens? They turn into scars – they show up in multiple ways in our lives. How we approach things. People with heavy trauma approach things differently than people who’ve been unscarred in their lives. The lyrics in the songs that we wrote in Scars kind of bear that out – either from a personal perspective or a societal perspective. People who are very damaged and act in a specific way in society, towards society and in their personal lives that wouldn’t have acted that way otherwise had they not gone through the trauma they went through.
Dead Rhetoric: What do you consider some of the biggest challenges that Patchwork currently faces at this point in your career?
Carlson: Since I wrote most of the music – we wrote these songs, and thrash metal for the most part is two-guitar driven. The riff behind the solos, leads, harmony leads, and all that. Losing Mark and just being me as a player, not saying we wouldn’t ever be able to do live shows again, if the demand is there, absolutely. Our vocalist Heith and our bassist Liza, they are 100% seasoned and ready, they can pull it off. It’s more about finding the right guitar player – not that there aren’t good guitar players in Rockford. Thrash metal is a nostalgic genre that we jumped on a time machine from in the mid-80s, the big four scene, it’s what we write and what we love listening to still. It’s what we like to play. Just finding another player that would want to play this stuff and do it well, the intensity, emotion, and sincerity. We have a lot of amazing solos from a lot of great players – Kragen isn’t going to hop on a tour with us, Bobby isn’t, Dallas isn’t. There are a lot of technical solos that would have to be maneuvered on here as well. Supply and demand, it would have to make sense.
We hope people hear the record, love it, and hope it inspires them. Download it, stream it, physical copies, whatever. It may give us the push to make that stuff happen. That is the struggle – the music business. It’s not for the musician at all.
Caruana: We have day jobs like a lot of musicians do – but a lot of those touring musicians have more flexible day jobs than we do. At some point there would be a decision that would have to be made. It has to make absolute financial sense – as Brad said, supply and demand. Demand where we are now isn’t that high, we would have to leave the area to do that, and that takes money. It takes people that would be willing to pay the money to go to different places and do those things just to survive and pay for it all. That’s the other side of it.
Dead Rhetoric: What are your thoughts on the thrash genre that the band is a part of? What do you enjoy most about the style – and what changes (if any) would you like to make for even more people to get into it?
Carlson: I’d say radio play – but these days people don’t even listen to the radio anymore. Sirius XM and all of that, that’s opened up more for newer music and different songs. I remember when I would have Sirius XM in a rental car in the past – Mark and Dave had it, and every time it was the same song! (laughs). They only had the copyright to so many songs they could play. Now you hear new songs, and it seems like they focus on more stuff. Ever since Lamb of God got popular many, many years ago – and Power Trip. Heavy, the aggression of it, it doesn’t have to be majorly technical, but more people need to hear it. If people could see what it takes to play that style of music – I was talking to another artist, and basically thrash metal and metal music is classical music with distortion, if you think about it. Whether it’s on a violin, a piano, whatever – that’s what we are doing with riffs on our instruments. People that didn’t know what we played, and they would see us for the first time playing out, they didn’t know we could play like this. That’s a good feeling to be appreciated like that. We don’t go around bragging about whether we are good or not good, but this style of music isn’t simple to play it right or arrange. I wish people would appreciate it more and not have the blinders on. Musically ADD, they want what’s next.
Caruada: Another aspect is changes in the industry and how music is delivered really has been a mixed bag. It’s much easier to get your music out there, but impossible to get people to listen to it because the market is so saturated. We are fortunate that we each built studios in our homes, we are able to compile scratch tracks and actual recording tracks – and then take them to a place like TVR Studios and compile everything there. We are able to do this in the comfort of our own homes – where in the past, you couldn’t do that. Distribution is even easier these days. You have Distrokid, you have Bandcamp, you have all these different outlets that allow all these bands to get up off their couches and create. The tradeoff to that is nobody makes it big anymore. Everybody starts down low, and you are looking for a way to propel yourselves up through all the noise. Even when that noise can be a lot of other really good bands. We rely on Dead Rhetoric and other webzines to help elevate us as best as we can – and everyone else relies on you guys as well. The other side of it too – it’s easier than it used to be to be a content creator and help out the music industry in that aspect.
Dead Rhetoric: What are three albums (metal or otherwise) that have had the greatest impact on your outlook with music? And what is your favorite live concert memory, attending a show as a member of the audience – plus what made that show so special and memorable to you?
Carlson: Metallica – Master of Puppets. Slayer – Reign in Blood. Megadeth – Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying. I got into Machine Head for a while; The Blackening is great. As far as live concert experience, there are people that travel and see the Grateful Dead hundreds of times. That’s how Mark Sheetz, our old guitar player, and I were with Metallica. We both saw Metallica for the first time in 1987 Alpine Valley, Wisconsin right before …And Justice For All came out. They got 20 minutes and played before The Scorpions; it was mind blowing. We continued to follow them. I’ve seen then 150-160 times. There are a lot of Metallica shows to choose from. A really cool one for me, they played the Aragon Ballroom a number of years ago when they came out with Garage Inc. the second time with the extended version. They played that small hall, I had seen Slayer and Pantera there, been in the pit – they only played cover songs. They had a Metallica cover band play before them Metallica songs. It was cool to see them play everything from Garage Inc. revisited, all covers. That was a very unique experience.
Caruana: Metallica – Master of Puppets is the quintessential album right there. For the other two, really hard to narrow down. One I would have to say is Fates Warning – No Exit. That got me into progressive metal. The other one is going to be really unpopular. Rush – Power Windows. That is one of my favorite albums of all time. There are no songs I skip on Power Windows. I was twelve when that album came out. Then I went back into the Rush catalog. In terms of concerts – I saw Symphony X at a bar in Aurora, Illinois, back in the mid-90s I think. It was the day before my birthday – and it turns out it was Mike Romeo’s birthday. Watching that band play – it was like a mini-Dream Theater. We were right against the stage. It was the bar tour before the larger set tour. Just watching all of those guys play – Romeo’s hands were all over the fretboard. He is a virtuoso, and every musician in the band is unbelievable to see.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s on the schedule for anything related to Patchwork in the next year or so as far as live shows, festivals, tours, or other promotional endeavors?
Carlson: We have a lot of people around town asking us when we are playing live. It’s got to make sense for us. Not that we don’t want to. Our singer Heith has so much experience live – he’s in another cover band that does all genres of music. Liza, same thing – she’ll play in any band she can, and she learns things like that. With those two up on stage with us, it would be so powerful. We released the album, we are pushing the PR, doing interviews, taking the reviews, paying attention and push forward from there. Take what’s in front of us as it comes.
Caruana: We also created our own record label, Scars of Lazurus Records. It will allow us to do some things that were going to be harder to do without it. We will release the CD’s under that; we will release some other merch. As Brad said, we will gauge demand at that point. If people want to see us in an area, we will figure out a way to put it together. We will have the means to do it at that point.