Interview: The Cadillac Three at The Long Road Fest 2022

Maxim and David
We loved getting the opportunity to chat to Jaren Johnston from award-winning US country trio, The Cadillac Three, ahead of the band’s hotly anticipated closing set at the Long Road Festival.

Something I think the Long Road Festival epitomises is the fact that the UK’s country music fanbase is a very close-knit community. It’s not as big as in the States, and it has an almost familial sense to it. How do you find playing to UK crowds, compared to those back home?
We love it, man! We’ve been coming over since 2013, and it's gotten bigger and bigger. I just love the fact that you guys still listen to entire records, and not just one song. We notice that a lot when we’re playing. In the States, it’s not really like that - crowds are waiting for the one big hit. I think that’s why we're done so well over here, because we put out full records.

Talking of putting out full records, you’re known for releasing a lot of music. Does this mean you’re constantly revising your set list?
It’s exhausting. It’s really just a matter of us learning all the songs. We don’t really create set lists, but we have songs that are in the flow of the set. We attempt to sprinkle in the new ones where it makes sense. It’s an ongoing process. Any word on new music? It’s on the way! We’re about halfway through. It’s tough, we put out so much music in 2020, like you were saying, and we just needed a mental reset. Back then, I could write all day long about how everything being shut down because of the pandemic sucked, but now we don’t really want a sad record. But it’s coming!

What’s your favourite song with a theme of mental health? Kacey Musgraves, Follow Your Arrow
It’s tough - (to his bandmates) I’m saving you guys a little bit - because most people listen to music to ideally feel good, whether that’s a song about drinking, a song about losing your dad or a song about your dog dying, you know? I wrote this song called ‘Doggone’, and it was on the last Tim McGraw record, and the amount of messages I got from people who had lost a dog...it’s amazing what that does to people. I think music in general is hopefully designed to heal - I don’t know if we’re healing people when we do it! But yeah, it’s just got to provide any kind of release. Every song in theory is coming from some place, and trying to help the artist get through something, celebrate something, forget about something, etc. I think there are different songs for different moments - there will be times when turning on a really simple song will be what I want, and then there’ll be other times when I need something deeper like John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ or Miranda Lambert’s ‘The House That Built Me’. It could be almost anything, which I think is what’s great about music.

When I think of your music, I think of it as generally being fuelled by an upbeat, funky style - particularly on Country Fuzz. When you’re putting together a project, to what extent do you factor in the mood - like do you think, ‘Okay, we want this to be a happy record’, and so on?
Sometimes we’re just feeling it out. We see where it goes and which songs present themselves. The Tabasco and Sweet Tea record is like a hillbilly DJ set - if that doesn’t make you feel good, then something’s really wrong! We were trying to make that record in 2020 during that time of there being no smiles, and we wanted to try and bring a smile to somebody. We tried to give the whole record away for $1.49, and we couldn’t figure out how to logistically do it with the DSPs, so we ended up doing it for $3.99. So people got a really cheap record that was fun to listen to while sitting on their couch during quarantine, wondering whether the world was ever going to get better. I feel pretty good about that whole thing.

With that project, because the title is so distinctive, did you start with the title and build the project out from there, almost as a concept album, or did the title come later?
I think it helped us finish it. It was something I started before the pandemic, and it was a reaction to the end of the Country Fuzz record. I started to get into more funky material, like on ‘The Jam’, and we didn’t get to fully explore that. We had to wrap up that record, but we’d had a lightbulb moment with this new sound, so we wanted to see what was going on with it. That became Tabasco.

There’s an undeniable sense of genre fluidity with your music. Is this a conscious creative decision, or does it flow naturally out of your process?
It ends up leaning one way or another to some degree, but it’s a natural process and we just see what comes out. It’s all an experiment. You feel your way towards the things you’re all connecting to the most, and then once when you’ve got a few of those, then maybe you start to find more of a musical path and sound.

Writing and creating music is a very personal thing. As a group of three, do you ever find it difficult when writing together to make sure you’re all on the same page?
It’s usually a meeting after every song. We’ll sit and listen to songs on the bus and think, ‘This could be really cool’, and one person will be like, ‘Actually, I don’t know’, and then we’re like, ‘Actually, you’re right’. Every time it's different. Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s Neil, sometimes it’s Kelby, and sometimes it’s all three of us. Sometimes it’s something we wrote ten or fifteen years ago, and we’re like, ‘Dang, we really loved that, let’s do something with it’. And sometimes we sit there and we know we need something with tempo and that’s badass in order to fit onto the record. It’s different every time.

One of my favourite songs of yours is ‘Long After Last Call’. How did that come about?
That’s an old song! I wrote that by myself around ten years ago. I wrote it around the time of the Legacy record, but it didn’t quite fit on that. Then it came back up for a later record and it did make sense. It shows how it’s all about timing and how all the songs fit together, you know? In that instance, we felt like it fit better with the Country Fuzz record.

There aren’t too many bands in modern country music. Does this create a competitive spirit between you and the other biggest bands in the genre?
We’re all friends for the most part. There are a couple of rivalries that are unspoken, like us and Brothers Osborne - we’re good friends, but there’s also a sense of competition there. And then there are bands like Old Dominion who we just cannot stand… Jokes, we’re friends really! And I wrote my first number one with LOCASH in 2010 over at my house - Keith Urban’s ‘You’re Gonna Fly’. We’re all one big family, and it’s very similar to what you explained about the UK country scene.

​Keep an eye out for an announcement about The Cadillac Three’s upcoming project, but in the meantime, you can stream Tabasco and Sweet Tea on all platforms.