Interview: Olaf Alverson of Local Rock Band, The Cellar Dwellars (Part Three)

I know you’re in a second band, Mudcutter. How did that come to be?

So, Logan Bennett, our bass player, is really smart. He’s studying astrophysics at TCNJ, going for the PhD, the whole nine yards. And he got this really, really awesome internship during the summer with the wonderful people over at UC Santa Barbara. And he went out there for like six months to study exoplanets, aliens, and planets forming. So, very happy for him that he got to do that, very cool stuff. But on the flip side, when he left, we needed to find someone to fill the spot. For me, I already knew all the songs, I’m the musical director, so I show everybody the sheet and what we’re playing. I knew most of the songs. So, in my mind, the most logical fix to that was to become the bass player. I became the bass player for the summer. 

I go to County College of Morris, and the music program is so great, and I know so many people over there who are wonderful and talented musicians. A friend of mine, Drew Kmec, who is a killer guitar player, came and played with us for the summer. He stepped in and basically replaced me playing guitar, and I became the bass player. At that time we had kinda hit a plateau in terms of writing, because everyone was so busy with school. Everything was wrapping up. So some people were going on vacation, some of them going home… so I was like, okay. I’d always wanted to be in a band that played heavier music. And I realized that, for our group, we could do it, but we’re not cut out for it. That’s not what we’re good at. You look at the stuff we play in a bar, we’re totally awesome at playing classic rock. That’s what we do. 

So, evidently, we agreed as a group that we were going to keep what we had, tone it back a little in terms of genre, and move forward in that way. But I still wanted to satisfy this need of justifying having a Marshall stack behind me while playing. So I reached out to Ethan Michalko, who wasn’t in a band, and Drew, and said, “Hey, you guys wanna start a threepiece post-hardcore group?” And they were both kind of hesitant at first, and I was like, okay… no big deal, let’s just get together and play first. We came up with a list of a few songs to do, came together in Ethan’s basement, jammed a bunch of stuff… and it was awesome. We actually wrote a portion of a song there, on the first time we hung out. So, the chemistry was there, and I was happy to be in a separate project with Drew that was an actual band in terms of writing stuff. When he came in with the Cellar Dwellars during the summer, we took a hiatus from the creative process because we wanted Logan Bennett to be involved in it. So, that’s how that started. 

And then after that, Adam had asked me if he could record his own music while Logan was gone, too. So Adam was working with Ethan, and they were recording his songs, which were songs that we played as a group and are now under a new name, and we don’t play them anymore. So those are all Lone Till Payday songs. And he wound up getting a bunch of people together and turning that into a band, which was cool. And… I cannot explain to you how weird it was to see Nathan Evans sing as a frontman after two years of him sitting behind me on drums. Just seeing him scream into a microphone… like, where was that this whole time? Listen, I’m really happy for all of them, and Adam that he gets to have his own creative outlet. 

But I also think that in terms of other things, it’s let me live out a personal dream of mine to have a post-hardcore group. I’d grown up with that kind of music, listening to Helmet and Quicksand and stuff like that. It was really a bucket list item. And now we’ve played two shows together, and we have an EP coming out soon with three songs that we recorded at County College of Morris. We had a really cool recording process; we took everything and put it in a live room and recorded it all live. Just the music, we did the vocals separately. It’s cool, you get this raw, unfiltered room noise. And a friend of ours, Theo, is producing it, and he’s in a female-fronted metal band called Squelch. It’s just been really cool working with a producer who understands what we’re going for. It’s just been, really, a bucket list thing to do, and I’m finally able to do it, which is awesome.

What do you anticipate is the future of both of your projects? What do you hope to achieve?

As Mudcutter, we all agree that whatever happens… The goal is to make it into the Meat Locker. Whatever happens after that is just icing on the cake. Like, we can all quit. We can be done with it and just say we did it when we were younger. That, for us, is kind of the mantra. But as far as the Cellar Dwellars go… I mean, we play so often, and we’ve become a fun cover band and a project that we all enjoy doing. Wishful thinking, it takes off, but as a group of friends, I foresee us doing it forever. At least playing.

How about the EP releases? Are the Cellar Dwellars releasing anything soon?

So, we have – right now – I am in the works of releasing “Will It Hold” as a single. We did that with Ethan at CCM in their studio. Hopefully, soon, with this new material that we’ve put together, we will have more coming. But as of right now, that’s the latest thing we’re up to.

Anything else going on with the Cellar Dwellars?

We have this show at Roy’s Hall coming up, which I am so thrilled to be doing. I know you’re coming, and I’m so happy that you’re coming there. I hope that we get more people that really know us to come out, and I think that it’s a pretty easy sell considering that it’s right after Thanksgiving. Nobody wants to really think about what they’re doing after Thanksgiving. And it’s also the night of Jingle On Main. So for all of you Christmas enthusiasts, come on out. 

I think it’s been a really, really crazy 4 or 5 months as a group because everyone’s been in and out, we’ve had people come in and cover. I know Ethan came in and covered for Nathan on a gig. I couldn’t make it to a gig once, so I had a friend of ours, Hailee Knapik from CCM, came and she sang. Drew Kmec was on guitar and Logan Bennett was on bass. So there’s been all these different combinations of us, in terms of being a collective, that have come out and helped us get those gig dates get through. For Roy’s Hall, we’re looking to honor that, so we’ll have a few special guests that will be playing for us, and we’ll be looking to acknowledge how crazy the past few months have been. Really, anyone that’s come out to help us in the last 5 months will be there, doing at least one or more songs.

Catch the Cellar Dwellars at 8pm on Friday, November 28th at Roy’s Hall in Blairstown, New Jersey for their special hometown show. Tickets are $16 in advance, $20 on the day, and can be purchased on the Roy’s Hall website.