The Lead: "Thermacare," the orphaned Chiodos song

“I think it was probably one of the best-sounding songs we’ve ever created, considering the circumstances,” recalls Chiodos keyboardist Bradley Bell of the much-debated, much-loved “missing” Chiodos song, “Thermacare.” “We just did a demo of it that wasn’t produced by any means,” he says. “It wasn’t perfect and the structure of it was a complete mess.”

During the summer of 2009, the post-hardcore band were headlining Warped Tour and had begun writing material for the follow-up to their hit record, Bone Palace Ballet. Creative sessions among the band members were frustratingly slow due to internal strife, burnout from over-touring and ongoing conflicts with their lead singer, Craig Owens. (See this month’s Chiodos cover story on stands now [Issue #290/September 2012]).

Owens remembers that despite many of the band members' intentions, they weren’t able to get all the writing done before Warped had ended. “We only got one song done,” he says. “[The writing of the record] was still in the beginning stages. We were all writing, and I was so unhappy with myself and with where everything had gone. I just wouldn’t even show up [to write]. I wasn’t happy and I felt like we had a lot to discuss and work on, but communication between us was just done at that point. Nobody was talking to anybody and I felt like we couldn’t get anything done.”

One demo that did come to fruition was “Thermacare.” Those who heard it during the final few weeks of Warped 2009 ascribed to one opinion: This was the song that was going to take Chiodos forward and upward. Many point to the work of Goldfinger frontman/producer John Feldmann, who had started writing with Owens months before Warped Tour began and was in consideration to be the producer of Chiodos’ next record. Feldmann met Owens for the first time on a day off while performing in Australia at the Soundwave Festival with Goldfinger. “[Goldfinger] really don’t hang out on days off anymore after all these years, so I was just kinda doing my own thing,” he recalls. “I was just walking across this crosswalk and Craig Owens was coming the other way and I had actually seen him on the cover of AP—that’s how I knew who he was. It was a total coincidence because out of the 80 or so bands on Soundwave, out of the three people that I met, Craig Owens was one of them.”

Feldmann hadn’t heard Chiodos’ music yet, but knew from his own discussions with Anthony Green (who had appeared with Owens in Rich Balling’s ad hoc project the Sound Of Animals Fighting) that it was a group he should be aware of. Feldmann gave Owens his number and told him to give him a ring to see what they could do together. “When we got back to the States, he and [manager] Dave Taylor came over to my house at 8 a.m., which I was super-stoked about because both Craig and I are early-morning guys,” Feldmann says. “We went out to breakfast and talked about his vision for the new Chiodos record.” Feldmann put it all on the table, telling Owens he wasn’t like their previous producers, that he was very much a hands-on type behind the board, more along the style of the Beatles’ infamous producer George Martin.

Backyard songwriting sessions with Feldmann are pretty much a staple if you’re going to work with him on your record. It was during one of these sessions that “Thermacare” began. “We set up a writing session and the first thing he played me was ‘Thermacare,’ which they had music to and Craig had some melodies and some lyrics to, already. We just sat down with the laptop and a guitar in my backyard and just went through the concepts: What are we talking about? Who’s this about? We talked in detail about his life—his ex-girlfriend and everything that was going down at the time. All I really did was help him with some melodies and tied some lyrics cohesively together. It wasn’t a true co-write, though.”

Once the foundation for what would become “Thermacare” was created, Chiodos knocked out the instrumentals (with drums by Brian Southall of Boys Night Out and the Receiving End Of Sirens) at rehearsals before Warped kicked off. “Brad and I were the only ones that went to Feldmann’s studio to record it. That was the only song I said ‘Okay’ to [record],’ recalls Owens. “I wouldn’t work on any other songs.”

Bell remembers the demo as being a loose idea that needed tightening and the structure was a complete mess. “It’s not like we ever had a chance to really work on that song for, like, a month while we were writing an album, where we could keep adding to it. We just took the stems we had already done that were kind of just there and restructured it all with Feldmann. He turned it into what it became. That was all in one day’s work.”

With the demo now pocketed, the band would proudly play it to fellow musicians during that last Warped Tour. Later on though, Owens and the rest of the band would fight over the song while working through the details of Owens firing from the band. Credit for “Thermacare” would eventually be split evenly between the two camps with Chiodos retaining the rights to the music and Owens owning the publishing to the lyrics and the melody. With Brandon Bolmer now installed as frontman, Chiodos would eventually turn their version of “Thermacare” into “Stratovolcano Mouth” for their next record, 2010’s Illuminaudio. The new singer admitted to AP at the time that he purposely chose not to listen to the original “Thermacare” demo before working on the new adaptation.

“This is a song about anger—hitting a boiling point, the last straw, shit hitting the fan, whatever you want to call it,” said Bolmer. “Some people don't deal with anger much; it's easy for them to stay calm and collected. I’ve dealt with this negative energy in my life—it's nothing to be proud of, and it's something I continue to work at with each passing day. This was a challenging song to write to, as I knew that there was a version with Craig floating around. I chose to never listen to his version as I thought it would affect my writing and melodies.”

The next year, Owens’ new group, Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows, went in the direction that Owens-era Chiodos had intended to take, with Feldmann producing, Owens signing with Warner Bros. and aligning with the high-powered Crush Management. Their 2011 self-titled record would end up taking Owens’ half of the song and, with Feldmann’s production help, turning it into the band’s wall-busting set opener, “The Only Thing You Talk About (Thermacare),” retaining the original demo’s chant-worthy opening line: “We all know, We all know by now/That you’re the only thing you talk about.”

Now, a year-and-a-half later and reunited with the original members of Chiodos, Owens laughs. “It was amazing, because my original idea was to open our new show with ‘Thermacare.’ I think right now, the most important thing is to play that song first,” he says, reflecting back on the three-year journey that each of the members have taken, experiencing the highs, the many lows and the maturity they feel they have acquired through it all. “I think that’s where we left off. We never played it live together, ever—not even at a practice with all of us together. I think it’s a great place to pick it back up and move forward, as opposed to living in the past. I think fans will be surprised and overwhelmed, but I think we’re going to do it for us.” alt