Gainesville, Florida, home to the Cade Museum, is a university town famous for being the home of nine members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Thanks to technology to harness their creativity, a fresh crop of Gainesville musicians are using their music to bring comfort and joy during troubled times. This is the story of 25 musicians with Gainesville connections, collectively known as Band Together, and their collaboration on a music video that has brought relief to thousands of music lovers and ordinary people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro:
Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace
James Di Virgilio:
For Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio. The mission of the Cade includes not only technology, but also arts. And within that, especially music. Past entrepreneurs and scientists who have been guest on this show where musicians, including Robert Cade himself. Today, we are joined by three musicians, Bob McPeak, Rob Rothschild , and Chris DeMakes. They’re here to tell us about the technology and the creativity behind the collaborative made at home music videos that certainly are proliferating in the age of COVID-19. They’re part of the amazing tradition of Gainesville, Florida music, a university city that is part of the story of Tom petty and the Heartbreakers, the Eagles Bo Diddley, Stephen Sills, the Motels, Less Than Jake, Sister Hazel, River, Phoenix, Against Me, Minnie Riperton, and many more. 25 musicians from Gainesville recently joined together, calling their band, Band Together, to make a music video of a song called “On the Other Side”, which has been generating quite a bit of attention. Welcome to the show Bob, Rob Rothschild, and Chris DeMakes
Bob McPeak:
Hi. Great to be here. Thank you, James.
James Di Virgilio:
Now, Bob, you started this project Band Together, and you’re also an example of someone who is both scientist and musician.
Bob McPeak:
That’s right. Although a lot of people who know me as a musician don’t know that I am a social scientist. I received a PhD from Ohio state university in social psychology way back in 1976.
James Di Virgilio:
And how did you wind up getting into music, social psychology to music, or do those two overlap? It seems sort of like a leap?
Bob McPeak:
It is an unusual combination, I think, although certainly not unprecedented. Uh , I started playing guitar when I was 14 and I got hooked on it and played in bands all the way through college. But at the end of my third year of graduate school, I was picked by the psychology department to go to this place in Greensboro, North Carolina called the Center for Creative Leadership. And one of the things I did while I was there was to take a career workshop from the vice president of the Center for Creative Leadership, whose name is David Campbell. He was a really remarkable guy. You may have heard of the Strong Campbell Vocational Interest Blank, which is a psychometric instrument that’s supposed to help you determine a career choice. And he did a career workshop and we went through all these exercises and every exercise that we did told me that what I really wanted to do was make music. And I took that to heart, but I was so far along that I went ahead and finished my PhD, but didn’t pursue a job. Instead, I moved with a friend, actually my, a musician that I was playing music with, whose name is Rick Kesner. And at the end of 1976 in November, he and I moved to Gainesville. I’d never been to Gainesville, but it seemed like a really cool place from what I knew about it. And he had been there and spoke highly of it and removed here. And we had a business plan, which was to play music and to start a used record store. And that became Hide and Seek Records shortly after moving here and not too much longer after that, I cobbled together whatever recording equipment I could afford at the time in built a studio in the house that I was living in. And that was the beginning of Mirror Image Studios.
James Di Virgilio:
So you go from having a PhD, to starting a recording studio. What did your family and friends think about that ?
Bob McPeak:
Uh, at that point, my mother was no longer alive. I’m not sure what she would have thought. My dad was a pretty laid back, do what you want kind of guy. He’d never really pressured me. And he seemed okay with it. If he had objections to it, he didn’t voice them. My friends, at least the ones in the psychology department and wondered if I had lost my mind. And to be honest, there were times when I had my own moments of doubt, but then I would go back to the studio and I would get involved in some kind of a recording project or a song that would just move me to tears or touch my heart or make me feel happy. And though I really enjoyed psychology. I enjoyed the research component of it. I never really got that kind of an emotional reaction to anything from psychology quite to that extent or quite that consistently.
James Di Virgilio:
There’s so much of your story that I feel like is echoed through all of the people I’ve interviewed on Radio Cade . And there’s a boldness that it takes to follow what you’re truly interested in. And in your case, I think you have two things you’re obviously very interested in it . It sounds like you’ve done both of those now having a recording studio, especially one that was really one of the only ones in Gainesville at the time, had to have lent itself with you working with some very interesting people. What are some of the projects and who are some of the artists you’ve worked with?
Bob McPeak:
Yeah, it was a long, long climb from being a pretty ill-equipped studio to becoming one of the better equipped studios in the region. So early on the first person that I worked with who’s gone on to any kind of major success or recognition would probably be a guy named J.D. Foster, who was the studio bass player in the early eighties and left town, moved to Los Angeles and took up playing bass for Dwight Yoakam and had a lot of success with that and now is a successful producer working out of Chicago. And he was one of the people I recruited to play on, “On the Other Side”, on the song, he played bass on it. I missed the Tom petty era. He was gone a couple of years by the time I got here, but I did have an opportunity to work with Bernie Leaden, one of the Eagles later on when he produced the project that the studio , uh, I recorded River Phoenix’s band, I recorded Bo Diddley in the nineties, Less Than Jake, Chris DeMakes is here from that band to talk to us. And he was also part of the band together project, a Sister Hazel in the 1990s, there was a kind of a golden era there in the 1990s when there were several bands that were signed out of Gainesville.
James Di Virgilio:
So let’s talk about this current project today. You’ve worked on a lot of projects. You’ve done a lot of things in your life. COVID-19 hits. The world gets up ended, and you have this idea for Band Together. How did the idea come to you and why did you choose to pursue it?
Bob McPeak:
Well, last summer I decided it was time for me now to really concentrate on my own music. I had such an education in songwriting and production by then in such a wide experience of seeing great people worked on the process and seeing the mistakes that other people made. So I retired from Heartwood and refurbish the studio in my house and set about writing songs. And I was keeping my ears open as I do to just what people say or I’ll hear something on the radio that is a catch phrase . And that’s sort of the nugget that forms the idea for a song. And then eventually slowly, sometimes more quickly, other times the whole thing kind of coalesces and the song takes form in the melody and the chords and the words. This one came together pretty quickly. And I heard a lot of people saying, well, I’ll see you on the other side. And that just seemed like a hopeful phrase. And I was in the mood to have some hope as I think everyone was. So I set about recording and I recorded it and I said, well, you know, that was fun. And there it is, there’s me playing all the guitars and me doing all the vocals. And on the other hand, I know all these amazing musicians that I’ve worked with. Why not see if they’re interested in making a love letter from Gainesville to the community of Gainesville, to the people who are out there, the healthcare workers and the frontline workers who are delivering packages to us or other things that put them in the path of potential exposure in danger. So I put out the word and send it out to, I don’t know, 30, 40, 50 people that I thought might be interested in . I thought would be great contributors in to my delight and surprise. Many, many of them said, yes, this all star cast, which believe me is much better than I would have been able to do on my own. The parts they gave me were so thoughtful or aware that this was going to be one component in a bigger picture and the tracks I got, even though they weren’t necessarily hearing the other players because they’re only working with the little guitar and vocal track that I gave them and they would leave space for other people. So then I had to put all this stuff together and they would send me their digital files and I would drop them onto the track and listen to them and I would go, wow, that is so cool, I would have never thought of anything that brilliant or that would have that kind of texture. So I have Michael Ward Bergman . Who’s just a brilliant accordion player. Who’s collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma and lots of other really amazing musicians. And it’s just a virtuoso of the accordion. Um , my friend David Beatty, who , who helped with the conception and the production of the song plays, there’s a thing called a bowed psaltery , which is this triangular instrument that you play with a horse hair bow, as well as the standard instruments, like an electric guitar. So we end up with Nancy Luca , who I think a lot of people in Gainesville know is a great lead guitar player who is from Gainesville, but now lives in California playing this guitar solo at the emotional peak of the song. And she comes in blazing with this guitar and then throws it to the accordion player. So he ended up going electric guitar to accordion, which violates some kind of rock-n-roll rule somewhere. But that’s my favorite moment. I think on the whole video, it’s just really cool.
James Di Virgilio:
So you put together this project where you have all of these creative artists working together, they send the files to you. You then put that together and you create both a video and an audio track. And then you have this completed project. The , “On the Other Side”, by a group that came together, thus Band Together, how proud were you when it was done?
Bob McPeak:
I think much of the credit goes to the players and the singers. And that includes people that are frankly, above my pay grade. Ken Block from Sister Hazel, Chris DeMakes from Less Than Jake, Ritchie Stanno, who’s off making albums with people like Tony Levin and Omar Hakim. He’s just a really brilliant guitar player. Jacob Lawson, a really fabulous violin player, who by the way, as the violinist on the Cade theme , I’m doing disservice cause I’m not mentioning every one of the 25 musicians, but the people who participated in this are all just fantastic people in wonderful musicians. And so I’m proud that they would have enough respect for me and for the community of Gainesville that they would have chosen to participate in this.
James Di Virgilio:
And one of artists is here with us on the podcast today. Chris DeMakes from Less Than Jake. Chris, tell us about meeting Bob and your early days of Less Than Jake.
Chris DeMakes:
Well, I had heard the name Bob McPeak . My uncle went to UF from 83 to 87 and he had recorded a demo for his college band and Bob was running Mirror Image out of his house at that time. So I remember having the Mirror Image cassette and it said recorded by Bob McPeak and I get to Gainesville in 91 to go to college, attend UF and would have been about four years later, we went to record our first record Pez Cor in 1995 and lo and behold, we get to the studio and there’s the man, the myth, the legend himself, Bob McPeak . And he engineered in essentially produce that first record, cause we certainly didn’t know what the hell we were doing.
James Di Virgilio:
Yeah, what’s it like to produce your first record? Take us back there for a second and put yourself back in that 1995 mindset you’re breaking into the scene. You’re going to record a record. What did you know about recording a record? What were your thoughts or ideas?
Chris DeMakes:
I mean, it was kind of like when you see TV shows and they’re recording a band, it’s, everyone’s set up in one room, the singer doesn’t even have a mic stand he’s just singing into a microphone and there’s an engineer in the other room recording the band and that’s how everyone thinks you record, right? So we get in the studio and we’re thinking, Oh, this is going to be like a live show, put up some mics . And someone’s going to record us in the other room and magically, we’re going to have a recording and we were green. We didn’t know anything. So we get in there. And the only direction that we had were people like Bob them we’d recorded prior to Bob, the terms of a pro studio, Mirror Image was the first setting of that nature that we were ever in. So it was great. It was exciting. We were young, stupid and crazy. Bob can attest, I mean, we were for lack of a better word, we called ourselves punk rockers, the blue hair and the tattoos and the drinking and doing other things that you do in Gainesville and being young and silly. And Bob had to put up with our crap.
James Di Virgilio:
And what did it feel like? Or what was it like when your first album comes out and all of the sudden Less Than Jake becomes a name people know.
Chris DeMakes:
It was incredible. I mean, I remember being in Mirror Image in the main room and Bob throwing up a rough mix of the first track on our record, it was called “Liquor Store” and it was written about Gator Beverage in Gainesville. And I was blown away because I finally heard ourselves, albeit we were still very raw and still learning our instruments and learning how to sing. And this is before pro tools. We were cutting everything to tape, but I remember hearing it back and I felt I’m like, wow, there’s something here. It was put together better and sonically, it sounded better than our previous recordings. And it wasn’t very long after that Rock104 had a locals only radio show. It might’ve just been called locals only or something like that. And I was pulling out of park 16th, which is no longer there anymore. It was apartment complex where I live for years down on 16th and 13th, by Steak and Shake and I was got in my car and I was pulling out of the complex and turn Rock104 on and there , the song came on. It was the first time I ever heard us on the radio. Like total mind blown, like a month prior. I heard the rough mix, the Vader’s go up at Mirror Image that Bob did and a month or two later, I’m driving in my car and I hear it on the radio. And it was just like for a 20 year old kid, I, at that point I had made it. I could have quit at that point. For real. I felt like I made it like I’m on the radio. Are you kidding me? It was awesome.
James Di Virgilio:
Yeah. That just seemed so incredible. Actually hearing you tell the story is great. I can feel the scene and how that must feel to get that notoriety and all of a sudden, like the fruits of all your labor, right? All your love, all your creativity gets played and then people can hear it. And I’m sure your friends thought that was probably the greatest thing ever, right?
Chris DeMakes:
Yeah. Our friends that loved us and then there’s backlash. Cause it was like, you got played on Rock104 because we came from this punk rock thing where like, you couldn’t be on the radio. You were a sellout and all this other nonsense that I never bought into. But it was funny because you gotta remember back in 95, there was no satellite radio. There was no internet. If you got played on the radio, like it was a big deal. If you got on, that was a huge deal. Those were your two outlets to get known besides print, promotion, magazines and such. So, and it was “Liquor Store” was that same song. I was speaking of hearing that on the radio, as I was pulling out of the car , I just, I lost my mind. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. And it was from that moment that things really started to snowball with us. We had a record that sonically sounded good, more so than sonically sounded good. There was an energy captured and that’s Testament to Bob. Because again, we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. We just went in and we had this raw unbridled energy, kinetic, and crazy, frenetic. And we would go out and play these shows. And we were playing outside of Florida now and people were showing up and going crazy. And somehow Bob was able to harness that energy and we put Pezcore out the fans absolutely ate it up and loved it.
James Di Virgilio:
That’s an amazing story of early, early success. I love origin stories, whether it’s a movie or real life and yours is certainly great, especially being from Gainesville. So let’s fast forward to now, how did you get involved in Band Together? And what was your side of the technology like? This is a project that requires, as you just mentioned, right? Modern use of technology versus the mid nineties where you had to be someplace physically to do anything.
Chris DeMakes:
Oh yeah. This was 95. Bob would still be waiting for the first person to write them back. Snail mail in this project would have taken 10 years. It’s absolutely amazing what you’re able to do these days from your own remote location and studios . So Bob had contacted me pre-Coronavirus and all this stuff. He wanted to collaborate on some stuff. I think he’s trying to put together a solo record and Bob and I’ve always kept in touch over the years, but I said, sure, I’d love, love to write with you. And he sent me a couple of pieces of things. And then he hit me up and mentioned this project and asked if I would be a part of it. And I told him , absolutely I’m all in. And then he had sent the track over at some point and it kind of sat in my inbox for maybe a week or two. And then I saw a post online . Bob said, Hey, we’re going to wrap this up. If you haven’t gotten your parts into this, that , and that I had a kind of an Oh crap moment. And I was over in North Carolina visiting my mom and dad and I called Bob and I said, Bob, I don’t want you to think I’m not into this. I want to do it . I want to do. And he says, Oh, okay, well, here’s the lines I want you to sing. And I got home the next day and I tracked it in my home studio. I have a studio. I work in logic pro. So yeah, I sang my lines that Bob wanted me to sing and send it back to him. And then Bob said, I want you to do a video. I said, okay, I can do that. But I haven’t had a haircut in like three months. I looked terrible. So I’m gonna wear a hat in the video. I think I’m the only person with a hat. So , uh, did did the video. And I think the thing came out great.
James Di Virgilio:
That’s really a fascinating tale of what can be accomplished really not a long time ago, right? 25 years ago, you come onto the scene and then today you’re able to record something by yourself, in a home studio, with the equipment, sync it up to others and get this fascinating results . Chris, thanks so much for taking some time to join your part of Band Together, as well as tell your story. It’s obviously great to have you as a contributor to a project such as this. And we look forward to seeing what happens in the future as it certainly seems like there’s a reason to believe that projects like these would continue even in a post-Covid world.
Chris DeMakes:
Yeah, I think so. I think that this is kind of really, it’s done a number on a lot of people. I know I’ve gotten a lot of projects and different things done. It’s made me look within and figure out other things to do while I have downtime from being on the road cause our band is still touring act that’s out there six, seven, eight months out of the year so, I think these projects you’ll be seeing these for a long time to come.
James Di Virgilio:
So let’s introduce Rob Rothschild now who played drums and percussion on the Band Together track recorded some of the vocalists and edited the video together. So you’ve done a lot on this project. Rob, tell us a little bit about your history. Are you from Gainesville? Are you full time musician? What’s the background? What brought you to where you are today?
Rob Rothschild:
Well, it’s a long and sorted tale. My career in this world began as the guy in all the bands that I played with who could not only carry the gear, but who could figure out how to use it. And that soon led me into the recording business. And when I lived in New York city back in the seventies at the height of the punk rock movement, I worked at Do Art Film Labs in the sound department. And I got introduced to the whole motion picture sound world. And I did just about everything you could do in the post production world for audio, for films. And I also got involved in the shooting, some of the punk rock bands back then. So I got to shoot video and record Divo and , and Debbie Harry and deepen the scene. So it was really quite a baptism for me, but I got the Gainesville in the early eighties and I met Bob pretty early on. And since then, I’ve just , just been a joy for me to work with him on a variety of different projects, including back in the day when Mirror Images was in his house, as Chris was talking about. And just whenever I get a chance to work with Bob, it’s a joy and I’m just really privileged to do that. And so when he called me about this project “On the Other Side” and said, you know, he’s going to put together a variety of musicians to play the song I was all in.
James Di Virgilio:
Now , Rob, in the eighties, you mentioned coming to Gainesville. So what was the technological scene music wise like in Gainesville, in the 1980s?
Rob Rothschild:
Well, for live sound, people were carting around these giant speakers and these heavy mixing boards. And for recording, there was just a few studios in town and the main one was Mirror Image Studios, Bob’s studio. And I was a little bit less involved in the recording business back then, I was still doing some field recording for motion picture stuff, but you know, it was primitive back in the day there you had tape and razorblades and you had to worry about all kinds of things that were mechanical rather than digital wasn’t even invented them practically. And of course now, if nobody has a piece of tape anywhere.
James Di Virgilio:
Do you view those days as the romantic days, there was a quality of them that you don’t have today or is today’s environment much better?
Rob Rothschild:
Well, I’ve done a lot of recording back in the early days with just tape and a couple of tape recorders. And you know, that’s how the Beatles did it. They just had a four track machine for a lot of what they did. And so there’s something to be said for the spontaneity and fearlessness that’s required when you have very limited tools or painter with a limited pallet has to get creative and a band with a limited set of tools has to get creative. So I think that there was some really magic moments created based on that need. But now we have unlimited technical resources just about, I mean, if you can think of it, you can do it. Bob’s famous for fixing everyone’s performances. Now, we didn’t have that back in the day. You got to play until you got it right. And now I don’t think we’re losing any creativity, but we certainly can be much more methodical now. And we can fix things that we did that we couldn’t have fixed back in the day. So if you played your part now you could come back two months later and go, you know, I’m going to tweak one little thing and that would have been almost impossible back when there was tape and razorblades.
James Di Virgilio:
That’s a really interesting thought in my mind actually goes to being a kid playing Nintendo, you couldn’t save your game, playing Nintendo. You had to beat the entire game in one take, or you were sort of dead and nowadays, right? You have like a million saved points in a way, that’s kind of what you’re saying is we have all these technological abilities to fix alter, edit change, get the perfect sound. It’s that’s interesting. It forces a different take. So with this Band Together project, what was the goal? The idea gets created. What is trying to be accomplished with a project such as this at a time, such as this?
Rob Rothschild:
Well, initially we want it to be able to put something out that would give people a moment of respite and joy in a pretty tough time period. And our challenge was to do that in a way that was shareable everywhere. So we had to have video. And on my end, what I had to do is take all this contributed video and turn it into something that would tell the story of how hard it is and how hard it can be to be a frontline worker and how much joy we can as musicians, how much we can share. And that should be our mission. That’s what we do. We want to make people feel better.
James Di Virgilio:
So you bring together 25 great musicians. You make a video, you want people to feel better. How do you get it out to them? What was the primary way to get people to see this or hear this or view this?
Rob Rothschild:
Well, we connected with someone in town who has a channel, a video channel that’s called Music GMV and decided to post the video on their YouTube channel because they already have a bit of a following. And their mission was to share Gainesville based music, but the real way to do it in this day and age. And I remember Chris mentioned there was no internet back when his band had to do things. Uh, we just hoped that everyone would share it on Facebook in a big way, Instagram too. And that’s how one goes Pardon the pun viral these days is to have people like and share your work. So it’s very decentralized.
James Di Virgilio:
And how has the response been? How successful was the social media share with a friend vitality ?
Rob Rothschild:
Well, for a little effort that we put out here, I think we’re getting close to 12,000 views on YouTube. So that’s a metric that we like to look at, but really the real measure is what people have said to us and how they’ve expressed themselves after they’ve seen it. Some people said it brought them to tears and some people said that this changed their outlook for a moment in a dark time. And those are the real that we love to Read. We’re not trying to measure the smiles. We just would like to make some smiles.
James Di Virgilio:
Yeah. I was thinking in my mind that views shouldn’t be the main metric in this situation, if you’re trying to bring about healing and restoration, the goal really is feedback and have people taking what you want from this and I’m sure that all of you feel really good about having people say, Hey, this really was a restorative thing for me. You know, it felt good. It brought joy to my life. Obviously I think we, as humans are realizing, there’s so many things in our lives that maybe we took for granted that mean a lot to us and certainly music has tremendous healing power and community power. And then those that can produce it are going to be able to bring that to us. Whether it’s been online concerts or viewings or a variety of other things that are there. And so certainly hats off to you and others who are creative, take your time and put these things together to give people these responses. Have there been any responses in general you can recall that have just really sort of taken you over the edge, just have really moved you?
Rob Rothschild:
Sure. Several things have been written that really tugged at my heart strings. And they were usually about how we transformed a moment for someone who was really feeling bad or brought them to tears, or they said this was an amazing experience. And I’ll tell you that you can imagine that I have watched this video probably more than anyone in the world, because how many times did I have to look at it to edit it, but I still go back and play it. And it still gets me not because the video is so great, but because the feeling of all the musicians, the music, the song that Bob wrote is just so fantastic and so beautiful. And everyone’s contribution is so heartfelt that it just works. And that’s a rare piece of business to encounter when you’re not in a live performance, but you’re watching a video of us. And so I’m pretty proud of that.
James Di Virgilio:
And it’s just a wonderful thing. I think Bob and Rob, I’m sure you’d both echo this. When you reach a point in your lives where you can do something like this to give back when you’re in a position to be a giver for those that need to receive something, as we’ve all been on both sides. And then this project “On the Other Side” by Band Together is something we’re finally going to play here on the podcast. We spent an entire podcast talking about it, but it’s also in video format. Where can we find this on video?
Rob Rothschild:
Probably the easiest way to do it would be to get on YouTube and type in either “On the Other Side” or music GNV in the search box for YouTube music GNV, that’s the channel we’re on. And you’ll see that video pop up right away and let’s hop in and take a listen now. And then afterwards, hopefully watch the video as well.
Music Intro:
[ Instruments ]
“On the Other Side” by Band Together Lyrics:
“The mornings are much darker since the clocks were set ahead The dawn is lost to shadow and I should be home in bed. But I wander through this quiet world, adrift in isolation Looking for a ray of hope in a desperate situation But I’ll be waiting with both arms open wide We’ll be stronger, grateful we survived When our mettle has been tested and our tolerances tried I’ll see you on the other side You went to war without a shield, the generals left you there The first line of defenders, disarmed and unprepared And you rush through busy, crowded wards with poison in the hallways And risk your life while we pretend that life’s the same as always We’ll all be waiting with both arms open wide You’ll be stronger, grateful to survive Let’s put aside our anger, reach across the great divide I’ll see you on the other side, I’ll see you on the other side Will we recognize each other behind the mask, beneath the glove? If we can’t hold one another, can we still hold on to love? For all the lives we sacrificed at the altar to our pride I’ll see you on the other side.”
James Di Virgilio:
And that’s “On the Other Side” by Band Together. And that’s the song written by Bob McPeak produced by Bob, Rob Rothschild , David Beatty, and featuring the talents of 25 of Gainesville’s finest musicians. Thank you so much for being on Radio Cade today.
Bob McPeak:
Thank you, James.
James Di Virgilio:
We certainly enjoyed getting a chance to hear your story and hear this collaboration. For Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio.
Outro:
Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. This podcast episodes’ host was James Di Virgilio and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage, and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed a Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.