Words & Photos by Derek Scancarelli
Vinnie Caruana always seems to self-diagnose his ailments. “There’s something wrong with me,” he says, laughing. “I’ve developed a problem with my ears—this is gonna sound even stranger when I connect it to soy sauce.” Waving his chopsticks at a restaurant in Brooklyn, the 36-year-old singer-songwriter explains how a series of troubling chronic symptoms led a fully inked man to carry a constant stock of Coconut Aminos in his pocket. A healthier, albeit less satisfying substitute for the sodium-packed sauce he used to dip his sushi in four times a week. This is just one of the measures he takes to manage what he believes to be Meniere’s Disease.
Before the Movielife and I Am The Avalanche vocalist most recently entered the studio, he knew something was off. He’s usually pretty good with these things, like the time he brought himself to the emergency room and told them to remove his appendix. He can tell when something isn’t right with his body. On a random night, he’d woken up feeling like the flu hit him—his body was fighting something off. Halfway through the next day, he started losing his balance. But it wasn’t until Vinnie Caruana started recording his debut full-length solo record, Survivor’s Guilt—out May 27 via Equal Vision—that he felt he truly triggered the condition.
“I sang, like, half of the record in one night, which is very rare, but I was on a roll,” Caruana says. “I must’ve tweaked my eardrums, because I [was] blasting through the headphones all night.” Following that evening, life became increasingly difficult. Gnarly tinnitus, dizziness, vertigo, and headaches completely threw off his equilibrium, making him wonder how he’d ever be able to finish the record. “I was waking up every morning feeling like shit—walking against the wall in the subway, because I was afraid I’d fall into the tracks because I was so off-balance,” he says.
At first, he thought it was a brain tumor—he tends to get himself worked up when facing stressful situations. After three different doctor visits yielded no results, he tried to keep his cool and take care of it himself. Diving down the Internet rabbit hole, he found support groups and other people experiencing his symptoms. It turns out Ryan Adams took two years off due to the Meniere’s Disease, which increasingly began to look like the musician’s worst nightmare.
“Maybe I didn’t live as much as I could’ve before. Let’s start now.”
Vinnie Caruana has been taking steps to healthier living, but the nature of his condition can’t help but beckon the curiosity: does he do this to himself? While he proudly touts his aptitude for self-diagnosing most any of his health issues, he also ponders whether or not the misery he undergoes is self-induced. “When I started recording this solo record, everything started getting all fucked up with my brain,” he laughs. He recalls a recent conversation with Steve Choi of RX Bandits, who also plays on Survivor’s Guilt and is a member of the side project Peace’d Out. “Dude, what’s wrong with you?” Choi asked Caruana. “You’re torturing yourself!”
Maybe it isn’t by chance that when Caruana hits the studio, bad shit happens. Hell, the guy can’t take a nap without getting into his own head. While recording his solo EP, City by the Sea, in 2013, he somehow destroyed his back. One herniated disc later, his girlfriend became his full-time nurse, helping him do everything for six months while he was couch-ridden and on a steady diet of Percocet. Hundreds of pills later, his body ached from the necessary evil of the medication, which tore apart his stomach in the process. “I don’t fucking know if it’s coincidental,” Caruana says about his current situation. “Maybe I did tweak my brain into being fucked up, because I was hypersensitive about making the record perfect.”
That’s believable. He spent two weeks sleeping on an air mattress next to a drum kit in The Barber Shop Studios, while his producer and I Am The Avalanche cohort, Brett “The Ratt” Romnes, was on a couch next to the control board. His temporary bed rested where an altar used to be, as the space exists in the remains of a cathedral, some stained glass still intact. He wanted to sleep in the studio, not the living quarters close by like I Am The Avalanche did for Wolverines. Total immersion was his goal, and even though he entered the studio completely prepared, he still ended up rewriting a lot of the lyrics. The goal for this record was to dedicate “maximum output and integrity,” he says, and to take his solo work to a different stratosphere sonically, as well as in his songwriting.
The elephant-in-the-room question is obvious: why now? At 36, why did it take so long for him to pour everything into a solo record? “Honestly, I think I’ve been lazy most of my life, I really do,” he says candidly. “I wasted a lot of fucking years.” He’s come to terms with that, but looking back, he’s realized that he wasn’t always doing what he was supposed to. The six year lull between Avalanche records is the biggest regret of his life. For that reason, Survivor’s Guilt holds that much more weight. “I could’ve made my solo full-length debut 10 years ago, but it wouldn’t have been as important or substantial to my life and career as it is right now,” he says.
The man Caruana is now is quite a departure from who he was 10 years ago, when it comes to both lifestyle and love. During his stagnant period, he was bartending in New York City, performing the same old songs, but not really producing anything new. He maintained the guise that he was still part of the scene that developed his identity, but his routine just perpetuated his complacency. He would drink, smoke weed, bartend all night and sleep all day. He missed the daylight. He certainly wasn’t helping his career grow. “I’d ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’” Caruana explains. “The bills were being paid, but life was not happening.”
The album’s opening track, “Burn It Down,” is representative of this period. The subject of the song is tossing too much booze down his throat, numbing himself, and not creating. It’s also about the people who got away, “the ones who grew as human beings while you’re just doing the same old bullshit in the same old setting,” he says.
For a while, Caruana was really angry about the situation. Now, he’s at peace with it. Take “Under My Side of the Bed,” a song he wrote about the fear of returning to love after loss, the way he felt after the split. “No one was ever gonna want to date me; I was divorced in my 20s, I felt like damaged goods,” he says. “By the end of the song, this guy realizes that’s bullshit, because as soon as love happens, it knocks you on your ass again.”
And love again he did: he returned to music and pumped out records like he should’ve all along. He immediately regained his love for England; no relationship could’ve defined that. As for romance, he’s now in a seven year strong relationship, and he’s never been happier. Looking forward, he sees himself getting married again. This time, he hopes to say “I do” in front of friends and family instead of a city hall clerk.
Vinnie Caruana’s rut pouring drinks and the end of his marriage were only the initial factors in the resurgence of his character. He’s slowly but surely started kicking all his bad habits. He no longer smokes the cigarettes he and the Avalanche guys would burn through on tour. Since growing into this new health condition, he’s quit smoking weed too. Sure, he still enjoys a cold beer, but he’s far from self-destructive. Though every time he sips alcohol, it passes through the XXX tattoo on his lip, he is reminded of his earlier lifestyle but not guilted by it. There will always be the little straight edge man inside keeping him in check. Ultimately, in the latter half of his 30s, he’s not concerned with anyone else’s decisions, as they shouldn’t be with his. As he likes to put it, “Nobody else is your God.”
Vinnie Caruana’s newfound sensibility and urgency circle back to his experiences over the past decade. After missing out on all those years, what if something goes wrong and he can longer do what makes him happy? That’s where Survivor’s Guilt snaps into place. Of course, it’s a record about love and regret. It’s miserable, but it’s also optimistic. It’s also inherently fatalistic.
For most of his life, Vinnie Caruana had never lost a loved one. It started to wear on him: the notion that, someday, his luck would run out and he’d be faced with the harsh reality of death. “Nobody I knew died. It was crazy,” he says. “I started getting really stressed out about it, like, fuck, I wasn’t ready for it.” But eventually, people in his life started to pass, as they do in everyone’s life: grandparents, friends, and family. He could understand losing someone to old age, but some were accidents, some were drug related, and many were simply too young. “When young people die, it’s impossible for me to even grasp,” he says, shaking his head. “I have breakdowns about it all the time. Some of them have been on stage.”
Loss tends to make people conscious of their own mortality and Vinnie Caruana is no exception. He’s got the self-awareness to know he still takes most of his days on earth for granted, but he’s trying to change that. His navigation of these new feelings comes in the same old format: writing lyrics. It’s the only therapy he has, and—while they’re not completely full of doom and gloom—they’re his only outlet to wrangle his fears of death and loss. To make the most of his life, however much of it he has left, he hopes to pay homage to the ones he’s lost.
“It’s a blessing to be here,” Caruana says. “I feel like I should avenge the death of everyone that goes before me by living fruitfully, living for real, and being a good man. Maybe I didn’t live as much as I could’ve before. Let’s start now. That’s Survivor’s Guilt.”
