Deer Tick’s John McCauley on Going to Rehab, Making New Album

In August 2024, the band Deer Tick were out for an old-fashioned Italian dinner when the band’s founder, John McCauley, began pitching his bandmates on his grand idea for their next album. He envisioned a record based on the group’s shared hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, with every song set around the city, including, perhaps, the very restaurant at which they were dining, the Old Canteen, a mid-century red sauce spot that hosted everyone from Frank Sinatra to Providence’s infamously mob-affiliated mayor Buddy Cianci.

“I remember John specifically saying, ‘This is the assignment,” recalls drummer Dennis Ryan, who was so inspired by the meeting that he went home and immediately finished a song called “507 Smith.” It was a fictionalized account of the time Ryan and McCauley lived together in a ramshackle house at that address. One lyric — “have a fresh picked strawberry” — is taken from a time their disheveled and frequently inebriated roommate greeted Ryan’s mom at the house by offering her some fruit growing in the side yard. “John liked the line about the strawberries,” he says.

“507 Smith” is just one taste of the mix of hyper personal and distinctly fictional Providence-based storytelling on Coin-O-Matic, the album that resulted from McCauley’s writing assignment. Out this Friday, it might be the most accomplished and fully realized record of Deer Tick’s career. The albums represents the foursome — McCauley, Ryan, guitarist Ian O’Neil, bassist Chris Ryan (no relation to Dennis) — taking the reins of their future after suffering a series of challenges over 20-plus years together.

There was a rough tour following the pandemic, and a 2018 stint in rehab for McCauley, which he’s never before discussed. It all forced the band to refocus on its long-term viability and, in short, grow up. The members are all men with families and children now and they set about to find new ways to communicate and conduct intra-band business (including, yes, Slack).

“It’s such a fragile thing,” Chris Ryan says. “There’s no guarantee we can hang onto it, so it’s up to us to do everything we can to make the most of the momentum, the success, and the reputation that we have to keep it going.”

John McCauley’s train is late. He’s decided to take the three-and-a-half hour Amtrak from Providence to New York, talk with Rolling Stone for an hour or so, then hop right back onto a train and head home. “Anything to avoid a Zoom,” says McCauley, who, before we even get to fully discussing the album he’s currently promoting, tells me he’s “had enough screwdrivers on the Amtrak” to reveal the title of what the next Deer Tick record might be. 

“We want to do a party record, recorded in New Orleans, Steve Berlin as producer, and we want to call it A Thousand Beers Later,” he says. “On the cover will be us at an archaeological dig, dusting off all the bottles of beer. I got the whole concept.”

This, McCauley explains, is how pretty much all Deer Tick records have begun since 2014’s Negativity. As Deer Tick’s founder, McCauley has evolved into a role akin to quarterback: He calls the plays and conceptualizes each record by envisioning album artwork and then writing backwards from that. Before he knew what any of the songs on the group’s latest would be, he knew it would be called Coin-O-Matic and that its cover would depict the mid-century tobacco vending-machine business that served as a front (and primary headquarters) for Providence’s Patriarca mob family. Almost as if on cue, McCauley’s cell rings with a call from his local city councilman. He ignores it. “See, I’m getting into the Rhode Island thing!” McCauley says. “Councilman Foley, how you doing!’

In its earliest 2000s iterations, Deer Tick were generally composed of McCauley and whoever he found to play with. But the band’s current four-piece lineup has been in place for a decade, and each member has been in the band for much longer than that. It may have taken 20 years, but McCauley seems prouder than ever to be in a collective with multiple singers and songwriters (all bandmates, apart from Chris Ryan, write and sing). 

Coin-O-Matic represents the full realization of McCauley’s collaborative dream. The record was self-produced by the entire group but helmed largely by Dennis Ryan, who engineered the record and enlisted Chris to help build studio equipment. O’Neil’s songs (“Everything Born,” “Endless Loop”) form an important emotional backbone to the collection. The band has figured out how to flesh out one another’s songs while giving the songwriter who first came up with the idea complete creative control over the composition. It’s a hard-won balance that requires complete trust. 

“When we were younger, we probably had a bigger ego about our individual songs,” O’Neil says. “We were still trying to prove ourselves to each other. When I was younger, I had a feeling of inadequacy when I was trying to write songs along with the main songwriter in the band.”

Years ago, long before their Italian feast at the Old Canteen, McCauley pitched the quartet on a concept record of songs that sound like they could be on the jukebox in a Seventies Mafia movie. Coin-O-Matic is not that, but it is a story about a city the four Providence natives worked on together for years. “ACI,” McCauley’s semi-fictional heartland rocker about a man locked up in Rhode Island state prison, started as a goofball soundcheck riff on Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” (McCauley’s father, a former state legislator who went to prison for tax evasion years ago, loved the song. “When my dad heard it, he just started laughing his ass off,” says McCauley). “Dog Years” is inspired by the senior living complex where McCauley’s grandfather lived.

McCauley’s songs in particular chronicle a city that’s largely faded into memory.

“I wanted to write a love letter to the Providence that doesn’t really exist anymore, as complicated and illegal and, at times, violent, as it was, it was still, oddly, a place that I long to be again,” he says. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me why, but it would be nice to be transported back in time and just see it one more time.”

“Everything Born,” meanwhile, by O’Neil, is less about the past city the band no longer recognizes and more a reflection of fatherhood and family, albeit one living in the city’s precious present. 

“This band, we spend a lot of time together, our kids play together,” says O’Neil. “It means a lot to show our children what we’ve been able to accomplish against those odds, and against the slog, against some of the worst years and some of the better years. It’s the proudest thing we’ve ever achieved.”

It was at Deer Tick’s recent  21st birthday hometown show  — with the bandmates’ kids running around backstage — that McCauley realized how far the band had come from its DIY house-show days. “We were kinda wacky,” he says of that time. “People thought they were coming to see a folk band and it’d be me and Dennis. I’d have three amps and Dennis would be playing nothing but 64th notes.”

Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the group developed a reputation as a hard-partying bar band working in the overlapping worlds of the indie-folk, folk-rock, and garage-rock scenes that were all flourishing at the time. Though he says he’s embarrassed by many of his earliest songs, Deer Tick originals like “Ashamed” and “Baltimore Blues” established McCauley as an insightful, deceptively melodic songwriter, while albums like 2011’s Divine Providence established the band as perhaps the only collective in its scene that could sing Lead Belly one song, thrash to Nirvana the next, then chug beers to a song called “Let’s All Go to the Bar.”

The group soon found themselves opening for the Replacements, headlining huge clubs, and becoming regulars on Letterman. The money seemed pretty good, at least for a mid-sized indie band in those final pre-streaming years. For McCauley, those years represent a period in his life where he was, to use his words, “out to lunch.”

“It was very easy in our twenties and thirties to play shows, get fucked up and buy drugs, and just pay people to leave you alone,” he says. “That’s dangerous. You end up with large bills. We’re still kind of in shock with how much money we’ve pissed away and the opportunities we’ve squandered.”

I ask McCauley what years exactly he’s talking about, assuming he’d explain his absentee antics were largely reserved for the band’s earliest days.

“I’d say probably every moment from January 1st, 2010, to probably, I don’t know, mid 2018,” he says, before veering into an element of his personal life that he’s never before discussed on the record. “That’s when I went to rehab. No one knows that, and it’s embarrassing to me, too, because my daughter was born in 2015. I felt like that happening would just really straighten things out in my mind, but it didn’t. And that’s how it works.

“I didn’t go for alcohol, obviously,” he continues, glancing down at the black-and-tan he’s been drinking during the interview. “I went for drugs. And kind of suicidal ideation. I was in a bad place. But I came out, and I stayed sober for a few months before I tried having a beer again. At the time I went in, I was drinking a bottle of brown liquor a day and shitting my pants…. I was really out there for a while.”

None of the other bandmates directly discuss McCauley’s journey with substance use, but it’s clear his wellbeing is part of the context when they talk about being in a much better place together.

“It’s probably pretty typical of musicians going from their early twenties to the late thirties, but at some point you are forced to make a decision which direction you are going to go in,” says O’Neil. “I think all four of us, but most clearly, John, we’ve just made a decision to be healthier people and to make healthier decisions for the band.”

McCauley’s stint in rehab was far from the only obstacles that Deer Tick has faced over the past decade. All of them agree the hardest period in their history came with the tour following 2023’s Emotional Contracts. They experienced what many bands did at the time: a resistance from cash-strapped concertgoers who had gotten used to staying home during the pandemic and also felt fatigued by the rush of post-lockdown touring by all their favorite bands. In other words, the crowds got smaller, and Deer Tick were forced to take a hard look at what’s next.

“We lost a lot of momentum,” says Chris Ryan. “The music industry was a different place. America was a different place. We all grieved, dealt, handled that in our own ways.”

The period forced the group to pare down its expenses. The members took on a more active role in the unsexy affairs of running the small business of Deer Tick Inc., and started having weekly in-person meetings in Providence (sometimes at Patrick’s Pub) to discuss anything from who their touring keyboardist should be to what their next record should sound like. They also experimented with using Slack as a means to communicate with one another about professional matters, fully stripping away the romance of being in a rock & roll band in 2026. (Dennis Ryan says Slack frees up the band’s group text chat for what it exclusively should be used for: jokes and memes.)

In an era where it’s never been harder to make a long-term adult living as an independent musician, no matter your level of perceived success (even Jeff Tweedy has a Substack, Chris Ryan points out), Deer Tick no longer take their existence for granted. 

“Once you get to be 38 years old and still playing rock music 100 days of the year across the country or the world, you notice how lucky you are, much more than when you’re young,” O’Neil says. “And you want to take care of it.”

Before John McCauley catches his train back to Providence, he wants to share one more reflection from the band’s birthday show. 

“I felt the totality of it,” he says of that night. “When you’re a working musician, there are times when I’m like, “How the fuck am I going to pay this tax bill?’ Sometimes you wonder, ‘Is this worth it?’ I’m not rich and famous, I’m doing fine, but I could be doing better if I wasn’t doing music. But in that moment, I was like, ‘You know what, I did make the right decision.’”