Culture
Captain Chucke & the Cadillac South releases deeply personal ‘Tiny Towns’
By: Emily Votaw
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NELSONVILLE, Ohio (WOUB) – Folk-punk band Captain Chucke & the Cadillac South will release its new album, Tiny Towns, on Friday with a release party during the group’s performance at Nelsonville’s Parade of the Hills. The band will perform on the festival’s library stage from 4 to 5 p.m. Attendees can pick up free copies of the CD during the set.
Fronted by Charles Whaley, who performs as Captain Chucke, the group draws its songs from personal experiences. Whaley created Tiny Towns following several difficult years, and the record explores grief, self-doubt and other personal struggles, including the deaths of his mother and grandmother.
The six-track release opens with “New Song Blues,” which Whaley wrote after an encounter with an attendee at the 2026 Nelsonville Music Festival.
“I got to catch up with an attendee I had met last year,” Whaley said. “One of the things he said stood out to me. He kept talking fast and quiet, and said he had felt shamed by society into not talking about himself or his emotions. I wrote ‘New Song Blues’ thinking of that, with the message to be confident, tell your story and make art.”
While that track grew from an interaction with someone else, Whaley said other parts of the release, particularly “Autistic Weirdo,” more directly reflect his internal experiences as a neurodivergent person.
“Emotional Game” explores a different aspect of Whaley’s internal life, reflecting on regret and the ways emotions can overtake better judgment.
“I don’t mean for this song to glorify wrong behavior or cheating on your partner,” Whaley said. “Our brains are wads of fat with electrical pulses (‘Electrified Meat’) that aren’t always logical, and some of us are working with broken brains, but I know I’m to blame for my side of things when last year, in a vulnerable position after my grandma passed, I caught feelings for a friend who was there for me during a particularly rough point but pushed them down since she had a partner already until one day we were hanging out and she said she had a crush on me too and I let things escalate into an emotional affair. “Emotional Game” is a reflection on that.”
Though the release does not shy away from confronting the difficult circumstances that inspired it, Tiny Towns closes with “It’ll Be Alright,” a song about holding onto optimism during difficult times.
Parade of the Hills takes place in Nelsonville, where Captain Chucke & the Cadillac South will perform on the library stage Aug. 21 from 4 to 5 p.m. Attendees can pick up free copies of Tiny Towns during the set.