AN INTERVIEW WITH CORRECTIVE MEASURE

2-20-26

1. Thanks for agreeing to do this interview! I’m always stoked to see Mainers making waves and you guys are doing it! I feel like the last year-plus has been huge for you guys and I definitely would like you to walk us through it, but before I put the cart before the horse, would you please introduce yourself, what you do in the band, where you’re from in our lovely state, and just give some general context about the band’s formation?

Hey Jacob! Really appreciate you reaching out. We love any opportunity to chat about Maine Hardcore and all the cool things going on here. My name’s Braden and I do vocals in Corrective Measure. Originally from Brewer which is where CM started a decade ago, but living in Westbrook now. The beginning of CM can sort of be traced back to when I was like 16 and first started going to shows and playing music. Three fourths of the original CM lineup (Ryan, Christian and myself) have been playing music together since way back then in one form or another, which at this point is about half of our lives. Sometime in 2014 or 2015 our drummer Adam entered the mix and he’s a brother for life too. The official formation of CM was in 2015 when our other band with the same exact members switched up instruments and threw a new name on it. Pretty boring origin story, but incredibly meaningful that it can be traced back to my earliest memories of hardcore with my closest friends. There’s not a bad way to start a band, and all the respect in the world to the people hanging fliers looking for this instrument or that band member or doing whatever it takes to rock, but I’ll always feel very fortunate that this form of self expression came so naturally at a young age and is something I’ve always been able to share with my best friends. 

2. How did you get into hardcore in the first place and what drove you to play it?

I’ll probably give more details here than necessary, but I think my answer to this question is such a strangely Maine answer (could be wrong), and also it’s something I haven’t thought about in a while so it’ll be fun to reflect on it. 

I’m sure a lot of people in my generation can relate to this, but I first found hardcore music mostly through Myspace before I was old enough for my parents to let me go to shows. I remember in 6th or 7th grade seeing Kave fliers posted on Myspace, pictures of my friends’ older siblings wearing hardcore shirts. And so that created this strange but (if you’re from Maine, you’ll get it) very fitting foundation of hardcore music - Have Heart because they were everywhere, Bury Your Dead because of my exposure to Kave fliers, and Righteous Jams because I was lucky enough to have a good friend who stole his older brother’s RJ shirt and wore it to school in the 7th grade. Thinking back to that friend running down our middle school hallway showing people what a “two step” was and yelling “INVASION USED TO BE THIS BAND BUT NOW WE’RE PLAYING RIGHTEOUS JAMS”, and knowing that hardcore was just a flash in the pan for that person is so funny to me. The reach that good hardcore music had back then in the mid-2000s was unreal. Like the kids who snowmobiled to school and kept guns in their trucks so they wouldn’t miss the last moments of daylight for hunting after school were truly repping Righteous Jams and Have Heart. No amount of viral Instagram or TikTok videos will ever replicate that era in my opinion.

In 8th grade I started going to a church youth group that a bunch of punks had sort of taken over, because they had a halfpipe in the church gym and we all quickly discovered that if you got the youth leader like 3 sodas deep he’d just skip the Bible study at the end. There was a local band called Take Courage that’d show up to the youth group and just rip a set. Actual lyric from that band: “Let’s go kill some deer, Welcome to Maine!”. It was such a lawless, chaotic time because you had all these rural kids who wanted to participate in the hardcore scene without abandoning all the experiences, interests, characteristics, beliefs, etc. that had led them there. And most of them came and went, but I think it was pretty cool to experience that moment and it definitely helped teach me that hardcore can help you change for the better, but it shouldn’t make you change to fit in.

Anyway, that was my experience. By the time I started going to shows in high school I’d been listening to hardcore music for a few years and had learned a little guitar. So trying to play music was a no-brainer. 

3. Take us up to—but not through—2025. It was a bit of some Sheryl Crow with the band—a winding road that is—as I understand it.

CM started in 2015 and was our first band to really get some opportunities outside of Maine. Up until then, we didn’t have a ton of contacts and the Maine hardcore scene could feel a bit isolated from the rest of the hardcore world, but I’d just moved back from living in DC for a bit and so that helped us get some shows outside of Maine and get a little momentum after putting out our demo. I was also just an absolute punisher back then, sometimes I’ll look back at my emails from 2015 and laugh at the absurdity in which I tried to get people to listen to that demo. CM was also the first band that I wrote music for and kinda felt excited to go out and share. Not because it was better than previous bands, but I’m just a really below average musician so my role in other bands was kinda just pedalling bass or ringing out the guitar and so I finally felt like I was carrying some weight and that was a cool feeling.

We got to play some really cool shows between 2015 and 2017… Not Dead Yet Fest in Toronto, Edge Day in Boston, an East Coast US Tour with Life of Reilly that had a ton of awesome shows. Atomic Action Records out of Rhode Island and Refuse Records out of Berlin both put out our 7”. We said yes to a lot of dumb stuff like driving to DC and back for a single show. Pretty sure our drive to Toronto for NDY Fest was there and back on the same day. But just having those opportunities, the energy to want to say yes to them, and the ability to do it with best friends made it a really special time.

I moved to DC again in 2017 and we decided to call it quits. I ended up moving back in like 2019, but getting CM back together wasn’t really on the radar. In 2017 we’d all lived in the same town, but by 2019 we were all kinda spread out through Maine and New Hampshire. It was actually Courtney from Retract who hit us up a couple years ago asking if we’d consider playing another show that led to everything since then… the 12”, the Europe Tour, etc. So it feels fitting and a bit poetic that we’re able to spend what is likely our last phase as a band playing some really fun shows with Retract.

4. So 2025 into this year is like a match to gasoline—you tour Europe, play with Fiddlehead, drop new music… It’s a lot and I’m sure your heads are spinning a bit! Walk us through each of these major band milestones!

2025 sort of felt like the culmination of everything we’d wanted to accomplish as a band. When we talked about getting back together and writing a new record in 2023/2024, I made the goal of playing a Squashed Warehouse show and touring Europe. It was sort of said in jest, but we did both of those things in 2025. For those who don’t know, Squashed Warehouse is the coolest spot in Maine right now and we’d missed out playing there when we were originally active. Other bands of ours had played there, we’d used it as a practice space, and we’ve known Vic (who runs it) for almost a decade at that point, but up until 2025 we hadn’t managed to play a show there. So that was a special one for us. The Europe tour was just a fever dream of incredible people, experiences, shows, food. Robert from Refuse Records set us up with one of the best weeks of our lives and that’s something we’ll be forever grateful for. It’s one of those things where I wish I’d documented it better… journaled, taken more pictures, that kind of thing. But I’m also happy that I sort of just unplugged and experienced the moments. But the pressure to not forget is real. Those are some of the memories that you want to keep front and center forever. And then getting to come home and attend the Eyestone Fest North and play with my good friends in Free To Think for such a good cause, then the Fiddlehead show in December. It was a cool way to end the year. We sort of rushed getting out some new music, but it was important to us to have some tapes to sell at Eyestone Fest South and it felt appropriate to package that release up with all the cool things we got to experience in 2025.

5. 2026 has already been a banger (by the way, if you’re reading this and you’re not from Maine, that’s not how you pronounce Bangor—we say it like the Welsh do, properly!) with Eyestone Fest South and your run of shows with Retract (you can read my interview with vocalist Courtney here) on your “hardcore spring break” in Florida. First, tell us about Eyestone Fest South.

Yeah, man. Eyestone Fest South was a beautiful encapsulation of what makes hardcore music so important. To be able to celebrate Ryan that way on his birthday was really special. What that show meant to everyone was completely out of our collective control and not something that could ever be replicated, because it was built on the shoulders of Ryan’s kindness, art, inspiration, all the positives that he poured into the world while he was with us. So at the end of the day it’s just an honor to have played a small part in it. 

6. And how did the run of shows go in Florida?

Florida was a blast. All three shows were great but I was blown away by Orlando’s scene. So many people, lots of young bands, very cool. The whole weekend was a bit of a wild ride, two of us couldn’t make it down, and our drummer Adam also plays in Retract so it made sense for him to roll with them. So it was basically just me and Pat (guitar) traveling down and kinda just popping up at the shows to play. We got to rock three gigs with our original bassist, Ryan, who now lives down in Florida and that was really special. Also having the privilege of seeing Retract get the responses they deserve, getting to hang with them all and getting to know them better, and ending the weekend all hanging in Tampa was very chill. I feel like I always leave stuff like that without much thought, thinking “can’t wait for the next one”, but eventually there won’t be a next one. 

7. What’s on the docket for the rest of 2026?

I think 2026 is looking like a very chill year for CM. Probably just playing local shows as they come up. I think our only announced show is March 10 with Prize Horse in Portland. We’ve got a couple others lined up in the spring/summer I believe. We tend to write music in quick bursts instead of being in a constant state of writing, so who knows? Maybe some new music by the end of the year!

8. I was very fortunate in that growing up outside of Portland, when I got into hardcore, there were these flag-bearing Maine bands making massive waves in the scene like Wake Up Call, Outbreak, and Cruel Hand. Funnily enough, many years ago when I first got into Cruel Hand I didn’t know what they looked like, only knew the music, and I was wearing that Cruel Hand t-shirt with the deer head on it at the gym and this guy kept looking at me a little strangely, and I was thinking what’s his deal? Then after a bit he came up to me smiling and observed that I liked Cruel Hand and I smiled and was like “hell yeah” and he goes “I’m their drummer” haha! I used to chat with Jeremy from time to time when I’d see him there about lifting and hardcore, and I remember picking his brain a bit when Lock & Key came out because I was doing a review of it for this (now-defunct) site called Decoy Music. I observed that the drumming style was way different on that record and he told me, “Oh yeah, Nate and I switched instruments for it.” Ages ago, I doubt he remembers it, but it was so cool this guy from this band I was—and am—a massive fan of was so chill and friendly.

Another good one came in I want to say 2016 or 2017, I know Your World Won’t Listen was out for sure because I was cranking “King” and “Liquid Paper” a bunch, but anyway I was in Sofia, Bulgaria visiting my friend and we went to Sofia Hardcore Tattoos to get some ink done and in talking to the tattoo artists it came out that they often put touring bands up there and they had heard of Maine because when playing in Bulgaria Cruel Hand had stayed with them or maybe it was with people they knew I can't quite remember, but that was wild!

Are there any such small world experiences you’ve had as a part of the hardcore scene?

Jeremy is the best, dude loves his Cumby’s banana bread. And for sure! One of my favorite things about hardcore is the connections and mutual friends all around the world. The ultimate “small world experience” for us as a band was definitely getting to cover a Wake Up Call song in Austria with Bill on the mic. The world felt infinitely small in that moment, you could convince me nothing else was happening in the world outside that room. For us having grown up on that music and getting to experience that so far from home was very surreal. Another favorite is just the legacy of the Kave and hearing stories and memories from people from all around who’ve been there, played there, or even just heard about it. 

9. So I’ve named the big Maine bands from my “hardcore graduating class,” but who should readers also be familiar with both in Maine hardcore and beyond?

Yeah, this is a good question that I think I give really similar answers each time I’m asked. It’s either the big bands that we can all agree shaped Maine Hardcore (Wake Up Call, Outbreak, Cruel Hand, DNA), or a long list of all the sick current Maine bands with the risk of leaving someone off accidentally. But I’ve been feeling pretty nostalgic for a specific era of Maine Hardcore, all the local bands that played the Kave in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s. So I’ll switch this answer up. There were so many different sounding bands, almost all made up of high schoolers and super young kids, and from the outside it probably looked like a super survivalist hardcore/punk scene just trying to scrape by, but if you went to those shows back then you saw something entirely different. Kids piling up on stage, singing along, less worried about the genres or sub-genres and just having a good time in a safe space. One particular song I’ll shout out is Welcome Home by We Are The Vulture. A lot of people from the era went in many different directions, but I think everyone who was involved would agree that having that moment of togetherness was pivotal in wherever we ended up, musically or otherwise. Shoutout Kathy Kave for giving us that. CM definitely would not exist without it.

10. Last question, a fun one I often like to close with: if you were stranded on a desert island by yourself and could only have five albums with you to listen to, what would they be?

White Lies - Big TV

Dinosaur Jr - Beyond

The Replacements - Pleased to Meet Me

DNTEL - Dumb Luck

Get Up Kids - Four Minute Mile