After singer’s death, Santa Cruz’s The Bad Light emerges from the darkness as Audio 37

When tragedy strikes, it usually takes people in one of two directions. 

One is to let it consume them, dragging them down to a point where they are a shell of who they once were. The other is to take the tragedy and transform it. To pick up the pieces, reassemble them and move forward, changed but not broken. This is often the path of the artist: to express themselves through tragedy and use their medium as a form of catharsis to understand, explain and let others know they aren’t alone in a world of heartbreak. 

This is exactly what local blues sludge metal band The Bad Light did in 2022 when they released their final album, “Goodbye,” shortly after the death of the band’s singer, Celeste Deruisa, from cancer. The Bad Light dissolved in 2023 but the remaining members have reemerged — along with a new member — as Audio 37 and they will play their first show on Sunday, Sept. 28, at the second annual Cedar Street Festival in downtown Santa Cruz. 

Consisting of singer and guitar player Edu Cerro, drummer Dana Shepard and vocalist Deruisa, The Bad Light was formed in 2009 by Cerro and original drummer Nathan Gonzalez as a duo. They added singer Emily Pegoda to create another layer of sound to counteract the heavy richness and Cerro’s gravely voice with soulful vocals. 

When Gonzalez departed the band in 2014, Cerro posted an ad to Craigslist. As the fates would have it, Shepard had also posted a very similar ad looking for a band. 

“And I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this guy’s reading my mail,’” Shepard says with a laugh. Two days later he brought his drums to Cerro’s house — with his signature, almost comically massive kick drum — and that’s where they’ve lived ever since. 

Cerro originally met Deruisa when she was still performing with her old band, local Northern soul act The Inciters. They hit it off and would occasionally talk when they saw each other at shows, bars or through mutual friends in the scene. In 2016, Pegoda told the band she was moving out of Santa Cruz, but continued performing with The Bad Light while they searched for her replacement.

Once again, Cerro took to Craigslist in search of a new vocalist. 

“We tried a few different people, which were fine, but the puzzle piece didn’t quite fit,” says Shepard. “But Celeste picked it up so quickly, it was a natural thing.” 

Deruisa joined Cerro, Shepard and Pegoda on their 2016 Northwest tour with fellow Santa Cruz-turned-Los Angeles psych rockers Mountain Tamer. They played as a four-piece for several dates until they reached Portland, Oregon, where Pegoda said her goodbyes and Deruisa stayed. 

Between 2016 and 2019 the trio of Deruisa, Shepard and Cerro played shows around the Bay Area, toured the Pacific Northwest, and recorded “The Bad Tuna” split EP with Italian band Tuna de Tierra. 

The making of “Goodbye,” however, would become the band’s silent ending — and Audio 37’s birth from the ashes. 

Released in 2022, “Goodbye” was brought into a changed world fresh off the heels of the pandemic. Locally, Santa Cruz County and the Central Coast were also still recovering from the CZU Lightning Complex fires. 

But for The Bad Light that year also hit with a more personal tragedy when Deruisa lost her battle with cervical cancer shortly after being evacuated from her mountain home due to the fires. She was only 29. 

“I don’t think it was the intention for that to be the last album going into it,” says singer Chloë Menkes, who joined the band in 2019 with Deruisa’s blessing when she needed to step back after her diagnosis. 

Cerro agrees, saying Deruisa and the band all believed she was going to make the album with them. 

“Especially since she was better at the beginning of 2020,” he says. “They had done the first round of chemo and things looked good. She felt good. So we expected her to bounce back.” 

For the band, the album was a cathartic way to deal with the immense grief and emptiness left behind after Deruisa’s passing. For Shepard, making the album became a lesson in healing. 

“The name ‘Goodbye’ has nothing to do with it being the last album. It’s about [saying] goodbye to Celeste,” Cerro says. “I’m not a ‘goodbye’ person, I’m more of a ‘see you later’ person because goodbye seems so final. But having the realization one of the last times I saw Celeste that things were not looking good and it was going to be a goodbye was such a punch to the soul.” 

The album itself is somber and hauntingly beautiful in its sadness. While the band’s previous works sway between dark ballads and foot-stomping, head-banging celebrations, “Goodbye” feels like it was recorded in another realm. A timeless plane between realities. 

Part of that has to do with the album being mainly built around two songs that Deruisa wrote, “I Walked Right In” and “Scars.” They’re both phone recordings she made and sent to Cerro before her death, so there was no question for the band about putting them on the album.

The latter of the two, “Scars” is the second-to-last track on the album. It’s a raw and visceral song, Deruisa singing and playing acoustic guitar, with the opening line, “Oh what have you done/with all the years that’ve come and gone/bones bleached white by the sun/show you what’s to come.” She goes on to sing, “Life is hard sometimes/but when it scars/you know it gets better.” 

The band originally thought about ending the album with it, but decided it was “too brutal,” and wrote “Eva,” a call-and-response track to “Scars.” 

The band members say they view the album as a whole story based around Deruisa’s tracks. For Shepard, that’s the exact reason why he finds it hard to listen to even today. Skip a track, take away a chapter, and the entire point will be missed. 

After Deruisa’s death, The Bad Light tried to carry on. They played four shows in 2023, three of them in Santa Cruz, including an acoustic show at Redwood Records. However, it was their last show that was the most fitting for the end of the band, even if it wasn’t at home, or even on the West Coast. 

In October 2023, The Bad Light was invited to perform on the podcast “Ghost Stories.” Based out of New York and hosted by Sashka Rothchild and Victoria Sterkin, its primary focus is on grief, resilience and how to survive and move forward when facing the death of loved ones. The band — joined by Hiram Coffee, Menkes’ husband and another prominent local musician — flew to New York, where they performed on the podcast to a live audience inside Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. 

For the band, the cemetery was the only setting that seemed appropriate. The performance also just so happened to be near Día de Los Muertos and the cathedral contained an ofrenda that Deruisa would have loved. 

“It felt extremely poignant to do it in this beautiful cathedral,” says Menkes. “In the most beautiful cemetery I’ve ever been in.” 

Surrounded by candlelight inside Green-Wood’s historic chapel, the band gave anecdotes and discussed the meaning of each track in between songs. 

“We didn’t even attempt to play ‘Scars,’” Cerro says. “We just played her version and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” 

Recorded for audio and video, the episode still has not been released for several reasons — including an issue with the recording itself — but the band remains hopeful it will become publicly available in the future. 

It was after that performance the band decided it was time to let The Bad Light end. They had done their duty to their friend and allowed themselves to express and release some of their grief. Besides, by that time the magic was all but a memory.

“It wasn’t fun,” says Cerro. “The motto’s always been ‘If it’s not for fun, then it’s not worth f–king doing.’ Playing those songs over and over just felt like ripping your heart out every time.” 

Enter Audio 37. 

While they announced the new project only earlier this year, the band was forming even while The Bad Light was dimming. Between 2023 and 2024, Cerro and Shepard were already working on Audio 37 tracks, seeing what worked and what didn’t. 

Adding to the band’s extra layer of sound is bassist Davey Ketchum. 

A longtime friend of Cerro’s, Ketchum is a seasoned musician who has played around the world in a plethora of groups, including Monterey’s Darktown Rounders and Western swing rocker Wayne “The Train” Hancock’s band. Normally he plays upright bass, but Ketchum says he is using Audio 37 as a “way to learn more.” 

“For me, this has been one of the funnest bands I’ve been in,” he says. “There’s nobody saying, ‘You have to play it this way.’ I can do what I want.”

After practicing with Ketchum and getting him up to speed with what they were doing, Menkes was brought back in on vocals, solidifying Audio 37. 

Cerro says they wanted Audio 37 to be something very different from what The Bad Light had been doing. By combining psych rock, punk, country and straight up rock ‘n’ roll, Audio 37 embraces a new, expansive sound. The idea was to move the band as far forward as they could. 

“I think it’s an important thing for an artist in general to give yourself permission to throw away your whole past and start over from scratch,” Cerro says. “Yeah, you invested all this time into something. But when you’re stuck and not moving forward anymore, sometimes you just have to let all that s–t go and start over. Whatever that means.” 

And what better way to debut a new project than at the upcoming Cedar Street Festival? Thrown by Redwood Records’ Rudy Kuhn and Tyler Davin-Moore, this year’s fest will be twice the size of last year’s and feature local artists, vendors, record-sellers, food and, of course, music. 

Kuhn says they chose Audio 37 because he and Davin-Moore were fans of The Bad Light and were excited to hear what the new project had to bring to the scene. 

“[The Bad Light] played the store a few years ago so we wanted to include them this year,” he says. “This town is a great place where heavy, sludgy blues music can survive, and their music fills that lane really well for me. It’s blues music but they put a harder edge on it without getting too abrasive. It’s approachable, but heavy.” 

Audio 37 takes this theme as the guiding compass but expands their map of sound with outside influences. On their track “Maria,” Audio 37 channels melodic ambient metal duo Earth, keeping a steady rhythm and using the guitar melodies to tell a story in a way that feels very much like what a Western movie would sound like if it was an aural medium instead of visual. 

Songs like “La Vivora Y El Cacto” and “Shallow Roots” have a more rock ‘n’ roll take, bringing in elements of 1960s and ‘70s classic rock with a modern twist. The former summons Jimi Hendrix and Cream vibes; the latter has a blues element with riffs that could fit in Chuck Berry’s catalogue while Cerro’s gravelly vocals are juxtaposed with Menkes’ soulful wail. 

Along with the Cedar Street Festival, Audio 37 says they have recorded tracks waiting to be mastered that will be released online sometime soon, but don’t yet have a date. The band also doesn’t have any official tour plans, but if they do, they will forgo traditional van tours and instead try to book one-off festivals. 

For now, Audio 37 is letting go of their past while keeping Deruisa alive in their hearts and allowing the music to speak for itself. 

“The Bad Light never found an opportunity that didn’t have a dead end,” Cerro says. “Audio 37 will be what it is. If it has legs, so be it. If we play around the Bay Area for a couple years, it will be that. Who knows?”

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