Signals Midwest leader Maxwell Stern has just released his new solo album, In The Good Light, on Lauren Records, and though it’s technically a “solo album,” it actually features more musicians than any record he’s ever made. The 13-person list of contributors includes Ratboys’ Julia Steiner on backup vocals, Slaughter Beach, Dog/Modern Baseball’s Ian Farmer on bass, Sincere Engineer/Into It. Over It.’s Adam Beck on drums, and more. The record finds Max orbiting the realms of indie rock, heartland rock, and alt-country, and, when talking to us about some of the inspirations behind the album, he mentions Tom Petty, Sheryl Crow, Jeff Tweedy, Jason Molina, The Lemonheads, Pedro the Lion, The Last Waltz, and more.
“I wrote a love record and it really surprised me,” Max says. “Most of these songs are explorations on that theme – romantic, familial, friendship and self. A lot of them hinge on the idea that getting to that level of openness and acceptance is hard-won, and often exists around corners where the approach seems nearly unimaginable.”
Max has given us a track-by-track breakdown of the full LP, and you can stream the record and read on for what he had to say…
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MAXWELL STERN BREAKS DOWN IN THE GOOD LIGHT, TRACK BY TRACK
1. MEMORY FIREWORKS
Max: My first voice memo of this song is dated April 21st, 2023, and we started tracking about two weeks later on May 5th. I liked it in the leadoff spot because it felt like the most immediate decision – there was no time to overthink it.
I love songs that include little inside jokes / trivial observations from which larger concepts or truths can be extrapolated. The first verse showed up when I was at a Phillies game with my friends Kees and MeeRee – just getting the cheapest seats possible way up in the last row, taking in the beauty of a warm springtime night watching baseball. The line “everybody eats on the turnpike tonight” is a reference to my bandmate Jon’s approach to driving: whenever he gets cut off, his mantra is “everybody eats tonight” as in “everybody’s gonna get where they need to go”…which is a pretty Zen way to deal with potential road-rage.
I love so much about this tune – Slo-Mo’s multi-tracked lap steel, Julia’s harmony vocals, Logan Bloom’s horn arrangements – I think it gives a really nice overview of what’s to come and made good sense in the #1 spot.
2. YOU DESERVE A GREAT LOVE
Max: This was the first song I intentionally wrote for the new record, dating back to 2019 or so, and it served as a North Star for the writing process that followed. It came out of a deep pandemic-induced Tom Petty obsession: I like the story behind his song “Wildflowers” so much (Google it if you’re not familiar) and I guess I took it really literally, enamored by the idea that you could write a song that you might need to hear and to remind yourself that you’re worthy of good things.
Jon: Max isn’t kidding about the Petty obsession. He was in a deep Petty hole. So, when it came to arranging parts for this record, my first thought was always “WWMCD?” (What would Mike Campbell do?) With Max’s stuff, I usually keep my head down and wait until I get called on, but I’ve never said, “Give me the guitar, I know what to do” faster than I did when I heard “Great Love.” This song is such a tight little pop gem, my favorite on the record.
3. HOW’D YOU FIND ME
Jon: Before we tracked this song, a fellow member of the band (who I won’t name) gave me a mushroom capsule. He said it was just a micro-dose, and I’d barely feel it. Well, he was wrong, and that’s probably why most of my live room guitar is inaudible here.
Max – We did SO many takes of this during the initial live-band tracking session. Adam tried a bunch of different drum approaches, and initially this was a much dancier song, almost with a disco-style drum beat, but I think we eventually got closer to a Goo Goo Dolls thing with the 12-string guitar and the sixteenth-note hi-hat stuff in the back half.
It really clicked once I heard Julia (Steiner, of Ratboys)’s call-and-response vocals. It was her idea to echo that main phrase in the chorus (“How’d you find me?”) and I think that made it all make sense and gave us a hook to highlight. Initially, that was just an empty no-vocal space. Now it’s impossible for me to imagine the song without it. Especially with such a conversational lyric – that little refrain turned into the crux of the whole thing.
Special shout out to Joe George, Adam’s bandmate in Into It. Over It. for his excellent guitar work on this one.
4. COLLINWOOD
Jon: I heard and loved this song in its original demo form—I believe I even sent Max back a video of me playing and singing it on piano—and I didn’t hear it again until the first mixes came back. I missed the live tracking day to go to a wedding, and it didn’t exactly need more guitar from me later. I was so blindsided by that sax solo I nearly crashed my car. One of my favorite moments in recorded music history is when Garth Hudson comes out of nowhere in The Last Waltz with that sick sax solo in “It Makes No Difference.” We have found the spiritual successor, folks, and it’s on a fucking Max Stern record.
Max: This is the oldest song on the record by a country mile: I think it dates all the way back to 2014. I remember writing the chorus on my parents’ piano, but I could never figure out how to put verses to it. It sat around for a decade and I’d occasionally chip at it maybe once or twice a year, but it took until now to finally crack the code.
Slo-Mo did a few passes of a lap steel solo, but Adam also had a friend (Brent Shumard) track a sax solo. When we put them on top of each other, we realized there were certain parts that harmonized, even though the two soloists had never heard the part that the other instrument was playing. A truly happy accident.
5. TWO MAGNETS
I know Andy and I specifically referenced that Sheryl Crow song “If It Makes You Happy” to get the main guitar tone – there’s a lot of dirt on the electric guitar, but a ton of string noise from an acoustic for that driving, percussive sound.
Julia sent very detailed notes along with her vocal tracks with ideas for how they should be mixed (i.e. doubled in the choruses vs. single-tracked and shifted off to one side to emulate a conversation / second voice coming in). It’s such a special thing when someone you respect and look up to takes your own composition and treats it with the same care as they would their own art.
I love the interplay between Logan Roth’s work on the Hammond organ and Slo-Mo’s lap steel. To me, they almost represent the two people / sources of energy that are referenced in the lyrics.
6. WHISPERS IN THE GROUND
Max: This came from following an exercise from Jeff Tweedy’s “How To Write One Song” book in which you watch a TV show or movie and write down phrases of dialogue. Once you fill the page, you re-read what you’ve written down (or potentially misheard) to see what connects. In this case, “Whispers In The Ground” was the phrase that jumped out at me the most, and I started to lyrically trace the contours of a few difficult years.
Musically, this one goes through a few movements. Each verse has a very different arrangement in order to build momentum, and the chorus is never the same either. The bridge vocal was a first take, too. A lot of the sessions that Andy and I did were after long, grueling workdays and I guess I only had enough gas in the tank for one of those.
7. IN THE GOOD LIGHT
Jon: The whole band was only together for the first couple days of recording before we all split up and did overdubs in our different locales. For me, the most fun, collaborative moment of those initial sessions was tracking this tune. I remember hooting at Ian when he did that big octave slide at the end of the bridge, I remember Adam breathlessly shaking his arms out after every take. This song is kinda the “Should I Stay or Should I Go” or “Lola” of the record, if you know what I mean. It rides that one earworm motif for all it’s got. There was so much discussion about how to dress it up, and I’m glad that much of the minimalist, rockin’ vibe from the live room survived to the final product.
Max: I had a fairly standard drum beat on the demo for this one until Adam started playing a pattern he referred to as “big dumb caveman” and the rest of us responded by playing our instruments twice as hard. We put everything we had into a few takes and let it rip.
Each verse is a little bit different personality- and arrangement-wise, and there’s definitely an unintentional reference to Jason Molina’s song “Hold On Magnolia” in the second verse. Occasionally Slo-Mo will tell me a story from a Magnolia Electric Company tour or session and I have to pretend like playing with the guy who wrote the lap steel hook to “Farewell Transmission” isn’t one of the greatest musical privileges of my life. Thanks, Mike.
Lyrically, this is a song about leaning into the possibilities of love and getting out of your own way. It’s the central theme of the record, and it made sense to focus on it as a title track.
8. FRAME BY FRAME
Max: This was also nearly the record closer! My initial demo had slow drums the entire time, but I really liked what Adam chose to do for the verses and refrains and found that it pushed the song / story along in a way that it really needed. This one is definitely supposed to be a journey, and I love how there are four or five overlapping vocal parts during the ending crescendo. I think there’s a little keyboard line buried in there somewhere at the end that Ian may have tracked as a joke, but I liked it so we left it in.
The lyrics came from some free-association exercises – I’m not sure what “silvery shadows of God-fearing trains” means, but it worked rhythmically so it’s in there too. I tried to just let the melody guide the lyric, rather than adhering super closely to one specific meaning.
9. GLAD THAT WE’RE ALIVE
Max: I think this came from listening to the Lemonheads a bunch and wanting to write a dirt-simple pop song. I think one of the weirdest and most surprising parts about living through a pandemic in isolation was that it actually made me really glad for social media for once. Everyone was doing livestreams and playing Jackbox or doing extended Zoom calls in order to hang out and connect with each other. I have oddly fond memories of those times, and I was just trying to scrounge up a little positivity while everyone was locked away and not hanging out.
10. AD FOR GOD
Max: I’d had the main riff for six or seven years. Initially it was supposed to be a “Control”-era Pedro the Lion kinda thing, but it never went anywhere. The verses were from a completely different song and the vocal phrasing was about twice as fast. Gordon from Downhaul was visiting and heard me messing around with these two ideas and suggested combining them and slowing down the vocal pattern, and it started to work from there. I love how triumphant Logan Bloom’s horn arrangement at the end is, too.
11. CLIMB
Max: This was written as a response to Jon’s song “Ladder”, which is one of my favorite songs anyone I’m friends with in real life has ever written. I was trying to write something that could hang with that and felt like I was taking a big swing. It was nearly on my last record Impossible Sum (2020), but hadn’t quite formed yet. I really love the interwoven guitar layers that Joe George added to this one too, especially in the bridge.
12. EDGE OF THE END OF THE WORLD
Max: This is, I think, the only song I’ve ever recorded that doesn’t have any guitar on it. Once I heard how Logan Roth’s piano, Adam’s drums and Ian’s fretless bass (which was a surprising and wonderful call on his part) worked together, I knew it didn’t need much else. I love the call-and-response of my chorus vocal and Slo-Mo’s lap steel – that three-note phrase works so nicely to fill that space in.
I do owe a lot to my dear friend Chris Baglivo of the Superweaks who tracked the first demo of this song. He wrote the initial repeated piano loop and a very basic drum arrangement that informed my thinking for this one a lot, and when it came time to rework it into a full-band version, we ended up just tracking everything on top of his existing demo. I don’t think any of the original recordings made it into the final version, but it’s definitely in its DNA.
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Max also has a one-off in Portland, OR next week: