Track-By-Track: Say Anything

Frontman MAX BEMIS walks us through every track on SAY ANYTHING‘s self-titled album.



Fed To Death

“Ironically, this is the first song I wrote for the record, and it also became the first song on the record. It’s pretty much a statement of purpose about what I think is wrong with the world or what is worth fighting against in the world. It covers two aspects: one is someone who is irresponsible and the other is one who claims too much responsibility and is obsessed with power. Both of which I think are two things wrong with society–people who do those things.”



Hate Everyone

The entire album is a narrative and each song tells a different part of a certain story: the result of recognizing what is wrong with the world. It’s a feeling of anger, and when you experience this anger, it surfaces at first as this irrational stupid hatred of everyone and everything. This song is about that emotion. That’s why it’s kind of tongue-in-cheek. I wrote this song going through that exact period myself and I was kind of waking up about how I was living my life in a negative way. I started to see the bigger picture a bit more, and it was very depressing and it affected me greatly. I felt like I hated everyone this one particular morning when I wrote the song, and I started to work my way past it. I believe it’s an important stage in human evolution for each person to have this feeling and work through it.”



Do Better

“This is a song I wrote later on in the writing process. It’s about the recognition that we live in a flawed society. I wrote the lyrics first. They were a criticism about myself and, like, this really negative song. What I realized when I finally finished the lyrics is that I had overcome a lot of the things that I was making fun of about myself, and that to write a song about those things would be a novelty or sort of typical Say Anything act–to make a negative, self-deprecating song. So my goal was to write a positive, uplifting song, but still have it be very “Say Anything.” It’s about the ability every human being has to fulfill his or her potential. It doesn’t mean we can all be godlike, but we can do better than how we tend to do. Once you realize that, you have a lot more options open to you as a human being.”



Less Cute

“It’s about a college-age girl who is infatuated with a college-age guy who doesn’t love her at all but sleeps with her all the time. So she finds an easier, more submissive guy to use to make this other guy jealous. It’s a terrible love triangle. In society, we see this happen all the time. I’ve seen this happen so many times: people pursue what is not healthy, including myself when I was younger. I could have played any of these roles in my life. We pursue that which is not healthy for us or gives us what we want. It’s what seems viable based on what society’s standards are, such as being attractive. In reality, it is just a lie that we’re pursuing and we are willing to hurt anyone to get that. In that process, everyone gets really screwed over. Even though society says this is dating, this is what it’s about: people get jealous of each other and people date people they don’t like that much. All of these things are acceptable in society, but they are demeaning and make people feel terrible. I wanted this song to illuminate what we think is normal for your love life is actually sometimes a really destructive process.”



Eloise

“This is a song I wrote at the tail-end of the relationship that was chronicled on our last record. This is the only song on this record that really references that time as the relationship was over and I began writing for this record. I was going through the stage with this person where you’re trying to be cordial and be friends, but it’s too weird and you both eventually just have to cut it off–or one person has to. In this particular instance, this relationship was really unhealthy and had a really negative effect on me and my self-worth. Cutting off this relationship was a spiritual act of self-empowerment. When you listen to In Defense Of The Genre, you can tell that there was more to it than just being someone’s fault. It had to do with me placing myself in a situation because I felt bad about myself or felt bad about things in society. I wanted to solve the world’s problems by trying to help this one person and help them overcome certain things that they just never would. The cool thing about “Eloise” is that it’s not just a break-up song, but a getting-over-a-girl song. It talks a lot about why we even get into these types of relationships and why letting go of them is such a good idea in terms of the biggest scope of spirituality and society. This is kind of a running theme on the record. While most songs on the record can be explained simply, there’s more to each song, and they talk about the grander issues in life. This was definitely my closure song as well as my new-beginning song. Because there has to be closure to the relationship before there can be a new beginning with someone else.”



Mara And Me

“This is kind of a funny song and a little schizophrenic because it was written very organically. When I was writing it, I had no idea what was going to come out of me. I told myself I wanted to write one song on the record that had a million different parts, kind of like our old records as we had so many streamlined songs. The ideas would be more alike and would come in the same way as they evolve and start in one place and end in another. This song is a turning point on the record. I start out feeling sorry for myself, alienated as usual. Then I have this realization that it’s not really doing anything for me. I see what’s wrong with the world and that I want to change. I see the things that make me feel inadequate and realize that I can’t let that consume me just because those things make me feel different. I start to pull myself out of the riot and examine my life and empower myself. I start to throw a middle finger up at the things I can’t change. The song really talks about accepting the things you can change and letting go of the things you cannot. There are certain things in my past–whether it’s my bipolar disorder or how I grew up or how things were done wrong to me by other people–which I had to accept as not my fault. There were other things that I was doing to myself and other things that were my doing and my responsibility. I had to differentiate between those things. I had to take responsibility and move on and do things differently when I can.”



Crush’d

“This song is about my wife, Sherri [DuPree]. I wrote this after we got engaged. I wanted to write a love song for her and realized that as I was writing this album, I needed this song to fill the narrative gap between “Mara And Me” to explain this stage where I had dealt with my issues and finally felt self-empowered and was able to meet someone who was not a throwaway person. I’m a screwed up, weird guy, so this song talks about someone who is worth putting in that much effort for because they’re right for you. I’m really proud of this song because to me, it’s the first pure love song that can be cherished by the person I wrote it for as well as other people. It distills my feelings so accurately about when Sherri and I first started talking that it means a lot to her too. It meant as much to me that she loved it and it I wanted her to love it as much as any other person that heard it. I think that’s what makes it so special and innocent. If no one ever heard it and it was a song that I just wrote for Sherri, I would be happy because it would let her know things that I can only express in a song.”



She Won’t Follow You

“This is both a song about being passionately in love with somebody and subverting social standards at the same time because your relationship is so truthful and pure and passionate on so many levels–whether it’s like love levels or sexual levels. It’s like the very act of loving each other is a statement of defiance against society that doesn’t promote human relationships like that; it wants us to sort of not give everything to someone else, whether it be friends or loved ones. When you can find everything that you need in someone–someone like a true love and it’s a real thing–it’s really a punk rock thing. That’s why this song exists. It’s especially about Sherri and her being an individual, and that’s one of the reasons I ended up falling in love with her–she was already defying and fighting against the man on her own. She’s really creative and not a conformist type of a girl. She’s even less conformist than I am, and that’s what this song is about.”



Cemetery

“This is a song about death and how love relates to death, and the fear of death. It’s kind of about how finding love alleviated my fear of death or my fear of growing old. It was a statement of recognizing my soul’s link to Sherri’s. It’s about how when you really love someone and it’s deep in your soul, after you die the soul endures and that love will burn on. If everything was stripped away and I had to answer after I die–consciously affirm the most important thing in my life–it would be Sherri, the defining thing in my life.”



Property

“As the record goes on, I talk about Sherri in the form of my anchor and our relationship as an anchor, but there are still issues in life. I still have these outstanding issues in my life that I wanted to address–those that are still there after you solve the biggest issue in your life. It just means it will be a little is easier to deal with the plethora of other issues. One of them was recognizing that not everyone is like that in a relationship, and I was seeing this from a first-person perspective with someone who is a jerk and who looks at people as property. Similar to what I was addressing in "Less Cute," it’s an extension of how we’re raised to see people as someone to possess or own and bend them to your will. I’ve been in relationships where people treated me like that and have seen others in relationships that are like that, and I felt like it was worth addressing because being in a relationship with Sherri sort of opened my eyes to how bad it really is in the world where we feel the need to posses everything.”



Death For My Birthday

“This song is another example of something I find inherently wrong with society and it comes from a different place. I’m a pretty spiritual and religious guy–not traditionally religious by any means–but very cerebral. One of the things that is promoted in spiritually is this understanding of death being a kind of gate to another world and that life isn’t the only thing that exists in the life of your soul. Life on earth is only one part of it, but I think there are people who become obsessed with that notion. I’ve even been guilty of that at certain moments, but I’m a pretty live-in-the-moment kind of guy. Some people forget that life is important and their fascination with death or the idea that it will take you to a perfect place keeps them from living their life as if it’s their only life. This song is about someone who drifts through this middle-of-the-road life and never really feels emotions strongly or is thankful for what they have because they’re so focused on the notion that they will eventually die. They believe this life doesn’t matter because it’s all temporary, and I completely disagree with that. I believe in the afterlife and that earth is only one perception that we will be experiencing for a certain amount of time, and that there’s more to it than that. I think that you have to love it for what it is and treat it as the most important thing in the world.”



Young, Dumb And Stung

“This song was written as I was finishing up the record. I felt like we needed an anthem to define the place I have been brought to and define the sense of self-preservation and self-worth. It talks about a sense of fighting against the people who try to put me down, not necessarily being angry and confrontational against the world. I think this song is a healthy version of "Hate Everyone" in which this anger is actually being channeled for the greater good and not blindly thrown out there for anyone who walks by. It’s about being proud of who you are and angry at anyone who would try to rob you of that. I felt like this was an important component to the record because a lot of Say Anything songs are very self-conscious and questioning. I needed a song that said, “Screw you. This is who I am and who I will be for the rest of my life.” This is that song. It’s important for anyone who likes our band to have this song. It’s unapologetic.”



Ahhh… Men

“Basically, I wrote this song during a moment of clarity and I think it’s the most spiritual song I’ve ever written. It’s probably one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written. It illuminates how I feel about the universe and spirituality, and the evolution of the soul and the collective evolution of everyone’s souls. It is sort of a hymnal; it addresses how I believe that everything in the universe and other universes and parallels and dimensions are all united. It’s kind of like one giant organism that I worship, and I call it God, but someone might not necessarily refer to it that way. But I tried to illuminate my religious and spiritual views and how they pertain to the overall record. This song shows the shift I had gone through in becoming one with this thing again, after years of being completely cut-off and feeling less important than it. True love is the best example of the presence of something bigger in this life, and I wanted to show specifically how I see the afterlife and God. I wanted to show people who have an aversion to being spiritual or religious that it isn’t simply a crazy notion, but involves science and logic and reason. The way it’s explained in the song is that all of the physical things fade away; there will still be spiritual matter that will continue to persist in a way we cannot perceive it. There are things in life we cannot explain or I believe you can’t explain with physics.” alt