Exclusive Interview: Max Bemis reveals all about Say Anything's new album

SAY ANYTHING recently finished recording their fifth album and first for Equal Vision, Anarchy, My Dear, with producer Tim O’Heir. It was a homecoming of sorts for both O’Heir and Say Anything frontman MAX BEMIS: The two last worked together on the band’s first widely released album, 2004’s …Is A Real Boy. But Anarchy My Dear comes from a much different place and represents a sonic and lyrical shift for the band, as Bemis explains in this exclusive interview.

Recording this album seems like it was a pretty quick process.
It was very quick. The last record took probably an average amount of time for a major-label release, when you work with a high-name producer like Neal [Avron]. You usually map yourself out to take anywhere between a few months and however [long]. But honestly, I prefer to work quicker, and Tim prefers to work quicker as well. So we’re like, “Why not just get it done quick and have a good time doing it?”

How long were you actually in the studio?
I think the whole process has been two months altogether, including pre-production and mixing. Last time me and Tim worked together was …Is a Real Boy, and that took, like, a year because I went crazy. [Laughs.] So I think he’s relieved. It’s funny to be reunited at a time in our lives when things are really different for both of us; he has a family, and I’m married and in a healthy place. We [naturally] produce a zaniness and craziness together, but we both kind of have to keep our shit together. There’s a lot of things [on this album] that remind me of that first record.

In what sense? Musically? Lyrically?
The best comparison I can make to […Is A Real Boy] versus the other [Say Anything] records [is] I feel like this one is an offshoot of the first record, [but] in a different direction. We kind of chose to go in a certain direction with the second two records [2007’s In Defense Of The Genre and 2009’s Say Anything], which I love; I would never knock that direction. On …Is a Real Boy there is a healthy mix of anthemic quality and then the quirky, odd, neurotic music that’s more of an offshoot of Queen or the Beatles or the Stones, that kind of an influence—versus Foo Fighters and more anthemic, big rock ’n’ roll. Even though we’ve always stayed a quirky, weird band, we kind of chose to go the route of [the latter], especially on the very last record we did. I feel like this one [is what would have happened] had we chosen to go in a different direction after …Is a Real Boy—it’s like a cousin of the other records as opposed to a brother or sister.

It’s really fun to explore that aspect of our band, and it’s a direction we’re going to go for the next few records at least. It feels a little more satisfying right now at this point. It’s not like we’ve decided to not write music you can sing along to, but it’s edgier and the influences are a little more diverse, and it makes us stand out a little bit more. That’s what I’m proudest about this record: There’s no way you can put it on and think of any other band besides ours.

Would you say the music is a little bit rawer?
I was in a pretty weird place when I wrote …Is a Real Boy. I was fully manic, doing drugs and living this crazy, young man’s life. Then I reeled it in for a while cause I had to get healthy, and now I’m a happier person. Basically, the first three records were kind of the story of a guy who grows up, comes into his own and realizes he doesn’t have to, like, destroy himself to be happy. And I sort of ended up happy in the storyline, so to speak, of the last few records. That chapter of my life is sealed, because I’m married. I’ll hopefully never have to write a song again about trying to find love; I’ve already found that and I’m really happy when it comes to that part of my life. I’m a reasonably healthy person and try to keep stable.

So it’s no longer about coming into my own; it’s more about what do I think of the world, what are the changes I’d like to see, what do I think of life, how do I experience life. So it is more raw in the sense that it has that early quality of rebellion. That’s the main thing I would put out there in terms of describing this record, because it does have a concept: coming out from the pack, rebelling and choosing to make your life your own and not have your mind be controlled by society.

I know a million bands have written about that, but I’d like to think we have [a couple of things] to lend toward that topic. First, we’re doing it in a very jubilant fashion, so it’s kind of like, if you would combine Sex Pistols with Guns n’ Roses in the [thematic] sense. Because it’s all about having a good time and being triumphant; you can really hear it on the record, the mood we were in when we were making it was totally triumphant. But then it does have that anger and that rebellion in it.

A lot of bands who tend to sing about political stuff or sociopolitical stuff tend to get super-dark and preachy, but this record is about kind of living it and not letting your anger towards everything control you; it’s about rising above it. I’ve heard a lot of kids asking for us to write that angry, edgy record. I think I was able to finally do that without sacrificing, without it being this false pursuit of who I once was when I was 19, stoned  and hating myself. This is about, “What do I really think of the world around me, and what do I want to do now that I’ve sort of grown up?”

So many musicians are facing the same thing: “Now that my personal life’s in order, what do I write about and how do I write about things?” Now that your mind is clear, you can actually comment and see the stuff around you.
Totally. I think there are many musicians who found love and stability to some degree and were still able to write awesome stuff, whether it’s [Bruce] Springsteen or John Lennon. And I look up to a lot of people. A lot of my friends in bands are getting older and have families now. If you even look at Chris [Conley] from Saves the Day, who wrote this record which is basically all about that, all about having these things in your life and still trying to find yourself, and there’s always a struggle.

So that’s what this record is about: trying to win that personal journey, and trying to triumph over these factors in your own life. I’d like to think that that’s where this record starts out. In my mind [I’ve] done that enough, and now I want to share it and try to spread it through this record and this music as much as I can.

Are there any guest stars on it?
My wife [Sherri DuPree] is on it; she obviously sings beautifully. She’ll probably be on every Say Anything record from now on. And Coby [Linder], again, he started singing on In Defense Of The Genre, and he’s kind of become a mainstay when it comes to doing dueling vocals with me. It’s sort of become an interesting, cool part of the band’s sound. You get kind of annoyed with my voice after awhile. [Laughs.] It’s like, “All right, we’ve been hearing this guy ranting and raving for like the past hour, I think we need a little bit of a change,” and Coby sounds nothing like me. He does a lot of cool stuff in this record.

What songs are you the most proud of on this record?
There is a song called “Burn A Miracle.” [It’s] probably my favorite song, because I wrote it right before I feel like I took this really big step in my life. I loved the melody and I loved the vibe of the song, but it had these kind of morose, depressing lyrics, and I was like, “I don’t want to get rid of this song; there’s something really special about it.” Once I felt I was in a better place, [I] completely rewrote the lyrics.

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[Again] people are asking what I see as a commonality between this [new album] and …Is a Real Boy, [and] really, it reminds me of the anthemic quality of those songs, but without the sort of like, stereotypical young guy-isms of it. [“Burn A Miracle” is] this rebellious anthem that kicks off the record in this really energetic way, and I haven’t written a song ever that makes me want to play it live and have a bunch of people singing it, since those early days of …Is a Real Boy. [Then] I think that became our thing, having these sing-along anthems. Thank God that’s continued to persist, and people feel that way about the new stuff. But this one [in particular] I have that vibe in mind of, like, a sweaty club full of kids just losing their minds to it. And that’s the first song on the record, so it kind of kicks off this vibe that persists through the entire thing.

Who’s the band lineup in the studio?
Right now, it’s just me and Coby [Linder, drummer], which is as it was for …Is a Real Boy. The other guys are definitely members of the band, but I’m just so controlling when it comes to guitars—which is my instrument—and that’s what mostly they play, so I choose to keep it reeled in. But it’s been really nice just returning to the me and Coby thing; it kind of feels like the old days.

I mean, we’ve been a band for 10 or 11 years, and it really started out with me and Coby just kind of walking around and talking about music, and getting excited and being crazy together, and trying to push each other into new directions and challenge each other.  That’s definitely a lot of what the musical dynamic on this record is; there’s a lot of little ear candy and yet at the same time it’s really loose and energetic. I think Coby has pushed himself into a place that’s really amazing. His dynamics on this record are really nice; we kind of gave him room to breathe a little more, because one of the defining things on this record is there’s almost no distorted rhythm guitar.

Really!
You think about the bands that Say Anything kind of gets [compared to]—at least the last couple records—and you think of Green Day or Weezer. But we wanted to push ourselves away and go off into a different direction than we did the last couple records. So we decided we would strip away any pop-punk. As much as we love Blink-182 and Green Day, I just feel like we’ve been doing a lot of that on the past couple records, and we kind of were going for a more of a Beatles, Queen [vibe]. Even if you’re talking about punk bands, then it’s like the Clash and At The Drive-In didn’t really have huge walls of power chords the whole time. And so we were like, “Lets just maybe keep the grittiness to the lead guitar,” and that way it has this kind of classic rock-y feel to it—or a vintage sort of proto-punk feel to it—as opposed to a pop-rock or punk-pop thing.

We really stuck by that rule. There’s only one song where it comes back in, and I’m not going to give it away, but it’s employed in a very self-conscious way, as opposed to, “This is what the sound of the record is.”

One thing we’ve done while recording, is there’s no tuning in the vocals at all. On the last record, we would labor over small lines and words in songs, but in this one, basically, all I’ve done is sing the song once or twice all the way through, as opposed to stopping and starting the entire time. So we get this really live, totally energetic feel for the vocals, which has made all the difference. It’s really crazy how different it sounds. I’m not going to say it’s better or worse, but it definitely feels like Say Anything live, when it comes to my delivery.

That’s so interesting, because it’s rare these days to have a vocal take that doesn’t have any effects on it. So people will be able to tell your vocals are so unprocessed?
I think so—even to the laymen, they’ll going to be able to be like, “Wow, this seems pretty energetic, he seems pretty into it.” There’s more chaos, which is, you know, the vibe of the record.

Your life was pretty chaotic for many years, but even now that it’s calmer, you can still remember that time.
Yeah, you go from being like—or at least I went from being—this really idealistic, head-in-the-clouds, 12- or 13-year-old. And then you grow up into a teenager and young adult, and it becomes all chaos, in a way, and you identify with yourself completely through that. And then, I think as you get older, you try and reel it in, and then once you’re secure, you can start interjecting little bits of zaniness into your life in healthy doses, because I think you need it for the creative spirit and to make sure you’re not held down by the Man, so to speak.

And a lot of times if your life is chaotic, a little bit is good–but too much is not good.
Exactly. It’s all about what’s going on with you internally. Because I feel a lot of people need to express the descent, or the chaos, with self-destructive tendencies. Then you learn that that’s not really the way to do it; there’s art and, you know, choices in your life that you can make to express yourself without having to destroy everything around you and yourself doing it.

Musically, is there a particular song that you really like?
Musically, there’s a song called “Peace Out” on the record that we employ the use of a hammered dulcimer in, and I have to say that’s one of the most exciting things on the record. We brought in this ridiculously talented kid who just came in and banged out this ridiculous dulcimer track, and it sounds like a medieval jaunt kind of, it’s like a weird, minstrel-music song. Again, we were at this point where we were like, “Let’s just go all out with this record.” We’re trying to turn things around and push the band into a different direction, so that one’s probably the most pure expression of what the hell is going on—in a good way. And there’s the title track on the record, “Anarchy, My Dear.” That’s an expression of the stuff I was talking about before.

Really, the record in its purest sense is a form of propaganda, to some degree. It’s a real, true expression of how I feel. And at the same time, it’s propaganda, because I believe in some level of anarchy. I feel like people mostly identify the idea of anarchy with certain political beliefs—like, you know, communism and stuff like that. But there are many different offshoots of it, some of them that are just expressed in personal choices, and some of it’s a little bit more abstract, and some of it’s a sociological ideal. And so this record really is my way of promoting what I see as a healthy level of anarchy, and that I believe in.

You see bands like NOFX, who I grew up listening to, who somewhat believe in some of these anarchist beliefs, but you end up associating it kind of with just louder punk music. And I feel like, it would have been interesting to see the Beatles or the Rolling Stones write an anarchist punk record.  And that’s kind of what we were trying to do, and the record is named after one of the songs on it called “Anarchy, My Dear,” which is basically my love song to anarchy. It’s sort of written as if it was to a woman, but it’s about my belief and my love for this idea of anarchy.

That’s one of the songs that I’m actually most excited about on the record musically, because it sounds like Neil Young or something. There’s harmonica in it, and steel guitar, slide guitar; it kind of sounds like the Band meets Aerosmith. Again, there’s nothing on this record that I believe sounds Foo Fighters-y. And they’re one of my favorite bands, and they were my main influences on the past couple records. But I think there’s only so much of that you can do, and that isn’t really where we started out. …Is A Real Boy isn’t really an over-the-top, modern-rock record. There was a lot of eclectic, eccentricity to it, and I think that’s kind of where we chose to pursue with this new record. alt