Kansas City, Missouri native, Matt Pryor, is a household name for anyone who was attuned to the second and third waves of emo. His genre-defining band, The Get Up Kids, were among a small and legendary group that has shaped the musical landscape for years. However, after growing tired of the boundaries it so needlessly applied, the internationally recognized frontrunners eventually transcended the genre with their later albums and found themselves at home with a more indie sound.
Most recently, on his latest album under his given name, Matt Pryor has presented the world with The Salton Sea, and it is abundantly clear that this is the continuation of a decades-long love affair with music and being outright obsessed with songwriting. Steadfast fans of Pryor’s prolific career will also find themselves treated to a style that is more reminiscent of the works of Paul Westerberg and Red House Painters, that is of course laden with Pryor’s signature style, whose DNA is deeply rooted in artists like Elvis Costello and The Afghan Whigs.
It should be noted that the chosen title for the album is not one that was picked arbitrarily, and while not a concept album, the period of time when the songs were written were some of the darkest days of Pryor’s life. After spending six months in a downward spiral in what he sarcastically refers to as the penultimate moments of his “drinking career”, Pryor finally hit rock bottom. A casual habit that became a full-on addiction had officially come to a head, and in the blurry moments when 2022 became 2023, Pryor found himself with a choice that so many people before him have been forced to reckon with:
Keep going on this path and face certain tragedy—or— Clean up, get sober, and stay on the right side of the dirt.
Thankfully, Pryor decided on the latter, and the beautiful composite left on the shoreline for all of us to enjoy is the album now known as The Salton Sea. For those unfamiliar, The Salton Sea is what’s known as a “terminal” lake—meaning that newwater never flows into it, and its salinity increases incrementally due to evaporation and pollution… The once high-spirited desert oasis was a tourist attraction for celebrities and the upper crust in the 1950s and 60s, and it is now a bona fide wasteland. It’s not difficult to imagine that while in the throes of addiction, Pryor saw himself as this once lush and vibrant body of water that years ago was referred to as a “California desert oasis”—but it is now an uninhabitable veritable shadow of its former self.
Pryor’s latest songs have a timeless quality that makes you instantly nostalgic for strangers’ memories that unfold as narrative stories, and as a listener, you’re left wondering what these moments are all about—how will they unfold? This is undoubtedly due to the fact that along with sobriety, Pryor has found solace in writing for the sake of writing , a practice that he keeps up with daily—usually before dawn. If there’s a silver lining to all of this, one can glean that nothing bad will come from finding more creative outlets to calm the devil that sits on your shoulder, especially when that person has been writing the soundtrack of so many people’s lives for the last thirty years.
Maxwell Stern is a singer and songwriter living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; his musical career began and blossomed in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio with his band Signals Midwest. As Signals grew to become one of the tentpoles of Cleveland’s independent music community, Stern’s songwriting prowess grew and his world-traveling continued. His new 12-song LP, In the Good Light, will be out on Lauren Records on August 9, 2024.
Maxwell released his first solo record, Impossible Sum, in September of 2020. The album showcased the same heart-on-sleeve earnestness Signals Midwest fans had come to admire, while Max opened himself up to new sounds and textures, incorporating the Americana sounds of Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Jason Molina into his sonic sphere. Though he was aided by collaborators like Adam Beck on drums (Into It. Over It., Sincere Engineer) and Magnolia Electric Company’s own Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner on pedal steel, Max found himself putting extra emphasis on the “solo” nature of Impossible Sum. “The first one was made very much in a vacuum,” he says. “I played bass, almost all the guitars, all the keyboards.”
Things are different this time around. “This was always going to be more of a band record,” Stern says of In the Good Light, and he tapped friends and collaborators from across the country to bring it to life, starting with his new home base: “I feel as if this is the first record I’ve made with its heart in Philadelphia.”
Stern assembled a line-up with Adam Beck returning on drums, Jon Hernandez—Max’s bandmate in Timeshares—on guitar, and Ian Farmer (Slaughter Beach, Dog, Modern Baseball) on bass. The quartet recorded with producer, engineer, and mixer Andy Clarke (Wild Pink, Spirit of the Beehive, Cloud Nothings) at Retro City Studios in the Germantown neighborhood of Northwest Philadelphia.
“Andy was with me every step of the way,” Max says of the producer. “We definitely developed a shared language where I’d say something like, ‘I want this guitar to sound like fireworks are going off’ and he’d nail it on the first go. There were a lot of mind-meld moments like that.”
Collaboration did not stop in the City of Brotherly Love. For his part, Adam Beck tapped a number of Chicago musicians to contribute instrumentation, including the horn arrangements that adorn tunes like “You Deserve a Great Love” and “Collinwood.” “Adam FaceTimed me from Chicago and played me the sax solo on ‘Collinwood’ and it sounded absolutely wild,” says Max. “It’s such a gift when people take something of yours and treat it as their own.”
It was also Beck’s idea to bring in Julia Steiner of Ratboys, whose vocal presence is felt on some of In the Good Light’s finest moments like “How’d You Find Me” and “Two Magnets.” “How’d You Find Me” plays like a photo album of a road trip—“Three days’ worth of film in the Pentax/Wound like a sprinter’s leg at the block/Taking over the left lane, racing the Amtrak/Straightening paper clips, resetting the clock.” It’s the feeling of being in motion, in conversation, as Stern sings the call and Steiner echoes the response “how’d you find me?”
“Two Magnets” is a different kind of conversation, a reflection on a relationship between two forces with the same charge, never quite able to meet. Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner’s pedal steel swells along with Hammond B3 accompaniment from Logan Roth as the song moves to the second verse where Max brings the focus to a memory. “Climbing out on the roof in December/both nursing our wounds/Gave me your jacket, said ‘I want you to have it. It looks better on you.’” Steiner’s harmony punctuates the moment, the stinger, before the band picks up the refrain.
“You Deserve a Great Love” was the first song Max wrote for the record; it’s built around a phrase that proved meaningful for him during a tumultuous time in his life. “I was going through a bunch of big changes at once and that phrase was looping in my head, you deserve a great love,” he says. “As I sat with that phrase, it started to transition into I deserve something great.”
“I didn’t realize you could do that,” Stern reflects. “My songs tend to lean towards critiquing myself and examining my own motivations. With that one, I discovered I could sing a song for my own comfort. That was a big realization for me.”
In the Good Light finds Maxwell Stern embracing love, tenderness, and authenticity. You can feel it in the performances and collaborations. You can hear it in Max’s voice, in the scenes he captures and the moments he memorializes in his songs. The title track speaks to that authenticity:
I wanna see you in the good light, further out where your hope and home can collide
So sing it out into the steep night, I wanna see you in the good light
Lawrence, KS.