How to rediscover yourself as a Myspace band in a TikTok era?
A look inside The Maine’s “self-titled” album, 16 years in the making.
A conversation with The Maine’s John O’Callaghan. Written by Evan Lucy
It would be easy to look at August 1, 2023 as the culmination of everything The Maine have been building toward — finally reaching the mountaintop they began scaling as teenagers breaking curfew at a Tempe parking garage they lovingly dubbed 8123. Those four numbers have provided comfort and community in the decade and a half since, carrying the band to some incredible highs: eight beloved albums, their own record label, worldwide tours, even their own semi-annual festival.
But while, as the song goes, 8123 means everything to both the band and their fans, 8/1/23 doesn’t mark an end for The Maine, rather another exciting beginning punctuated with an exclamation point: a blowout celebratory show in Denver, CO, along with the release of a brand-new self-titled album that finds the band unfurling a career-spanning collection of songs that toe-dip into new territory while not losing an ounce of the authenticity that’s carried them this far.
Days before The Maine (the band) announced The Maine (the album) with singles “blame” and “how to exit a room,” vocalist John O’Callaghan opened a door into the band’s headspace going into album nine, detailed the decision to self-title an album this far into their career, and explained why you should finally delete your damn Facebook once and for all.
Back in December, the band’s account tweeted “It’s time to turn the lights off and get to work” along with a reference to writing your first album. How did you approach the process this time around, balancing the desire to put yourself back in a blank slate mindset after “Sticky” and “Loved You A Little” became hits?
I think on XOXO, because we were toying with the idea of joining Photo Finish and I was open to collaborating with songwriters again, I bought into the idea — maybe a little too much in hindsight — of the singles game. It did do a lot for our band and for us maintaining relevance in the conversation of current bands, because there aren’t a lot from 2007 when we started.
Every record and everything we’ve done as a band is going to, even subconsciously, impact the decisions we make moving forward. I think what we did on this record was take all the parts of our music that we enjoy and try to magnify them. Even playing songs on XOXO in front of audiences ended up placing a larger importance on the way things would translate live, and that was in our headspace going into writing this record.
But I don’t think this album is a reaction to XOXO. It certainly wasn’t as calculated as American Candy was after Forever Halloween, a slingshot to the other side of the fence. This record doesn’t feel like a reactionary thing, just what we wanted to do. As a matter of fact, I heard a quote — and now I’m going to paraphrase it and not know who said it — along the lines of, “This isn’t a culmination of everything The Maine is; it’s a snapshot of who The Maine is right now.”
That’s a really important headspace to be in when you’re nine records and 16 years deep. We’ve been provided with the trust from the people who dig our music to allow us to swing and even if it means we miss, we’ll do the breaking of our backs to make sure it still gets the attention it deserves. We’re lucky in the fact that we have so many records and done so many things that the nostalgia factor is sort of built in. So many people have grown up with us and experienced their lives simultaneously that we love to nod to the past, but it’s so important to focus on the right now and the thing we’re most excited about right now.
These two songs have a lot more energy straight out of the gate than basically anything we’ve done before, and that speaks to where our heads were at. But at the same time, the chorus of “blame” feels like it could be a new iteration of “English Girls” or “Bad Behavior” for people who’ve been following us for some time. You know, a song like “Dirty, Pretty, Beautiful” on the last record opened the door for us for a dancy aspect on this record in a couple songs. We took parts of XOXO that we loved and embellished on those, but I think we probably took parts of every record.
Hearing that quote makes me think of the one you used for You Are OK (“If you aren’t right now, you will be soon”) or even one from “If Your Light Goes Out”: “It’s only just the weight of the world/Not the end of it, you know.” This record doesn’t have to be the end-all-be-all, just the next one.
Releasing music isn’t as anxiety-inducing as it used to be, and that comes with doing it as much as we do. That’s the luxury we have at this point. You can get so precious about something that you fall out of love with it or don’t release it at all. There’s plenty of our songs that don’t do anything for me now, because I’m a different person than when I wrote them. But it’s exciting because I’m so pleased with the end result and proud of what we did. I love it, and I know six people love it because the six of us did.
Nine records in is a pretty long time to finally release a self-titled album. It feels like they tend to be bookend titles, either your first record or a farewell album. Why now?
It has a lot to do with the question of, “What haven’t we done nine records in? How can we make it exciting and interesting?” Well, we haven’t had a self-titled record.
I tried to write these songs in a way that would be like, if this was your introduction to our band and you’re on MySpace version 16 or whatever, who do you want people to think your band is at this moment? Who would you want people to think you sound like? It’s hard to be objective, especially from my position being in it, but even I can hear my voice develop and our songwriting develop over the past 16 years.
We’re not the same band, and we’ve definitely done things to shift the focus away from one specific song embodying who The Maine is. I think we’re lucky — and maybe financially unlucky — that we haven’t had our “Mr. Brightside” or our one song people know us by. We’re playing into that. It makes it fun for people. People that buy tickets to come see us can expect to hear certain songs, but we played “Into Your Arms” at a festival a couple weeks back. We hadn’t played that in a minute, but when we put out Can’t Stop, that was one of the bigger tracks for us. Having a catalog this vast helps us not put as much emphasis on one song.
“blame” is gonna be a little shocking for some people who are familiar with our music, and “how to exit a room” is going to be a warm embrace in that it feels like what’s in our DNA. Come August 1, who fucking cares what we think? It’s not ours anymore.
“blame” feels fresh and cool because it’s combining two distinct parts of your band in a new way. There’s the dancy pop chorus like you mentioned, but also a driving energy of something like “Numb Without You” and a lyrical sentiment that reminds me of something like “Diet Soda Society” that touches on the race to the bottom of being terminally online.
In a lot of ways, hip-hop is pioneering the way songs are structured and tearing up the old rulebook of songwriting. I had a playlist called “Moves” on Spotify that was literally just songs that switch-up. That’s what they call it in hip-hop — the switch-up — and we wanted to put our own spin on it. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” was definitely a song I used as a reference for the verses, along with “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” Those songs have a sort of manic energy and stream of consciousness with a hip-hop type of rhyme scheme.
The first iteration of the song felt entirely like the chorus, and it could have been a “Sticky 2.0” — in a negative way. I loved the chorus and the way the song made me dance, but I tried to take a step back and ask myself, “Well, if I loved Sticky, would I want to hear the sequel?” That didn’t scream progress or evolution to me, and that’s what inspired tearing down the verse and going “Bohemian Rhapsody”-style to take two vastly different elements and squeeze them together.
I played it for a lot of my friends who are very honest when it comes to critiques, and I didn’t get a ton of “this is fucking amazing” — which is good! I got a lot of “that’s fucking crazy and fresh for you guys.” That, to me, is the difference between a double and a home run. I’d rather strike out trying with the possibility of doing something really special.
What other parts of this album feel new and exciting for you?
There are a lot of firsts for us, and that’s what’s really cool. The opening track on the record has a breakbeat in the verses that Pat has never really done before. Garrett played a lot of bass parts that are the focused element of tracks, and that’s a huge twist on what we’ve done in the past. There’s a song called “the mood i’m in/jsyk” that peaks and valleys and has a lot of dynamic play that fucks with the listener.
My dad is watching the Grateful Dead doc on Prime Video right now, and someone was talking about Jerry [Garcia] and how the genius around him, especially his guitar playing, was how he could take people to a familiar place only to rip them out of it and into another world they haven’t been together yet. You think you know our moves at this point, but hopefully here are some surprising elements along the way.
A huge difference from XOXO to this was having Colby [Wedgeworth, producer] back. Not saying Matt Keller, who engineered XOXO, didn’t speak his mind, but having the trust already established with Colby made for wilder ideas on the band’s part. Obviously record to record — even tour to tour — it’s clear we don’t like doing the same thing twice. It’s never going to constitute happiness on our part. As long as we can find fulfillment and fill the void, we’ll still keep doing it. And there are so many doors we haven’t even knocked on that we want to open.
The chorus lyric of “the mood i’m in/jsyk” reminds me of how you were writing on Forever Halloween, with a darkness and real stark honesty that’s really moving:
If I’ve been unapproachable
Or I seem too emotional
Life has been a rollercoaster
So it goes
I’ve been
Avoiding confrontational
Bullshit conversations so
If I forgot to say hello
It’s just the mood I’m in
Where was your headspace when you were writing that song?
I was writing with Andrew Goldstein, and I went home for the day and couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about the song. I rolled over and just texted a rambled meandering of words. It was free verse; I wasn’t writing with intent. When we approached the song the next day, I said, “Hey, I have this thing. I don’t really know what it is.” It became the chorus. When we got to that loud bit right before the drop, Andrew said, “The listener is going to think it’s this thing you’ve done before — this song they’ve heard The Maine do before — and this kind of rips them from that.”
In terms of the lyric itself, having a kid does a lot for you in terms of how much stock you put into certain things and how worked up you get. A lot of this record is centering around the important aspects of my life at this time, and that’s my kid and my wife. They don’t center around me anymore. The lyrics in the past have all sort of been self-serving, even the whiny “I don’t know what I’m doing” stuff. It all comes from such a selfish place — and not in a bad way, but there are more important things than me now, and I think that’s what a lot of this record talks about.
On “the mood i’m in” specifically, it can definitely come across as bratty, and I can understand that, but … I don’t give a fuck anymore about the perception of what I’m saying. I’m hyper-focused on my family and the well-being of my daughter. I don’t have time. Intention is so important, and your time is the absolute most valuable thing you have to offer in this life. I’m not going to waste it on bullshit anymore. Even in “how to exit a room,” I say, “I just can’t fake it.” I don’t have it in me. I’m not trying to win the game anymore. I couldn’t care less, and I know that sounds pretentious or righteous, but I think in a world and society that’s so focused on social media and perception of lifestyle.
I’ll never not think this about social media: When I had a Facebook fucking 15 years ago, I thought it was such a rotten place. There are good elements of it, but the sole purpose of these outlets is so people can see other people fail. “Oh, I can see all the popular kids from high school and how fat they got and fucked up they got.” It’s such an evil place. There’s so much more beauty in blue skies and birds chirping. When you have a kid and start to see life through their eyes, it reminds you there’s so much to be thankful for.
Like you said, it’s not literally the end of the world. There’s a lot of beauty out there that I think has been forgotten about and glazed over that still exists. Those are elements that exist on this record, too: being appreciative of what we have. We’re blessed to have such a fucking abnormal job. This is ridiculous; it’s laughable that this is my only gig. I didn’t go to college, didn’t follow the normal journey of what is fed to you. What it’s given to me is priceless. Those are the things that, as a dad, I’m trying to figure out how to illuminate my daughter to my idea that whatever you want to do, you can do. If it’s an engineer, be the best engineer you can be. There’s so much more than textbooks and social media.
You’re a band who’s consistently released a new album basically every two years — yet it never feels like part of a business plan. Instead, it feels like the product of a lot of care and effort — a genuine desire and hunger that dictates when music comes out.
I’m sitting outside our studio. We’re in here all the time because there’s always something to do. The fact that we have this place, this clubhouse, and this opportunity and these ears still … that’s such a thing that can easily be taken for granted, that people are still listening.
It all centers around the idea that we’re so excited about what’s happening now. XOXO did give us a boost and filled up our tank of confidence a little bit more. We got a lot of opportunities we haven’t ever received in the 15 years previous. To see there’s still new things you can experience this far into it? Those are the things that keep you hungry.
It would be awfully easy to phone this whole thing in. It would be so much easier, and we could probably make a lot more money, but it wouldn’t feel right. It wouldn’t be authentic to what we’ve built The Maine around. I’d like to think people can understand that and feel that, and I’m excited for them to experience this with us.
★ Listen to “blame” & “how to exit a room” https://themaine.lnk.to/tm9
★ Watch the “blame” music video https://youtu.be/Zc3iFsYr-AE
★ Catch The Maine on tour https://www.themaineband.com/
Hear “blame” along with other staples from The Maine, across the country at Sad Summer Festival this July. The Maine drops 8/1/23, with a special show at The Fillmore Auditorium in Denver.
Evan Lucy is a North Carolina-based music writer whose work has appeared in magazines like Alternative Press, Billboard, Spin and Substream and on the podcasts Voice & Verse and Simpler Sound. In 2019, he co-authored You Are OK: Finding Your Way When Life Doesn’t Feel OK with The Maine.
