Seattle based musician Max Zorn has been quite prolific in recent years, releasing four remarkable albums including 2021’s “Father”. Zorn’s music is an inspiring blend of infectious rhythms, colorful textures, intricate guitars and cosmic synths.
I sat down with Max to talk about discovering Bowie and The Beatles, their love of Dario Argento films, how they started writing songs and the making of “Father”. Explore all of Max’s music here.
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you growing up and what artist and bands did you enjoy the most?
Max-I wish I had some cool, niche artist to talk about here but the honest truth is that in almost all of my earliest memories of listening to music, I’m playing The Beatles. My six year old self was addicted to it. My parents wouldn’t distract me with an iPad or the tv as a little kid, but I did have an iPod with practically every Beatles song on it and that was the only thing I wanted to hear for years. I remember being on a long train ride, listening to Love Me Do or something like that, and getting in a little bit of trouble because I got so carried away that I stood out of my seat and started dancing and singing along at full volume.
My mom would play a lot of David Bowie too. I can’t overstate how many times we blasted Starman or Ashes to Ashes on the way to school. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust was actually one of the first records I ever got. It was a birthday gift from my mom. I think I got Oracular Spectacular by MGMT that year too. Those are easily two of my favorite albums.
Overall, if I had to pick two artists who had a clear impact on me growing up, I’d say The Beatles and David Bowie, but the music which affected me most for sure came from my parents. There was a stretch of time where my brother and sister and I would wake up and run downstairs to find my dad making pancakes and playing his Saturday morning playlist. It was the same playlist every time and it had songs like New York Groove by Ace Frehley and Convoy by C.W. McCall. It was just pure fun. I can often take my own music too seriously, at least when I’m in the process of making it, and looking back on those Saturday mornings reminds me that first and foremost, music is meant to be fun, it’s meant to be enjoyed, and it can be silly too.
As for my mom, aside from teaching me David Bowie, she used to sing me lullabies that she’d written for me when she would tuck me in. They had my name in them and everything. That was probably the first music that had a real impact on me. My mom would never call herself a singer, but those songs meant more to me than any Beatles song, and they taught me a lot about how music can be used as a tool for communication and expression. Also, you really don’t have to think of yourself as a singer or a musician to make great music. I am an absolutely awful instrumentalist. All that matters is a desire to make music. That’s enough.
CMM-When did you first start playing instruments and writing songs?
Max-I started playing instruments sometime around first or second grade. I had a guitar teacher that I really liked around that time but he moved away and I wanted to keep learning, so my parents hired this guy named Nick Shadel and oh man, did that decision change my life for the better. I actually just started crying thinking about that. On top of being probably the best, coolest, and smartest musician of all time (who has released many of the most important songs in my life) Nick Shadel is just a phenomenal human being. I think we started weekly lessons when I was in third grade and over ten years later, they’re still going. He has been the most encouraging teacher ever and he really was the reason that music went from being something I just thought was cool to being an integral part of my identity. He would show me songs he was working on and ask me what I thought, and I would show him little riffs and melodies that I came up with. He fostered in me a love for writing songs, and he was always down to help me work on one, no matter how atrocious it was. I’ve listened back to some of the voice memos of those songs, and man are they embarrassing, but that was never really the point.
CMM-You’ve released four amazing albums in just the last few years. One of the albums that stands out to me in particular is “Father”. What was your process and approach to making that record? Any particular gear you used that really stood out throughout the sessions?
Max-Thank you so much for saying that! I have a lot of mixed feelings about this album in particular. I wasn’t really trying to make it, but at some point probably around May 2021, I realized that it was possible to put out a record before August 24th, and the thought of releasing three albums within the span of a year was too tempting to pass up.
I put out my second album, Bojaxis, at the end of February and for a couple months after that I really had no clue what I was doing. I went from having a very specific intent with my music to all of a sudden making a song that sounded like a zamrock ripoff one day and then my own title sequence to American Horror Story 1984 the next. It was a very confusing time in music for me. Of course, Nick Shadel got to hear all of this and he kind of jokingly planted the seed of a time travel album in my mind. I didn’t really know what that meant, but it seemed like there was a potential there, and I tend to have an easier time working on albums when there is a story for them to follow. So I took some of the songs I liked best and tried to write a plot (with time travel in it) that pieced them together and from then on, every song I made I tried to fit into that story somehow.
As for specific gear, I’d just gotten a Roland JU-06A and was listening to a lot of synthy, eighties sounding music, which factored into this album pretty heavily. I was also quite adamant, for no logical reason, on playing every single part on this album (I think I did with the exception of the bells on There Goes My Girl, which Nick Shadel contributed), which meant a lot of scouring through synthetic drum sounds and chopping up drum samples that were played by the legendary Aaron Benson. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted this album to be and I was not very flexible about it. Ironically, the two songs that I consider to be the best on Father – Body and Intro, Pt. 2 – were the two that I approached most freely, with no preconceptions of what they should be.
Making those two songs was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had recording music. Seattle got hit by a heatwave one weekend at the very end of June and my whole family was out of town and I spent two straight days recording. It was over 100 outside and probably 110 inside the little room I was recording in and I was violently downing ice water, sweating through my undies, and putting down every first thought that came into my mind the second I had it. I ended up making four songs over those two days which completed the storyline and officially made Father a concept album. It doesn’t happen very often that on Saturday morning you have nothing and on Sunday night you’ve essentially got an EP, so I was pretty psyched about that. I ended up cutting two of those songs, which meant that Father would be an incomplete concept album, but I committed to making a sequel which would fill in all the gaps and finish the story, really diving into the whole time travel aspect of it. I’ve got a few songs for that done but I’ve got no clue when the whole project will be finished. I always felt like Father was rushed, so I’m taking my time with Son.
CMM-If you could compose a score for any film director who would it be and what would the film be about?
Max-This technically isn’t the question but I thought I’d put it out there in case anyone is trying to make a Dazed and Confused-esque movie that I have been compiling my own soundtrack for the past five years which would work perfectly on it. I don’t know why I decided to do that, except that now I get a great 70s playlist, but I guess in the back of my mind I’m always hoping another Dazed and Confused will come along and I’ll get to be a part of it.
If there were any director I would want to compose the music for, it would be Dario Argento. I saw his movies for the first time last year and I loved them so much I named my last album, Deep Red, after one. I actually wrote my own horror movie with the incredible Sophie Sherlock partially so that I could practice working on a score like the ones Goblin did for Dario Argento. Some of those songs ended up on Deep Red. Lucretia, for example, was written for a particularly tantric sex scene where a few characters get killed off in pretty brutal fashion. It sounds bizarre, but if your horror movie doesn’t have a tantric sex scene where characters are killed off in a brutal fashion, what are you really doing? Anyways, that’s why I think Lucretia always sounds kind of unnerving to me, ‘cause it was literally made for a horror movie. The movie is called Shark Knight 2: Death by Murder, by the way, and it’s currently undergoing rewrites courtesy of Luke Wisniewski, who also happens to host a radio show I work on called NYWHO. I just wanted to work on something as campy and beautiful as what Dario Argento makes, and for those who’ve read it, they know it gets pretty crazy.
CMM-What do you have coming up next? Writing or recording anything new?
Max-I’m not too sure what’s next. As exciting and rewarding as it was, putting out Deep Red last summer was an incredibly taxing and emotionally exhausting experience. There’s a lot to be proud of Deep Red about. I think it’s my best album, it delves into some pretty heavy themes, and all money I make off of it gets donated to Planned Parenthood, but I also don’t ever want to go through what I had to go through in order to make it again.
All that being said, after I put it out in July I just took the pressure off and started writing a bunch of folkie songs again. I had no intention of starting up another album, and it was arguably the best continuous stretch of making music in my life, just in terms of how happy it made me (tied with making Bojaxis). For a long time I wanted to make something that was awesome, something epic, and I forgot how cool it can be to make something small and intimate. So for now, I’m just making music for me. I could technically put out another album whenever I want, I’ve got enough material for it, but I’m gonna keep messing around with different sounds and maybe revisit Father’s sequel and I’ll put out more material when I’ve got a couple of projects ready to go. Also, I’ve always been so focused on the recording and producing of my own albums that I never really took the time to play much music live, and that’s a big goal of mine for the near future. If you’re in Seattle for the summer, keep your eyes out, because I may swing by a few spots to test out some of these new folkie songs.
