"Sing" by Mae, Monday, April 11, 2022
In 2021, Dave Elkins and Zach Gehring of Mae talked with The BlackSheep Podcast: Presented by HM Magazine about the Mae's career and the future of the band. The interview took place nearly three years after Mae's technically second self-titled album Multisensory Aesthetic Experience was released. Elkins and Gehring give insight into the making of Mae's latest project on the podcast, and it's certainly worth a listen for anyone who has any fondness for Mae. And, I realize that this is two Mae songs in a row, though by a technicality I'm not breaking the rules. Dave Elkins was the chief artist yesterday, although he was singing one of Mae's most famous songs.
SO OPEN UP UNTIL YOU KNOW THERE'S MORE THAN EITHER/OR. One of the podcasters admitted that it took several listens for him to appreciate Multisensory as an album, and the podcaster claimed that, perhaps even compared to all the musical experimentations in the band's discography and 7+ minute songs on their (m)(a)(e) EP series, Multisensory was the most experimental record the band has produced. The band did, after all, produce a music video visualizer film for the entire album and go on tour recommending that the audience wear VR sets. The music on this record isn't jarring and a lot of the melodies are catchy. Lyrically, there are a few good lines. The space imagery aims and the colors seem to play into a sort of synesthesia. But just as the album sat hard with the reviewers, Elkins, too, said the album was difficult to make and not a pleasant process. In the interview, Elkins talks about deconstructing his Christian faith, coming to realize the traditional teachings of the church were both comforting and damaging to him. He says that he wanted "to use Mae as a sounding board for [his] own faith deconstruction" essentially trying to gather the elements of his past and make sense of the direction his life was heading.
I THINK WE BOTH WANT HARMONY NOW. Gehring also talks about the difficulty producing Multisensory. He talks about working several jobs and having a newborn during the recording of the record, which limited his time in the studio. The band recorded the album at different times, which made it difficult to collaborate on ideas. Today's song, "Sing," seems to attest to this frustration. The speaker longs to "create harmony" with the other person, but he cannot find the key that the other person is singing in. It's an interesting metaphor for life, whether talking about a friendship or a relationship. Whereas Gehring didn't have the opportunity to work closely with the band for extended periods of time, Elkins talks about how the moments in the recording studio lead to conversations that clarified his new set of beliefs and "unclogging a pipe of creativity" so that the band can produce even better work in the future, whenever Covid and distance across states will bring them back together to record the follow up.
Comments
Post a Comment