Max Rainier has a lot to celebrate these days.
After nearly a decade together, the front man for Wilderado says the Tulsa-based trio (which also includes with Justin Kila and Tyler Wimpee) has finally dialed in its sound. Despite solid critical acclaim for past releases and a fervent fan base waiting on new music, Rainier says it wasn't until the recording sessions for their new EP, Talker, that they landed on the vibe they've been chasing for so long.
In our latest interview feature, we sat down with Max Rainier to talk about the evolution of Wilderado and a mindset shift of the last few years. It's a story of a band learning to celebrate what they can and finding healthy measures to deal with the rest.
Analogue: You guys had some solid momentum from the outside looking in a few years ago and then the world stopped. You’ve picked up where you left off, but did that create any sort of identity crisis for you there?
Max Rainer: I don’t think I had any sort of identity crisis. I’ve never wanted to be on the road, so whenever the pandemic happened, it was awesome for me. We just kicked it. We made a studio and we wrote songs and we actually got to see our baby. So it was the greatest. Then we followed that time off with 265 days on the road in 2022.
So we followed the pandemic with the most brutal year of all time and then in ’23, we did things in a much more moderate way. That helped a lot because I think a lot of us were like, ‘Never again!’ I think doing less of it helped it be more about the music, to tell you the truth.
You’ll never believe how hard touring is, especially for a band like us that has no crew. You just go out and grind and you’re sitting and waiting in places for hours and hours a day. It’s just brutal, so if you’re doing it too much and you can’t see it as an adventure and instead just something you’re signed up to do, it becomes too much of a head case.
Analogue: Was there a reckoning after a year like that?
Max: Yeah, that’s how it was. We asked what we needed to do, so what we did was to write another record. That’s what it always is. You’ve gotta be excited by something. You have to continually start all of this over or it goes into madness.
Analogue: Have you found a way to change your relationship with the expected cycle? Do you develop guardrails?
Max: Yeah, I think our entire team just saw that we weren’t going to be the kind of band that’s so stoked to spend their lives on the road partying and cruising around. We’re songwriters and we go play on the road because it’s such a fun cool mix-up. That’s how I’d hope it would be. You go out and make some money and see it as the time you go and connect. At the same time, it should be a celebration of what you’ve done.
So I think finding the balance of it is really important for us. But that’s also difficult to do because the moment you find that balance, someone changes their opinion. So it’s always this plastic state of mind and making sure everyone is heard. You have to be honest.
Analogue: I love the term that you used there about learning to celebrate the album. Is that a learned thing or has every release naturally felt that way?
Max: I think it’s felt that way for me. You get done with it and people start listening to it and then you go sing songs together. We’re working but the crowd is hopefully in a state of enjoyment and ease and that’s why we’re there, to hopefully give people that moment where they get to leave wherever they were before and come into a new place. Hopefully, that’s a place of relaxation and goodness.
The celebration of it all is that—the give and take we get from our audience listening and so we go and try to give back to them. What a wild thing to have done. So many people try and so few get to the point where they have people looking forward to hearing them. The more you can think about it like that as a celebration, the healthier it is.
"We wanted to make music that you could listen to anywhere. I didn’t any of it to be situational."
Analogue: Speaking of celebrating, what are you celebrating on the new album?
Max: Yeah, we’re celebrating a lot—maybe mostly that this is the first record we’ve made that I really went in with something I wanted to do. Before, our process has been to write tunes, make them sound as cool as we can, and then sequence them. But I really went in with a goal, and so what I’d celebrate is that we made exactly what I was wanting to hear. I just love it. I think it’s awesome and it’s the vibe I wanted to make. I feel really grateful that we were able to pull it off.
Analogue: Can you make that tangible? You used the word “vibe.”
Max: It’s funny because everyone uses the word “vibe” as a blanket statement. [Laughs] I try to use vibe as much as I can until someone asks me what that means. But the vibe I wanted to create or that we did create is that we wanted to make music that you could listen to anywhere. I didn’t any of it to be situational.
I thought so much of our first LP was situational. I love that and I’m proud of it, for sure, but you can’t turn any one of those songs on any time and have it be a perfect accompaniment for what you’re going through. You can’t just play “Head Right” at any time. You have to be in a state of mind where you want to yell or go fast. I think I got so fed up with having to enter that state to perform it or just having to way project my voice on “Outside My Head”.
“Outside My Head” might be my favorite song we’ve ever written, but me and our drummer spent so much talking about the fact that we had all the time in the world to create what we wanted. So we started by setting up some clearly defined visions and one of them was to make a record that, if you turn it on loud, it feels like you’re jamming, but it you turn it on soft, it’s not distracting. It’s just an energy that’s coming through.
I think we did that. It’s crazy. You turn on these tunes and you turn ‘em up and it feels like you’re jamming out. The guitars sound amazing behind it. But the drums never bash away and the vocals never project or yell at you. I was intent on capturing my vocal in a way we’d never captured it before, which was in a state of ease. We want it relaxed and casual and yet we wanted an energy all around it.
Analogue: Did everyone get that vision when you presented it?
Max: Yeah, everyone got it in theory. It took two years of work to make it a reality. [Laughs] I can’t tell you the number of times we threw a song away.
Analogue: Really?
Max: Yeah, we have a song on the next record called “Higher Than Most” that probably had six versions. I wrote dozens of versions of it and then we danced around sounds forever and ever. What was fun and frustrating at the same time was that I was not going to progress if it did not feel right. It took a long time but it was undeniable when something was right. We had a rule that if something was not undeniable then it wasn’t done.
VISIT: Wilderado
