In the decade-plus I’ve known Maxwell Stern, he’s never been one to stop. And I’ll go out on a limb and say that anyone else who has come to know Max—maybe from one of his several bands (Signals Midwest, Meridian, Timeshares), or perhaps sweating it out in the pit at a show at some point in time, or maybe from a ska message board in the early 2000s—would say the same thing. Max has this undeniable urge to create. It’s like an impulse, really; an uncontrollable desire to try and make sense of the thoughts and emotions and anxieties about the world that swirl around our heads at any given point in time—and funnel it all into a song. Maybe it’s a song that people can relate to. Hopefully it’s one that they can sing along to.
For Max, Impossible Sum—his first proper solo record—is an honest-to-God effort to wrangle heartfelt and sometimes confusing feelings of adjustment, displacement, and settling into song. These songs have the kind of heart-on-the-sleeve vulnerability that fans of his other bands have come to admire, but presented in a completely unfiltered fashion, existing exactly as they need to be. ” Max tells me. “So I really tried hard to throw that kind of thinking out for the sake of making something different.”
