Dalmatian
Max Bemis Interview
by Joseph McCain
25 May 2026
What does the average day look like for you?
I would say that my average day is pretty different these days, but there's still a lot of the same stuff that's been going on the past fifteen, twenty years of my life; the dominant part of it is always recording music. I'm not one of these musicians who's like, it's the only thing I love to do. But I do like it, and it's one of my favorite things.
Even when I was starting the band out, recording our first, you could call it an album, in high school, when it wasn't my job, I'd get home from school and lose myself in production and sitting there, and I could have been jerking off, I could have been going to parties. But, I mean, I would really voluntarily come back and spend six, seven hours in a row for fun doing what I do now, where there tends to be an audience for it, or sometimes even I'm paid for it. So that's still a part of my life, and I think would exist even if I wasn't doing this. But I have CPTSD. So a lot of my day is just resting and recovering. Like, I'm in bed right now. And I sadly, I don't leave bed that much, but it's therapeutically permissible how much I'm asleep, depressed, and resting in this bed as opposed to a guy who's given up. I definitely haven't given up.
It's more that I've embraced this part of my life, so I try to be productive. I do get up and take walks and stuff. I just try to be as productive as I can in my depressed and traumatized state, to be honest. And half the memes I see are people just rotting in bed all the time.
I don't really put up a facade that I'm not. I don't feel like I'm the only one, but then everyone is posting or liking something related to this. I do feel like I'm the only one, half the time.
Are you more of a cook-at-home or takeout kinda guy?
I'm a DoorDash kinda guy.
I used to be a restaurant guy before COVID. It's one of those things that feels Portlandia to say, but I've been a foodie my whole life. I love food. I love weird, pretentious food.
I do have to say I developed slight social anxiety at a really young age and at various times, but I'm also an extrovert. So there have been times in my life when I don't mind going out to a nice restaurant or something like that. I don't mean expensive, just cool and good, going someplace new.
Once COVID hit, I got into the idea that I could just not have to deal with that social element or the time it takes to wait for the check, which I'm ridiculously annoying and ADD about. The fact that I could bypass those things, but I'm totally down to get something ridiculous on Uber Eats when I can financially.
What have you been listening to lately?
I listen to everything. I know that sounds like something someone says who's at Coachella in the audience. It doesn't matter because it's true. I really do listen to a lot of the same stuff. But then, since my thirties, it's leaned a little bit away from the typical stuff that I focus on mainly, which was post-Fugazi punk music, or even emo music.
I did get into punk music around thirteen, and I still love it, and I still love those bands. I guess that the music I listen to has to be a little bit more visceral in whatever direction it is, even if it's slow and plodding. I listen to a lot of slowcore and music that I can be fully depressed to. I can literally just hibernate, stare at a wall, and dissociate. And it'll be the soundtrack to that emotionally– Duster or something like that. Or the band Low, who's one of my favorite bands. And they're also really inspirational to me musically because there are little bits of that on the mixtape we just put out. But even if it's not, a lot of our songs are faster tempo-wise, and there's a lot of yelling, and I don't really sing in a low register. There's still a lot of musicality there that I relate to, and definitely, the emotional component is very raw and honest in a band like Low.
So, versus shoegaze, which I love, I think that sometimes with that, it's beautiful musically. But, you know, it can tend to be a little bit same-y when it comes to a lot of these types of music. It's not as much focused on the underlying melody or kicking you in the nuts when it comes to the intense depression or longing.
Hip-hop is the same for me. Some of the stuff that I liked ten years ago, I can't listen to as much because it doesn't rile me up enough. It doesn't have to be dark, it just has to be really emotive and unafraid to show a more animalistic side to human nature. I also listen to a lot of Converge, Cave in, and dark music; the first show I ever saw was Metallica.
These are kind of the things that sometimes I'll tell people, and they're like, “Oh, you know, we it you wouldn't know that necessarily from listening to Say Anything.” But if you listen to Say Anything a lot, there are plenty of those influences. Tupac was the first person I memorized lyrics from. Even some of the candences on Is a Real Boy are very hip hop-y, and very verbose, lots of talking, and the way I rhyme and things like that.
Same with metal and dark. That was stuff that was my gateway into punk, versus the other way around. I still love punk, hardcore, darker metal, hardcore math, stuff like that.
How often are you making music these days?
Every day, pretty much. I mean, there are days that feel really luxurious where I don't, that's the thing. The feeling after I do it for several hours, the way I do it makes me never wanna work on music again because I'm so OCD, and I get very into it. You can't even talk to me when I'm in that state.
On tour, it's different. When I play a show, the live experience is really different for me, because I don't play guitar. I do a lot of my own production, and I have for a long time. So I'm comping my own vocals from a bunch of different takes where I have to kinda get into the weeds, and it's like a lot of brain examination, and it's very personal in that regard. You have to be kind of numb and pushing because if you're producing, it's just endless. But then at the same time, the type of music I wanna make should be immediate. So I improvise a lot, and I wanna get takes that are very off the cuff. It's this weird mix of being very free and very OCD. When I record something, I’ll get to the point where I have my shirt off, and the fan is off, and I'm sweating and rolling around. So it's a weird mix, and it can be really exhausting, but it also keeps me sane.
It seems like you like shows more. Is it freer? That's the opposite of what I would have expected.
No, not all. I would say if I had to quantify, I would choose recording more. It's just that I don't stress out before a show, especially lately. Maybe for the first five years, I'd be really nervous, especially if it's a bigger show.
I also get nervous if we have a festival, like when we played When We Were Young. That was one of the most terrifying things ever because they have this rotating stage where you're set up behind the band that's playing, standing there at the mic, ready to go, like the Beatles. They turn around the thing, and then it’s like fuck. As opposed to you just walking on.
You look out, and there's a crowd that you would see watching Blink. So something like that can be really viscerally scary, and I just have to use breath work and therapy hurdles to get through it. But, generally, on tour, I walk on stage almost like nothing happened; there's no nervousness. And especially with what I hope Say Anything stands for, even live, the less guarded I am and the more I’m me; I mean, it is a persona to some degree, especially in the context of Say Anything.
A stand-up comic is, I guess, what I would compare it to. But if Marc Maron walks on stage, like, you don't wanna see him be too self-conscious about that. So I just really try to… I vape. I have my stupid vape, and I just walk on stage while I'm still vaping. And I try not to even separate it from the rest of my day.
Whereas if I sit down to record music, even if I find it taxing, it's just like a hobby. Performing doesn't feel like a hobby. It's more like a calling, and it's a form of art that I don't really think of it like I'm getting paid for it that much. I don't have a problem with money. So I don't think, “Yay, I’m getting paid,” as I'm going on stage. I just think of it as important. There are all these people here who really have had my music impact their lives, and this is the moment to take the stakes up, so that they walk away from this and they feel seen. You can look them in the eye. It's so visceral. It's like a magic moment. It's almost this mix of not caring, because that's the persona of a guy who's just walking on stage and kinda saying his weirdest thoughts, and then understanding that that casualness and off-the-cuff autism is what's helping people. So I have to really value that moment.
Do you feel dissonance between Say Anything and your solo/side projects?
For most bands, trying to get along still, whether they do or not, can be hard. But with me, I am the band, at least in a legal sense. The people I work with are invaluable, but whether I pay them or if they're nice enough just collaborating with me on a casual level, they're coming into what I see as a collective that revolves around me and Say Anything as a collective. But on paper, it's me. So if I wanna do something, I don't have to go to four people and ask for an OK. I imagine that’s how it is with Chino from the Deftones, for example, if he wants to go do one of his side projects. And I think there it actually did get gnarly with that at some point for them. Or, when Tom DeLonge did Boxcar Racer, it caused friction.
With me, I don't have anything to ask anyone, but it's about I do kind of manicure my output so that I think of if someone really cared about me as a listener, because I'm that kind of listener. Even for Chris, who is probably the best at this, Chris in Two Tongues is the best example of someone who I look at everything he does in a detailed way.
I would overall answer by saying that lately, I've just tried to do more within Say Anything. Because it's such a fluid thing that, for instance, we're making a record right now that is, essentially, a split with another band that I don't think I can spoil yet, or I would. But it's really just me and that band hunkering down in the studio and playing together and writing songs together. So it's easier to have a fluid definition of what a Say Anything record is than with most bands.
Do you feel a disconnect from your older songs? I hear that with a lot of artists.
I don't. When I do cringe, usually, it's something like Baseball, that era of music. I think that’s pretty normal. But there are times when I can listen to it, and even with the cringe, I’ll still think it’s pretty cool. I see why people love it. I'd say starting with Is a Real Boy, there's very little cringe. There are times when I, this is hard to admit for me, and most people don't, but I do listen occasionally to our own albums.
It's almost like a hard reset for me, and it's actually really nice when I haven't listened to an album in a long time because it feels like listening to someone else. You're like, "Wow. That guitar tone was cool.” I don't now hear all the fifty takes I did. And the way that I try to make music and Say Anything at the time is I need it to be something that I would love to hear that follows my own case. I'm almost never trying to make music that pleases my audience because I see myself as part of the audience. What would I wanna hear? And I love Say Anything. So, what do I wanna hear from the band? So when I listen to our old music, I hear the legacy. I hear all this history of how it touched people, and when I was making Is a Real Boy, we had never even toured. So it might not be as exciting to me as something I'm making right now, but I can go back and think about it in the context of the music video or playing it opening for Weezer or something. I look at the history of it, and it strikes me almost in the same way that it does for certain people, where it’s nostalgic.
My reference for it is really different, but it's impacted my life in an insanely positive way. Maybe if I had a negative career, I wouldn’t like it. If certain songs have a blatantly negative reaction, and there aren't many, maybe I’d have a different opinion. For example, Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too is a little harder for me, but I would say that's probably because I got in trouble for it. But even then, when I hear it, I think it’s a fun song.
You got in trouble for it? So many people love that one.
Yeah, it's gotten me shit. People do love it, and it's our biggest song, but also, there are false interpretations of it.
Do you have a favorite album of yours?
Sometimes I do. Right now, I don't. It's usually the last thing we did, so I would say the mixtape. I don't think Is a Real Boy is our best record. I think it's really special. It’s really cool for a debut record, and I understand why it's a lot of people's favorite record. I would never impugn that because there are bands where their first record is my favorite record, but they've also done amazing stuff since. For me, Foo Fighters is one of my favorite bands, and I would say, to some degree, The Colour And The Shape is their best record, it also has their biggest hits on it and everything.
But if someone played me all their records with no history attached of my own, I don't know if I would say it's my favorite record of theirs. I don't know. It's almost impossible to filter out what is contextual and what isn't.
So right now, just being as honest as possible, the last thing I did, which would be the mixtape, because it's my current musical self. And with the mixtape, it's openly self-indulgence. You have some nine-minute songs that are just me, self-consciously wanking, on purpose, as part of the concept. And it's very personal. Those songs got me through the hardest time in my life.
The first record of yours I heard, years ago, was Is a Real Boy and I definitely have some nostalgic attachment to it.
We recorded that in Williamsburg when it was the equivalent of maybe Queens today in terms of gentrification. I know it's much worse now, but it was at the very beginning, it was vintage stores and record stores, but there was not even a single Starbucks in Williamsburg. But it was literally the apex of indie sleaze. So that's why I wrote Admit It!!, it was my kind of, or the whole record really, was my reaction as a young, earnest kid to the shittiness that had the culture at that time.
You seem pretty grounded and self-aware about your music.
I came out weird, man, and part of it is actually positivity. I piss people off with it. Sometimes, I'm not a good friend because I always find the positive. But I'm also one of the most depressive, bleak, nihilistic people at the same time. I guess the way that I look at all of it is, I think that people just speak into being so much negative shit, but they don't have to.
For instance, I always had a hard time with criticism– music criticism, film criticism– and people being so shitty. Let's say you go to see a movie with The Rock in it. You could sit there and be shitty about it, the newer Jumanji movies, for example. So you could be like, yes, this sucks. Or you could be like, this is fine. This is good. What are you gonna project into the world? Because I'm analytical enough where I could listen to my old music and be like, “I hate this, I hate the way I'm singing that.” I do have those thoughts, but I'm also mindful. And those negative thoughts come from insecurity and projection. You should remember that. Someone like you is out there who doesn't have all those same convictions that you do.
I'm all for being really ethical, and I'm pretty hardcore when it comes to my beliefs. But I always say, I could be wrong about all of them. I don't know, I could be crazy. I could be a narcissist. I wouldn't even know. No one is infallible.
Max Bemis on Instagram
The Noise of Say Anything’s Room Without... on Spotify and Apple Music.