Drummer Pat Kirch said The Maine used a mood board of sorts when they were working on their upcoming album.
“We wanted the intro song to almost be like the trailer for a movie, and then we wanted the second song to feel like the opening credits,” Kirch said Monday. “We had a plan mapped out in advance, and then we would just see how we felt that day and we made it happen.”
The 10th studio album from the alt/pop rockers, “Joy Next Door” is set for an April 10 release on Photo Finish Records. The album was written in chronological order, starting with “Green” as the first track and ending with “And Then” as the album closer.
“It was pretty hard, and I think for us having 10 albums now, it only gets harder because we don’t want to just retrace what we’ve done in the past,” Kirch said. “We want to always feel like we’re pushing ourselves into new territory that we haven’t been before. I think in order to do that, you have to get yourself out of your comfort zone. That can be hard, so it definitely doesn’t feel like, oh, because we’ve made a lot of records, we know what we’re doing. I think if anything, it gets harder.”
The Maine will be showing off their album and more on their I Love You But … I Chose The Maine tour, which hits Stage AE on April 14. They’ll be joined by Grayscale, Nightly and Friday Pilots Club.
In a phone call on an off day in Eugene, Oregon, Kirch gave a shoutout to the long-closed Club Zoo in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. He spoke with TribLive about The Maine’s latest single, an upcoming national TV debut and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
You’ve got the new album coming out, so what ideas and themes were the band hoping to explore with it?
I think for this record, our big intention was to make an album, not just a collection of songs. It feels like a lot of records being made now are made by, you meet a co-writer and a producer and you get in a room and you meet them that day and you finish recording a song in a couple of hours, and then the next day you do the exact same thing with a different person. Then all of a sudden you have 20 songs and then an A&R guy picks the 10 that he thinks will do best on TikTok, and that’s how an album is made. For us, I think that our fans want a body of work. They want an album, so that was our major intention behind it. We recorded the album from track one to track 11 in order. That way we could actually think about what type of song we needed next and what instruments should be on that song and how we wanted the emotion to be of it. So that was our major intent, to make a complete thought of an album.
Is hitting 10 studio albums a meaningful milestone for the band?
Yeah, for sure. Ten feels like a number that feels like some type of a completion of something. I don’t really know what that is, but it’s something that I know that not a lot of artists get to, even major artists throughout history. I think we have as many records as the Beatles at this point. So it’s something that we didn’t think would be possible. So it feels really important to us to make sure that, if we’re making a 10th album, and we’re adding another 11 songs into people’s lives, that they’re important and that they’re not just like, we’re doing a record because that’s what bands do. We feel like we have enough songs. We have way too many songs to even fit in the show when we go on tour. So it’s like, we don’t need more. We only need more because that’s what we’re here to do, to make music. So that’s the reason that we do it. So in that sense, yeah, it’s super meaningful to feel like on our 10th album, it feels important and it feels like something that we’re so passionate about doing.
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How would you describe the “feel” of this album in comparison to, say, 2023’s self-titled album? Does it feel different?
Yeah, there’s a little more organic instrumentation. There’s acoustic guitars and pianos and the drums aren’t edited on the computer completely perfectly. I think we wanted it to be the sound of the five of us and the uniqueness that we have when we play together. I think it’s so easy now with the click of a button, you can make a performance absolutely perfect. That ends up just making it to where any song could sound like anybody’s song. Our whole goal was just, how do we make something that it sounds like only the five of us could do? The only way to do that is to actually make it just us performing. So I think the biggest difference is just it isn’t so perfect.
What would you say is your favorite song from the album, and what makes it your favorite?
I think right now I’d go with “Green,” which is the opening track on the record. I think it really is the calling card for the album, and you can kind of hear bits and pieces of what the entire record is in that one song.
The most recent single is “Palms,” so can you give the backstory on how that song came together?
That one was written right before we went into the studio and John (O’Callaghan), our singer, wrote it in like half an hour. It came together just so fast. That part of the process was extremely easy. And then the really hard part for the rest of the time was to just fight our instinct to change stuff in the studio. We made eight different versions of the song, and we ended up going back to the very first version. I think that was the easiest song to write and the hardest one to finish. (laughs)
Have you ever had any other songs that it only took a half hour to make?
There’s only been a couple throughout the history (of the band). It all comes in different ways. There’s songs that take two years to make, and some that take a half an hour. But I would say being that fast is pretty rare.
The band’s also going to be on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” in April. Is that the band’s first national TV appearance?
Yeah, it is, and we’re pumped. It’s one of those things like, for our parents and stuff, obviously, they’re super supportive of the band, and they come to the shows. But it’s those kind of things that make it feel like, oh, we’re a real band. It’s a moment of pride. They can’t quite quantify the fan base and all that stuff, because they’re not in it every day. So having that type of a thing is cool. My dad told me he’s ready to record it on his DVR. (laughs)
You guys have been doing this for 19 years, so hopefully the parents have realized that this is a real band by now!
They have. This is the extra thing for their friends and stuff. My dad actually was our driver in our RV on our first tour because I was only like 15 on our first tour. They’ve been there from the start.
I’ve read about the Free For All Tour in 2015. Do you look back on that fondly, and is that something that you’d see the band ever doing again?
Yeah, that was an awesome time. For us at the time, it was just like, what can we do to say thank you to the fans that have made it possible for us to be a band for so long? We thought that that was an awesome way, that they had bought tickets to shows for a decade at that point. We just wanted to say thank you. The logistics of it were extremely difficult, which is why we haven’t done it again. (laughs) But I think at some point, for sure, it’d be great to bring that back.