Zooming in from his home in Dallas, TX on a Thursday afternoon, Max Bemis, frontman of the rock band Say Anything—comprised of Bemis, Coby Lindy (drums), Alex Kent (bass), Brian Warren (guitar), Parker Case (keyboards, guitar), and Fred Mascherino (guitar)—is eager to chat about the band’s new record …Is Committed, out on May 24th via Dine Alone Records, an emotional record full of truths that the singer has grappled with over the past few years, some of which he has faced privately. Vape in hand— Bemis asked if it was cool that he smoked while we chatted before doing so— the singer calms himself and is ready to talk candidly about the totality of the path that led him to create this record. Bemis delves into the ways that tragedy, trauma, and searing honesty about himself and the forces that have shaped him birthed a record in which the singer lives by the mission statement stated at the start of the album’s opener “Be, Children: Intro To The Reunion Record.”
To understand the events that preceded the album’s creation truly, one must know of the crisis that befell the singer, the reception from the media during the band’s early years, and how Bemis’ life nearly unraveled during the pandemic. “This record was written to remind me of what I can’t become. It saved my life,” he admits.
Formed in 2000 by Bemis and his friends, the band released two EPs and signed to its first label, Doghouse Records in 2003. In 2005, the band signed with J Records and released … Is A Real Boy, following Bemis’ successful recovery and rehabilitation. After disbanding in 2018, months before the release of their eighth album, Oliver Appropriate, the band reunited in 2022. The band’s latest album Is Committed is the group’s first record release in four years, containing searingly honest and humorous tunes that created the heart-on-sleeve pathos that the band is known for.
It was the past treatment from the media and fans of the band that made Bemis initially retreat. Unable to enforce the boundaries between the fictional narrator in his songs and his true self, Bemis began to feel like he was a caricature of Jerry Seinfeld playing an empathy-averse fictionalized version of himself on Seinfeld. “There’s a lot of truth in the Say Anything albums, but I was often misperceived by the fans and the press,” Bemis says. “Eventually, I found myself starting to act like the character and it didn’t agree with me. I started wondering if I was a bad person who was completely insane and should be locked in a mental health facility. Or am I flawed but ultimately a good person who has just been writing about himself in very unhealthy ways?” The artist looks back on this period during the release of Oliver Appropriate and says that he still fears he’s a piece of shit, but for completely different reasons. “I naturally can be self-loathing and neurotic. It’s that they circle things like ‘Am I a good father? Am I a good husband? Am I doing the best thing for the fans of my band? Am I being good to myself?”
Bemis had a different view of self-worth back then. “Before, I would’ve never worried about that because I didn’t treat myself that well at all. I didn’t think that was a value worth having. I cared about other people a lot. What I learned was that I care about other people when I’m at my worst. I was naturally codependent for most of my life and part of that is confusing narcissism for codependency. It took treating myself terribly to the point of putting myself in harm’s way to see it’s me doing this to myself. This mindset to hurt myself was put there unintentionally by other people.” Bemis adds that the things he was saying in previous work had to be forced. “The things I said On … Is A Real Boy are a stretch. ‘Every Man Has A Molly’ is not true. These things that were made up on purpose were no longer made up. They were also absurd.”
In this current period in the band’s history, Bemis knew that he would return to the band someday. “I knew Say Anything was going to make music again and that was part of saying goodbye to it for a long time, leaving an escape clause in there. During the gap, there was never that feeling that made me want to start the band. When we broke up, I said that when we get back together, it has to be a disembodied spirit avatar for other people as much as it is for me. “The rebirth of the band comes from it being fully severed from me in purpose.”
A sabbatical sparked by multiple forces such as Donald Trump’s rise to power, and a growing misogyny within the rock scene led Bemis to focus on his life outside of music, channeling his energy on being the best parent possible to his five children and repudiating the youthful indiscretion of the past. Instead of crafting tunes for the band, he focused on recording solo material and diving into a second career as a comic book writer. Then things started to unravel, first slowly and then all at once. The pandemic caused both financial and mental health struggles for Bemis and his family. Bemis’ wife, Sherri Dupree-Bemis, who operated as the grounding force for their family, had experienced her psychological woes and Bemis had to be a stabilizing figure for the family.
The spiral continued. A few years earlier, the Bemis family relocated to Tyler, Texas, where Dupree was born and raised. As the strife and chaos metastasized, a few members of his adopted, extended Texan family began blaming Bemis for the duress. Public accusations were bandied about, and family services were called to investigate false claims of his children being at risk. Bemis had to work to clear his family’s name at the expense of his mental health and bank account.
The most relatable art can come from calamity, and the album’s single “Woman Song” was born from it. “It was this visceral feeling. Some of the best and worst ideas I’ve ever had are ideas I’ve had in the middle of the night when I’m at some emotional extreme or in an altered state of existence. Trauma dissociated me and if you had asked before anything that had birthed the album happened if I had experienced trauma, I would have laughed and said ‘Yeah, of course, constantly’ [chuckles], but this was a new level of trauma for me.”
It was a few days after a CPS checkup on the family started by false allegations that Bemis started writing the song. “Stuff was still ongoing within my family and with my wife’s recovery and one night of not being able to sleep and saying, ‘This is something I need to do.’”
With “Psyche,” the feelings of angst and a “serious punk anger” that Bemis had not felt in a long time bubbled to the surface. “Metaphorically, to keep living and to keep going for my family, I needed to feel that need to write,” Bemis says. Although Bemis wanted to fully focus on parenting and penning comic books, there was a larger force that was telling Bemis that he needed to ‘live.’
“Half of it is saying things that are happening, but I can’t believe this is happening and the way I’m saying it. But my life had become absurd as opposed to having to force the absurdism on a guy that had two kids living in Texas with his beautiful wife.” Out of the stressful time comes a song that offers a purging of emotions for anyone who has felt like the world is conspiring against them. A punk rock song that is meant to galvanize the listener, the song was meant to “jolt” Bemis and Coby, the band’s drummer at the time, into getting the band back together. Everything followed from there.
The record … Is Committed is an album that employs world-building and lore that is filled with jarring and uncomfortable honesty. Comprised of the “most honest songs written since high school,” the record serves as a raw portrait of someone living through crisis and finding catharsis in facing the truth on the other side. A return to form and a mid-career left turn simultaneously, the record includes the band’s trademark Jewish humor, absurdism, and exaggeration tempered by grim phantasms of adulthood which can be found in tracks like the bonus ripper “Rated-R Guitar” and “I Vibrator,” a song that lampoons the traditional ‘for the ladies’ tunes. However, the nuclear core of the album lies in Bemis’ unpacking of the layers of trauma found within his life. The tune titled “Carrie & Lowell & Cody (Pendent)” discusses the relationship Bemis has with his mother, seeing him get into conflict with her for the first time. A meditation on codependency and resolving conflict with loved ones, this song gets to the freedom that the album provides to Bemis and listeners. Religion is a subject on this album too. “We Say Grace In This Goddamn Band” sees the singer attack the small town in Texas that nearly destroyed him and the facade of kindness that can be present in fundamentalist Christian philosophy, while the single “Say Anything Collectively Made Love To Your God” discusses religious oppression. Part therapy session, part humanistic lament, and part biography, Bemis paints a picture of a bittersweet ending to a traumatic period of one’s life. Meant to be played at maximum volume, the anthemic songs on the record serve a larger purpose: giving hope and deliverance from trauma to others.
Bemis hopes that fans come away with a feeling of hope that things can be better after listening to the album. “Yes, it’s extremely fun for me and helped me get out of this rut that I’ve described and all of these terrible things. I want people to hear that I’ve been through this stuff and understand that no matter how dark things get for them or if they’re relating to some of the trauma that they’re hearing they feel like they lived long enough to make it. You can live long enough to help other people.”
For Bemis, this record does not completely “unburden” him from the devastation that colored the past few years of his life. “Art does not completely unburden you from trauma. Looking back since I finished the record, since I wrote “Psyche,” since Oliver Appropriate, and since I broke up the band, objectively I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve by making these decisions. Those issues I was singing about, that was just the beginning of those issues. So far, it’s done everything I’ve wanted it to do. It’s not just internal. When I see it’s resonating with others, that’s important, so far everyone has picked up on the things that I’ve wanted to be picked up on.”
…Is Committed is out Friday and you can pre-order it from Dine Alone Records. Follow Say Anything on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for future updates.
Photo courtesy of Crystal Kirby
