Say Anything

Hello, my name is Max and this is the bio I had to write for my band. We are called Say Anything. We have existed since Coby started playing drums over the horrible songs I wrote about girls while attending high school in Los Angeles, California. Being the egomaniacal singer type, I proceeded to kick out and\or drive away pretty much anyone else who joined the band, so there were a ton of lineup changes, yet somehow we ended up selling a lot of our self released\recorded cd. Soon, all these strange children started to repeatedly attend our live shows and tell their friends until we garnered a motley crew of a fan base. Being fresh faced teenagers, as well as the fact that we were playing with (and sounding like) bands like the Promise Ring (and such), it wasn’t a surprise that all these big scary labels saw us as a safe bet and tried to get us to sell our souls to them. They also told us we could be the next Blink 182 if we gave them our first-born children. That didn’t sound so hot to a bunch of gawky indie kids so we chose to be totally “underground” and sign to Doghouse Records. They’ve put out such obscure, borderline D.I.Y records as…..The All American Rejects. We were stoked at this point, but how we looked (goofy) and sounded (annoying) had us lumped in with a certain genre that was begging, begging for a backlash. I got really disillusioned and weird and went to college for a semester. Thus, I decided we needed to make “respectable” music.

During the lonely, depressing period of time when I dropped out of college to prepare for writing and recording our first record for Doghouse, I thought often about what the point of my life was. Was I doomed to remain yet another earnest, upper-middle class bred whine-rocker? After all, hidden deep in the recesses of my mind, I had hidden the notion that I could do something incredible and different, that I could be somebody like Warhol, or Jesus. I had to write an album that was revolutionary in its content and presentation. Finally, one night, it hit me. THAT was what my record had to be about: the fact that every creative person has this sick ambition to affect some sort of change in society with their art, to be more than just a guy in a band or a poet or a sculptor. I decided to parody that overzealous, overly ambitious drive in human beings by crafting a truly over the top musical about…myself. The songs were jam packed with fairly blatant nods to bands I dig (Queen, Pavement, Faith No More, Fugazi, etc). Together, the songs formed a narrative arc that we wrote an entire script around. The plot centered around a neurotic collegiate punk rocker (based on myself) who is imbued with a strange power that causes his inner thoughts to burst out of his mouth uncontrollably, backed by full instrumentation. He becomes the unwilling superhero of all things rock. We decided to record the songs for the “rock opera” first and then record the plot between the songs with speaking parts and a full cast of our friends. However, the process of playing all the instruments except for drums and singing all day turned into such an intense, draining process that I ended up wandering the streets of Brooklyn in a psychotic daze and getting thrown into the looney bin for two weeks. Needless to say, that sucked, so we parted with the idea of the “plot” portion of the record and decided we could make a much more concise record if we focused on just the music; after all, the songs told the story themselves. So Tim O’Heir (produced Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr., Superdrag) and Stephen Trask (wrote the songs for\produced Hedwig and the Angry Inch) helped me create a debut record (entitled Say Anything is a Real Boy) that I am truly proud of. It may even cure cancer. As for Coby and I, we, as well as new Say Anything members Casper Adams (ex-National Acrobat, guitar) and Alex Kent (ex- Lances Hero) will be coming to your town with the hopes of kissing you all over your neck until you can’t take it anymore and finish quite early.