Sitting down to talk with Milwaukee’s Maximiano about their new album Rokeby came in the middle of a busy day for both Max and I – they let me know they had just booked the most epic string of tour dates that lasts pretty much all the way through 2026 and the exhaustion was palpable.
Max wisely had us both take a pre-interview moment to be still with his meditation phone app, taking in some silence and breath to recharge and after, away we went – I was very eager to chat after listening to the full album the day before, enamored with its honest beauty and sonic shades of Sufjan Stevens.
The fact that Maximiano had traveled outside of his Milwaukee home to his former college town stomping grounds near Barrytown – a hamlet within the town of Red Hook in Dutchess County, New York called “Rokeby” – was something I wanted to explore; I love albums with a sense of place and couldn’t wait to dig into this one, even if it seemed personally tender to its subject.
Maximiano shared that they truly found healing by the Hudson [River], “undressing grief,” culminating in a collection of songs swirling with emotion, healing, and hope, written over the course of a ten-day dog-sitting gig (which is what originally brought them to the Hudson River Valley). And even with its humble and spontaneous beginnings, the singer-songwriter, producer, engineer, and multi-instrumentalist managed to loop in a pile of Milwaukee friends once back home to help amplify this moment, also aiding the healing process by banding together in both friendship and music.
Maximiano and I sat down and unfolded the story of how Rokeby came to be, the healing quality of the “puppers” named Bandit, who brought Max back to New York, the eerie mystery of the Hudson River (and bodies of water in general), and how writing songs can create mood shifts that help us get by.
Photo credit: Cameron Flynn
On “Rokeby” the place and Maximiano the person alchemizing songwriting magic.
I had a hunch that it was all gonna unfold. I’d spent so much of that year on the road and I had also been going through so many changes (and a lot of grieving) that I hadn’t slowed down. I kind of knew that when I took some time to just be with myself that the songs were gonna come, and then they did. I try to keep my “craft” side of making music as disciplined as possible, like just trying to write little things here and there all the time, so that when I have to use that muscle for something I really care about, it’s more instinctual that I can just sit down and do it and don’t have to wait for something else to come in and inspire me.I can just start working and see what happens.
On that first song that literally flooded in.
It was “I Will Not Abandon the River.” It came pretty powerfully. I was back in upstate New York where I’d lived for four years. It’s a place that, strangely, I’ve always gone back to whenever big changes happen in my life – most of the deaths and the breakups of my adult life in one way or another, I ended up back at that river, across from the Catskill Mountains, looking at them and crying. And this time around, I was down by the river crying quite a bit, but I brought my guitar with me. So once I finished with my “river wailing,” I just started playing and that song came out almost fully-formed right there. I took some recordings and I went back to the house and finished it off and from there, I got the confidence to keep going and the rest of the record came. I [then] went to the river like four times a day; like every time I walked the dog, basically, which is why I was there, dog-sitting for my former advisor.I went down there every day and every day something new popped out at me.
On how rivers and bodies of water carry inspiration (and eerieness).
[The Hudson River] is pretty haunted. I think most big bodies of water are, like Lake Michigan, the rivers here in Milwaukee – there’s some kind of soul to them that you can feel. And the Hudson Valley region especially, is very, very full of inspiration and creativity; not just because it’s beautiful, but because it’s kind of eerily beautiful. They can hold [things] and they can continue. The flowing river is such a good example of how we live – we fill up with all the things that we love, that are painful and we just keep flowing.
On how writing songs can inspire a mood shift.
I think that the mood shift was from being a person at the mercy of my feelings (which is how it often is when big changes come and grief is upon you) to being an artist…like sort of reminding myself that I have dedicated my life to turning whatever is inside of me into art and when “I Will Not Abandon the River” came out of me, it just reminded me that there’s so much worth in making things that are challenging at first to write because they’re so personal. Upon re-listening (and especially playing over and over again,) [the songs] are so cathartic that that initial feeling sort of becomes softer and softer. The way I often think about it is, it’s turning that grief to “compost” and then giving some room for something new to grow. So with the rest of the songs, it was just composting, especially the last half of the album.
Photo credit: Anna Goodwin
About writing and producing an album in halves.
Well, the first half I wrote in its entirety while I was there during that ten-day span, and the last five [songs], I started while I was there, but didn’t finish until later that year because also while I was there, I fell head over heels in love with somebody out in the Hudson Valley, and after trying a summer of long-distance, it just didn’t work and it ended pretty painfully. I realized those songs, which had sort of been wrapped around kind of feelings of loss, I rewrote and they became the way through that confusing, sort of very personal grief, while the first half of the record is sort of more keyed into collective grief and the ways that we as a society right now are experiencing massive amounts of change and anguish. Despair and anguish keep coming up more than they used to, too, and I would like that to be reflected in the production as well. I want to treat that with more layers of sound to reflect the complicated nature of that. But the back half – those songs just wanted to be raw and direct and I was pretty heartbroken and I didn’t want to get in the way of sharing that with any kind of masking in the production, so I recorded it in an afternoon with my friend Will Hansen to tape in full takes. And there are things in those recordings that I never would’ve put – something more produced, so I’m grateful that they are the way they are.
About taking a production class with Philip Weinrobe – producer for Big Thief’s Adrienne Lenker.
The last couple of years now, it’s been my day job to be a recording and mixing engineer for other people and I’ve sort of honed what I really like and what I think my voice is as a producer. I took a class with a really incredible engineer and producer named Phillip Weinrobe who’s been Adrienne Lenker’s producer on her last two solo records. The thing that his class taught me and – that I hear on this record – is that you need to move with ease and with motion as the most important thing; that getting stuck in tiny details will just lead you to a bad relationship with your own song, and these songs are very, very tender to me, so I wanted them to flow, so I kept things as simple as I could and I moved with my instinct and my emotion and it’s one of the rare times I get to do that, ’cause when I’m working with other people, I really want to put their work at the forefront. But with my own personal project, I wanted it to be an expression all the way through and I think that my intuition and my simplicity comes through pretty well on this record.
How Milwaukee showed up for Maximiano on Rokeby.
Nick Lang, who’s a really incredible drummer, we recorded drums on “I Will Not Abandon the River” and “Countryside” together. It was very fun to work with him. He has an incredibly sensitive ear. Also, Ellie Jackson, who as always, just brings joy to everything she touches, and so her harmonies are just indispensable. Pieces of this record – especially on the first half – Dandy L. Freling and Kati Katchever, who I’m in a folk group with,called the Big Heart Kind, recorded harmonies and harmonica on a song called “Puppers,” (about dogs) and, Will Hanson, of course – “Old Pup,” Milwaukee’s favorite son; he appears briefly on pedal steel on the first half of the album, but he is the sound of the latter half. [Will] works a lot of the time as a producer to tape. He has a very earthy kind of sensibility about what kind of sound he captures, and so I just instantly knew when I wrote those songs that he was the one to engineer them, so he worked on the back half.
Photo credit: Lauren Trific
What Maximiano’s communal hope is for the impact of this particular collection of songs.
I think that part of the use that music has in our lives is that it breaks us open or it can have the ability to make us more sensitive – to listen more closely to ourselves and to people around us. This record is about grief. It came from a place of very deep change in me and through the process of writing it, I’ve seen the use of grief [and] the way that it changes our inner chemistry. It’s definitely made me feel more capable of facing change. There is going to be more and more change already. Life feels completely different than it did six months ago…a year ago. I was just in Minneapolis and I witnessed how my friends there have been forced into a place of communal grief and how that state is the reason that they’re holding it together so well. That there is something about grief that is like compost; it grows something new when you can really share it and let it be what it needs to be in your life to make room for it, which I don’t think we have a lot of space for in our culture. So if anything, I think that this record just gives us a chance to crack open a little bit. [And] to quote one of the songs at the end of the record, to “shatter to the earth and then awake.” So the record is the first step to “shatter to the earth,” and my hope is that it helps people stay awake to what’s happening and to what they can do to support each other.
Maxiamiano releases Rokeby on April 1st with a Milwaukee release show scheduled at Cactus Club on April 4th with Field Report and Ava Brennan.
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