The Maine is in a funny place.
John O’Callaghan sits outside underneath a cloudless sky. It’s mid-March, just late enough into the month when the temperature begins to level out in the evening at a moderate 71. When the sun sets, it’s not hot, nor is it cold. The weather, as he explains it, just is. He compares the weather to the band The Jayhawks, one of his favorites.
“For me, this is just music,” he says. “This is what I think of as music. It doesn’t make me feel too happy and it doesn’t make me feel too sad. It makes me feel just right.”
He then laughs off the fact that he’s made a glaring “three little bears” metaphor. But, he insists, that’s the kind of record he wanted to make. A record that didn’t feel too syrupy, too sweet, nor make it feel too heavy or dark.
“I wanted to make a record that felt good,” he says. “Like summertime or a cloudless sky, I suppose. And regardless of the lyrics, if people just heard the music, I would want them to feel nice. Make them feel kind of warm.”
That record is American Candy, The Maine’s fifth studio album and third on an independent record label. O’Callaghan is the singer, songwriter and frontman of The Maine, a band that has constantly changed, evolved, pushed, expired themselves creatively and has continued to come out with something new, something fresh.
Most of the changes and newness come from the album’s pop sensibilities. Coming off of two very heavy and dark rock albums (Pioneer, Forever Halloween) The Maine have pulled back the reins on somber tones and went for a lighter and less aggressive sound. Sonically, it’s got grooves, melody and quickness. Even lyrically, it’s upbeat and hopeful. The choice to make a lighter-feeling album was a conscience choice of O’Callaghan’s.
“The main difference on this album was that I vocalized to the guys for the first time what kind of record I wanted to make,” he says. “Everybody got on board early on and we knew what kind of feeling we wanted to convey. With the sonic qualities alone – lyrics aside – we really wanted to focus on something that had a groove and something that felt new but familiar at the same time. Something that you could’ve heard before, but something that could be from us, very sincere and couldn’t be recreated by anyone else.”
The inspiration and general happiness came from a summer on the road with good friends and better times. The epiphany, as he calls it, came from a realization of how much people’s personal mood and energy affects him and everyone around him. That invisible and breathable energy that can’t be physically felt. Only through thought, reflection, recollection and recognition can someone take it all in for what it’s worth. Or in hippie talk: good vibes. It wasn’t a foreign feeling for O’Callaghan or the rest of the guys, either. They’ve been a relentless road band for over seven years now. But sometimes it takes the right blend of connectivity and contemplation to get back to writing – in what he sought after – a “contagiously optimistic record.”
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The first two questions the band asked themselves prior to recording American Candy was, “Where are we going to do it?” and “With whom are we going to do it with?” The latter question was answered fairly quickly.
“We decided on Colby (Wedgeworth, who produced Pioneer) pretty early on in the process,” says O’Callaghan. “Not having to build a report with someone is a luxury in a lot of ways. Colby learned a lot about us as much as we learned about him that first time around and having that relationship where you don’t have to beat around the bush during certain scenarios is nice. For me it was really great because I really trust the dude and do believe the advice and criticism that he gives me and believe he just wants to make a great album.”
With a producer at the helm, the band packed up an impressive amount of recording gear that they had accumulated over the years and drove across the desert from Phoenix to Joshua Tree, California. For thirty days in a dome-shaped house that looked out past the mountains of southern California, The Maine had a job to do. Getting into a routine, O’Callaghan would wake up early with the rest of the guys, sweat out all the expensed energy from the day before in the house’s sauna, throw on a pot of coffee and have breakfast with the crew. Then The Maine went to work.
Using the master bedroom as the control room, the indoor pool to track drums, various rooms for various mics, hook-ups and booths, the band narrowed down 400-some-odd demos that were neatly organized on O’Callaghan’s computer under “older” and “newer” into ten songs and 35-minutes of energetic, compact and delightfully powerful songs.
On the first spin, American Candy is over before you know it. The swiftness was also a conscious decision made by the group. Pat Kirch is tight as always behind the kit, driving each song with vigor and pop. Very in synch with Kirch is Garrett Nickelsen on bass, in the groove and along for the ride. Kennedy Brock gets the most vocal play of any album to date and meshes extremely well in the harmony underneath the lead. But with the speed of the album at an all time high, Jared Monaco’s lead guitar is underused; his impressive and inventive solos are missing. Without being able to get lost in the music, you get caught up in O’Callaghan’s words instead.
What will you do on the weekends / when your best friends / become your dead friends?
That’s a line from the title track, a jaw-dropping opening lyric that introduces the album’s least discreet message. The verse continues:
From all the sugar and all the sweetness / this is your sweet tooth, it is your weakness.
For three albums now, O’Callaghan has been writing from the perspective of a man with questions, a man not comfortable being fed whatever society feeds him, a man who thinks freely and voices his opinion.
“For me, it’s important to talk about because I feel like it’s not talked about enough,” he says. “A lot of things aren’t questioned, and really that’s the bottom line as far as I’m concerned. I just want to vocalize the idea that it’s okay and necessary to question things because that’s how our society changes as a whole. If we just blindly accept everything that we’re fed, that’s a recipe for regression. Things don’t always have to be so serious, but at the same time, I don’t think everything always has to be blindly accepted.”
He’s written songs about girls and will continue to write songs about girls, but at 26, he feels a responsibility and an obligation to say something a little bit more five albums in.
“I think I would be a disappointment, personally, if I didn’t use this soapbox for some good,” he says. “I’ll always have to pepper in some of that reality – or what I perceive as reality. And again, it’s not like I’m saying, ‘This is how it goes.’ All I want to do is give perspective and hopefully evoke some of those things that are dormant in people’s heads.”
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Back in Arizona, O’Callaghan sits with a friend he’s known since sixth grade. A close friend. A best friend. He has a solid bunch of those, a group of friends who have continued to surround him with love, brotherhood and a tangible, so-strong-you-could-feel-its’-roots type of dynamic that he’s very adamant and comfortable writing and singing about.
“I’m not going to do the whole ‘I have the best friends in the world,’ so it would be relative speech,” he says. “But I do feel like I have something super unique out here.”
Going back to their debut album, there have been constant shout-outs to friendships and the important bonds that O’Callaghan and the band mates have made since childhood and the band’s inception. “We’ll All Be,” “Like We Did,” “Fucked Up Kids,” to name a few. American Candy’s comes in the form of a sing-a-long, the album’s farewell.
This one goes out to my closest friends / the ones who make me feel less alien / I do not think I would be here if not for them.
“It’s really important to me to make that known on these albums,” he says. “It’s such a relatable thing for people to hear and it’s great that I can say it and sing with such certainty and people can listen to it and digest it and feel the same way about their own friends, their own dynamic and their own pals. I think that’s why people dig it and that’s why I dig it so much, because it’s coming from that tangible place. Emotion that is real. I owe those guys a lot and songs are just a subtle homage to the years we’ve shared.”
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Elsewhere on American Candy there are serious moments, suggestive moments and thought-provoking moments. O’Callaghan sings of self-discovery, a diet-indulged society, pretty girls along the San Francisco coast and an underground to explore, subtly inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground, a book he read while writing the album. But again, this is an album that keeps it light. So he also sings about his hair.
Interview by Patrick Filibin
