Max Gardener is a bedroom pop artist from Long Beach, CA, who’s début album Memory Lounge was released this month by Sports Day Records and Citrus City Records. Following on from ‘Get Lost’, which premièred over at GoldFlakePaint, Gardener has put out his second single, ‘Home Alone’.
‘Home Alone’ came to life when Gardener was packing up in Long Beach to move up the coast to San Francisco to go to college, so the track is composed of the million tiny excitements and anxieties that come with such a transition. While the whole song is a hazy dream cast in golden Californian light, there is quite a distinction between the verses, two forms of ambiguity which exist side by side. The first deals with the passing of time and the alarm you feel when opening your eyes to it, while the second points in the other direction, telescoping outwards into a future both long and excitingly indistinct.
“Write all day and dream away
theres nothing on the horizon
but the light that’s in your eyes
see where it goesI am home alone again”
The whole album is carved out of this paradoxical arrangement, a pre-collegiate hope mixed with the sneaking suspicion that there ain’t no end to the desert we cross. You can buy Memory Lounge now from the Max Gardener Bandcamp page. There’s also a special cassette release, featuring a personalised Memory Lounge matchbox, which is limited to thirty copies and will be available through Sports Day Records and the Citrus City Records Bandcamp page.