“The large and the small sit side by side, bereavement next to dancing in bars, favourite shirts alongside fatherhood, as MBK collapses the line between the significant and insignificant to evoke the very fabric of existence and all its messy threads. The result is tender, often joyous and occasionally heartbreaking, songs which treat life as a privilege no matter what any one day might throw at you.” So we wrote of Baby Green, the new album from San Francisco-born, New Orleans-based songwriter Max Bien Kahn back in August, introducing a record which takes a big swing in order to capture the full spectrum of human experience as witnessed from one person’s perspective. The album’s energy is furthered by the fact it was recorded live, Bien Kahn working with Ross Farbe at New Orleans’s Little Squeeze Studios for four days with band members Kunal Prakash (of Silver Synthetic), Ray Micarelli (Video Age), Gina Leslie, Matt Bell, Shaye Cohn, Ajai Combelic and Cameron Snyder. A method which charges the sound with an almost feverish quality, everything delivered with the authenticity of immediacy.
After recent single ‘Neighbours’, a song “which manages to mine the ostensibly mundane experience of nodding hello to a familiar face in the neighbourhood for all of its uplifting delight, and all without a trace of irony,” as we put it, “even if the repeated assertion ‘I’m not afraid of strangers’ suggests something telling about the contemporary moment,” Max Bien Kahn has now returned with ‘Skipping Stones’. Again crafted with equal parts brightness and wistful reflection, the song takes another incidental encounter and turns it into a meditation on the momentum of a life and the routines which maintain its forward motion, or else preserve the illusion long enough to allow us the will to climb out of bed in the morning.
Standing in line
The cafe is full
And they’re sitting by the window
I accidentally catch their eye and smile
They’re married to their jobs
And married to each otherI don’t ask hard questions
When I don’t want the answer
And every skipping stone hits the bottom
Baby Green will be released on the 23rd October and you can pre-order it now from the Max Bien Kahn Bandcamp page.
