Say Anything Return with New/Old Line-up Featuring Fred Mascherino & New Single "Psyche!" After 5-year Break-up (Dine Alone Records)
Say Anything have returned to release their first new music together as a band since 2019's would-be swansong, Oliver Appropriate. "Psyche!" reunites Say Anything's mouthpiece and mastermind, Max Bemis, with the band's original drummer, Coby Linder, former bandmates, Alexander "Alex" Kent on bass [and] Parker Case on synths and programming, and adding into the fold Brian Warren (Weatherbox) and Fred Mascherino (The Color Fred, Taking Back Sunday,) who, actually, briefly toured with Say Anything through 2014, offered additional production on the track, alongside Case. With his signature snarl, Bemis proclaims in the opening lines of the song, "we are born again. We've died and sprung to life, so wet and fresh." "Psyche!," replete with lyrical nods to the band's contemporaries in the Pop-punk scene—"I will sing the requiem" (Saves The Day,) "blink and you'll miss" (blink-182,) "to the crucifix with Twin F***ing Forks" (Chris Carrabba)—is a near six-minute long, stream-of-consciousness, self-referential, and attitude-laden return for one of the most beloved bands to come out of the early aughts Alternative Rock scene.
However, it really shouldn't be too surprising that Bemis got Say Anything back together just five years after dramatically, albiet briefly, breaking it up and, especially, since he posted on Instagram in October 2022 that the band would be performing at the 2023 edition of When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. So, who knows what's next for Say Anything, but they're back in-effect as a fully-functioning band. It appears as though more sprawling songs, an album(s), and extensive touring are all in store for us within the not so distant future. Say Anything's "Psyche!" is now available on streaming services through their new/old label home, Dine Alone Records. There's a crazy, extensive, extremely wordy, endlessly babbling "press statement" from Max Bemis himself that we found last week on chorus.fm. It's included down below the break in full because we just didn't have the heart to edit and/or take anything out.
Say Anything's (public) career began with a record where I stretched my super-ego into a character that could define everything I hated about myself and my generation and how that mess of Bohemian pretensions and wide-eyed conviction could one day, perhaps, be a real, redeemable boy. Almost two decades later, after marinating in both the toxic sludge of artistic industrialization and the actual spiritual good this incredibly dubious notion was doing for real people in emotional pain, I realized I stood at a crossroads where I could, literally, become that character (i.e. keep snorting things and chasing my teenage dream) or cease defining myself by being "Emo Beck" and throw myself into life as a father, a husband, and someone who truly cherished the process of writing, my first love as a creator. Five-ish years went by and I went broke, went through a jarring mid-life crisis, got sober, and almost lost [my] wife and kids to a combination of my own naivete and rubbing up against a few sick f***ing people, who probably just needed a hug, but, instead, took it out on the nearest bastion of innocence they try to skullf**k.
I stopped giving a sh*t about the Bowie-like conceit of Say Anything being a "dead" character named Oliver, who I metaphorically "drowned" in order to escape a false image of myself I had accidentally imprinted on my art... because I live on Planet Earth and that kind of makes no sense to anyone not obsessed with Grant Morrison and the film Adaptation. After spending almost a decade shunning it, I simply needed to play grating Emotional Hardcore music because I was sad, tired, and wanted to scream and cry a lot. Maybe, I'm an Emo late-bloomer in that while I was j**king off to film class in West Hollywood, my fans were going through real-life traumas that I really feel like I've only experienced recently. And, specifically, I missed lighting up the skeptical eyes of Coby Linder, who founded Say Anything with me, with just an acoustic song, too many time changes, and the need to excite my own personal Silent Bob on a deep level. During the peak of said emotional mid-life entanglement, on very little sleep, probably during or directly following a good cry to Something to Write Home About, I sat on my porch as the sun rose, shirt off, sweating, spitting, drooling, and improvised the song "Psyche!" in one take.
Say Anything at The Bowey Ballroom - Night 2 (CREDIT: Nicole Mago)
I sent Coby the acoustic demo and he got it immediately: Say Anything's future (which is, in terms of the band's meta-narrative, technically, some kind of sublimated "afterlife," but, again, very few people give a f**k) consisted of a project disembodied from my own personal bullsh*t. It would exist for what it was ever good for in the first place: to help people, to excite them, to drive around and scream along to with old friends or new ones you didn't realize were, also, once Emo, and, in sharing this moment, you now trust more on some weird level. In terms of its effect on me and Coby, we simply accepted we were now just fans of our own band. The music we're working on now is so meta it's not. It's a satire of everything our band was, and the idea of every Emo band coming back after five years, going "back to basics" and grasping for the fanbase they discarded so callously by diving headfirst into their fans' wants and needs, instead of gorging on major label cash and, then, still trying to be the next Animal Collective or [The] Strokes, despite what their band actually sounds like, to be thwarted every time by Indie gatekeepers.
"Psyche!" is probably the apex of this concept, full of Easter eggs, sincere attempts at Stadium Rock and an incredibly disturbing outro hinting at the real-life situation this new music revolves around. For the first time since our first record, probably, the irony behind the concept comes full-circle and becomes utterly sincere because this neurotic, cheesy, and excitable heartfelt music is what I needed to survive the hardest time of my life, a phrase I remain #humbledddddd to hear from fans of Say Anything to this day; again, Say Anything now serves the same purpose for me as it does for them, which, again, ironically, actually, has nothing to do with the generous money we're getting from festivals to play shows again; this song only exists because of the strange brew of Saves The Day & Queen that I just needed to hear as much as I needed to make it... which is why we formed the band in [2000] in the first place. It's, also, actually, played and sung by the people who will be playing it live, including Coby himself, the prodigal bass-master Alexander T. Kent (of In Defense of The Genre and our self-titled LP,) the beautiful enigma that is Parker Case, as well as two of my favorite musicians, Brian Warren (of the better version of my [own] band called Weatherbox) and Fred Mascherino (of [The] Color Fred, [Taking Back Sunday], and generally just shredding.)
So, this would be a first in that what you're hearing... Is A Real Band, not me [Prince-ing] it up. All that remains is to look you directly in the f***ing eye and make you sing it back to me... that is, after I drag my middle-aged, hypothyroidal, hemorrhoidal dad bod out of the side of the bed where I've spent most of the last decade vaping and get ready to fling myself around the stage like [Zach] Galifianakis deluding himself into thinking he's Mick Jagger, as my five kids watch dumbfounded like, "who the f**k does he think he is?" and my wife smiles sadly knowing that even now, I think this bullsh*t impresses her.
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