Karen Ponzio Photos
Maxwell Omer at The State House rehearsing for the Cabaret last year.
Maxwell Omer is contemplative, calm, still, but not at rest. While many musicians are waiting for venues to open and trying to find a way to create through a pandemic-induced lack of gigs, the New Haven-based lead singer and guitarist for The Right Offs has chosen to remain present and put the work in where he can: with his songwriting.
“I have a weird relationship with it,” Omer — a.k.a. Max Loignon — said about the conditions of the pandemic. “I can’t totally hate that I have time to write without thinking about anything else.”
The Right Offs had come into 2020 fresh off of a series of shows celebrating the release of the band’s latest EP, Fake Adjustments, and the crew was ready to settle into a spring that would focus on preparing for the next release, a full-length album titled Bardo, which Omer said he and the other band members — Than Rolnick on bass and vocals and Bob Breychak, a.k.a. Bob Rock, on drums — have been working on for the last two years and are currently shopping around to labels.
“This didn’t come at a terrible time for us,” said Omer. “We were planning on being a little bit quiet anyway, getting housekeeping stuff done — social media, press kit, bios — things we had been putting off. We planned on being out of state over the summer — New Jersey, New York, Philly — that was going to be our big push. That’s on hold now.”
Omer talked about the growing concerns over the “the musical landscape” post-pandemic. “Will there be a traffic jam once it opens up?” he asked. “Who will play?… We will try to be as smart as we can and a bit clever if we have to, but it’s a lot of wait and see.”
When it comes to writing, however, there is no wait and see time for Omer. “Once we got all the tracks done for Bardo last spring, I started writing songs,” he said. “I kept working on them, but then they got pushed to the back burner with shows in the fall and winter. Those songs were in a good place, not done, but they had their foundations. I knew if I wanted to pick it up it wouldn’t be hard to do.”
For the past two months that is exactly what Omer has done. With East Rock Coffee, where he works, closed for a period of time along with venues closed and gigs cancelled, Omer was left with “nothing to do.”
“I can’t have nothing to do, so I regimented my writing” he said. “I got up early and told myself ‘I’m gonna finish this song today, if it takes two hours or the whole day.’ I held myself to having to go to work. It helped me stay focused.”
Did the current state of the world have any effect on his lyrics? “I don’t want this to touch on my art, but I will say I have found some songs that might be a bit relevant,” said Omer. “They feel a bit appropriate for these times and coming back. I tailored some of the lyrics to what it will feel like when the world comes back to normal.”
Omer has a gift for poetics in his songwriting and does not necessarily stick to one topic or narrative for his projects. “I don’t think Bardo had a big story in my head. There was a theme I stuck to only moderately. It’s still a bit there. Once it was done and I started the next round of writing, I just wanted to write good songs.” When Omer writes, he said, “I’m not worried about a collective album. I do a better job if it’s more varied. The songs have a quality of ‘devil may care, you’re on your own buddy’ … I’ll leave it for the listeners to decide.”
The Right Offs.
As far as his most recent writings, he noted that two-thirds of the songs have already been shared with bandmates Rolnick and Breychak. “Rudimentary editing software” enabled Omer to give them “a pretty good batch of demos. It lets us play with things and speed up the process.”
“With Bardo the demos I gave them were the full 20-something songs. We went nuts and recorded them all, but then put out an EP (Fire In a Theater) then another EP (Fake Adjustments) and now an album. This time we will give 15 or 16 songs, pair down to a dozen and record a number from there. I’d rather have a 9 or 10 song album. It’s time for us to do that sort of thing.”
Another venture The Right Offs got involved in last year was the State House Cabaret. The full band played for one show in the spring and Omer played solo for a holiday show, even performing a new song he penned specifically for the show called “Everybody’s Getting a Candle This Year.” With this year’s live shows on hold for the time being, the Cabaret has decided to put on a pre-taped show online; that will be held on Saturday, June 6. Viewers can either purchase a ticket allowing them to view the show for 24 hours or can purchase the show to keep. The Right Offs will be recording their piece soon, but you will have to view it to see what they will be performing.
Neither the band nor Omer have any livestreamed shows currently booked. “The ones I’ve seen, the music is always great, but it’s that dead air between songs. It kills me. Maybe I’m being weird,” he added with a laugh. Omer is not against doing one. For him, it is more about how he can do it in a way that satisfies him.
“I have to come up with something. I have to figure out how to do it,” he said, his concerns mostly being with the absence of audience interaction and response, which he notes is a big part of how the band prepares for and conducts a live show.
“That’s how we organize a set list. That can change depending on how people respond — that cyclical feedback, the response back and forth.” He is unsure if he can reproduce that “by myself … me in my bedroom,” he said. “That’s my laboratory. I don’t know if I want people in my laboratory,” he added with a laugh.
He is definitely not opposed to trying once he is inspired. “I need one little kernel of an idea,” he said. “I want to do something that is effective of that fact, that context. I need to be able to sink my teeth into something.”
Check out The Right Offs Facebook page for updates about their forthcoming album. Check out The State House Cabaret Facebook page for information about their upcoming show on June 6.
