Eternally Spooky

Arizona indie rockers The Maine are halfway through a seven week tour of America when we catch up with them, but lead guitarist Jared Monaco sounds as fresh and excited as if he were a 16-year-old talking about his brand new band.

Blessed with inherent American confidence and niceness, he even indulges a wide-eyed question about the Arizona music scene:

“It's been a weird past decade for music in Arizona, I think it's just now starting to take shape. For a while in the early-2000s it was just kind of the hardcore scene and didn't know what it wanted to be, but it's getting more accepting I feel, like, of our kind of music.”

The Maine's 'kind of music' has undergone some noticeable changes in the gap between their last album Pioneer (2011) and new effort Forever Halloween, which has taken on a slightly darker and more dramatic tone. 

“We didn't mean for it to be a dark or theatrical kind of thing, but I think there's some undertones of that even just in the way we recorded it; it was the first time we've ever recorded an album live,” Monaco recalls of the recruiting process, which was partly due to producer Brendan Benson (of The Raconteurs), who they found via rather unconventional methods.

“We didn't even think about Brendan initially, but our drummer Pat [Kirch] was just poring through Wikipedia looking at guys in bands trying to think outside the box, and we found out that Brendan produces bands and records live to tape which we were really interested in so we reached out to him from there. 

“When you do it yourself [like we did with Pioneer] you have the gratification of saying what's good enough, but I think sometimes your ideas can go too far outside the box and you don't have anyone to say 'no'. So we did a lot of surgery on songs with Brendan getting rid of unnecessary parts.” Less ambiguous was the decision to self-fund and release the record, which they'd previously done with Pioneer after recording the record in secret, despite being signed to Warner Brothers at the time. 

“I think they were a little hurt that we didn't involve them, so they backed away and let us release it, which was awesome because we got to learn how to release an album ourselves,” Monaco smiles. “We've always tried to take control of every situation and work with the label rather than letting them work for us.”

And now working in conjunction with management company 8123, the band are excited about making a community of independent bands and playing with their friends under this brand. 

“We just wanted to have an umbrella not only for ourselves but the other artists that we like,” Monaco tells, “It's a really great feeling to put your own money towards it; it means more”.