My Mom's Basement - EPISODE 319 - THE MAINE RETURNS

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

The Maine returns to the Basement to break down their NEW self-titled record track-by-track with Robbie, plus they discuss life on the Sweet 16 Tour and the eras of their career! #TheMaine **************************************** Subscribe to My Mom's Basement on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIeZ96PqdsJYQ7DFLRx6MHw My Mom's Basement Merchandise: https://store.barstoolsports.com/collections/my-moms-basementYou can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/mymomsbasement

Hey My Mom's Basement listeners, you can find our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to My Mom's Basement, presented by Barstool Sports and 3Chi. I am your host, Robbie Fox, and today I've got another interview for you with one of my favorite bands, The Main. It's The Main's second time on the show, first time in person. The first time around, we did it over Zoom. This time, it was much better, getting to go through the first time in person. The first time around, we did it over Zoom. This time, it was much better, getting to go through the whole album in person with the guys, their new album, self-titled album. Before we get into that, let me tell everyone about our presenting sponsor, 3Chi.

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going to 3G.com and using the promo code basement15, basement15 to take 15% off your order. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Please use responsibly. Now let's get into this interview with the guys from The Main. All right. Hello and welcome back to my mom's basement. It is Robbie Fox and I am back with The Main over a year since I've interviewed you guys the last time. You guys now have a new album out. I think it's fantastic. Right before you recorded this, I said, when do you know it's time to record? Like, is it The Force? The Force was with you on this album.

Your mom's basement was beautiful. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it looks a little bit like a green screen studio. How are you guys? How's the tour been? It's been great. It feels like it's been forever because we had a little break

during Thanksgiving where we went home. Uh, and then now we're kicked back off. And I think this is the first of six in a row for us right now. Six nights in a row. Wow. That's crazy. How do you like maintain your voice through that? Is it tough? Uh, that's why I'm eating a cough drop right now. Damn. Is this interview maybe hindering that? No, no, no. I'm on day four of steroids. It's a warm-up. Anabolic. All right.

Good. Yeah. Good. How do you guys like playing New York City in general? Over the years, it's definitely become, you know, when we first started, it was very intense, very, like, nerve-wracking. Well, we didn't know what we were doing, though. Yeah.

We were just rolling into the city with no clue how to conduct ourselves. So it's definitely gotten a lot better for us, too. Yeah, fortunately. It's kind of like home shows. It's like once you realize that it's going to be a little hectic, you just kind of settle in and have a lot of fun.

So we're really, really pumped. And two nights at Irving Plaza. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't been there for a while, so it'll be fun. Yeah, it's been 10 years. Wow, really?

They redid the bathrooms. Really? Who were the bathrooms? They were nice. I think they redid it maybe after Hurricane Sandy or something. Damn. Which is longer than 10 years ago, so I don't know. It's been a while.

Like I said, though, this new album is awesome. I always have a special place in my heart for Lovely Little Lonely, but this I feel like could be your best work. That means a while. Like I said, though, this new album is awesome. Like, I always have a special place in my heart for Lovely Little Lonely, but this, I feel like, could be your best work. That means a lot. Thank you. What was the first piece or demo from this that made you guys excited? I guess technically the first song would have been Blame that was written. But we didn't have a place for it per se like it was just

um in its form at the beginning it just kind of like felt it was a completely different song it's been like five different songs like a different version of it that we have fully recorded that uh in what direction does the different version felt maybe more in lines with like sticky from xo um and just felt like too vanilla um but that was the first song that then after we started writing and we kind of recrafted that that tune it just all started kind of falling into place and in our last interview you guys were talking about how like genre blending was something you were really excited about and pushing forward i feel like this album does that a lot was that on your mind as you were writing this um i don't know i think we were just like really cutthroat about what we wanted

to include and what we didn't we were very like hard on ourselves as far as songs that were resonating like if somebody back here or you know colby wedgeworth who produced was like on the fence about something we didn't really give it too much thought we didn't chase it too far um maybe to a detriment but that i guess means we have some more in the discard pile that we can go back to um but yeah i think we like we we've done so many things as a band as far as uh you know sonically uh i i think it just like dance songs there's uh heavier i guess guitar leading songs i don't know we just didn't really have uh a governor the governor was just really like do we like it or not and i think the a big focus on this maybe compared to xoxo was like we wanted the consistency to kind of come from

like the drums are the same in pretty much every song like the drum tones and stuff where i'm on xXO's like mix of electronic drums and actual drums and whatever, where like this, we like really wanted kind of the baseline of everything to just be like the five of us. We could perform in a room without too much extra. Most guitar tones were consistent. And that was like where we it was very hodgepodge on xo it was like everything was catered towards the song and this was just like a blanket kind of i feel like we had so many more conversations of yeah about the sound before we

had about actual songs it was so much more focused on that and when did you guys know that you wanted this to be like the self-titled main record i think pretty early on yeah um it was just it it felt really daunting to try to come up with another uh you know another era in our minds that didn't just, just represent the main, like we wanted it to be sort of an all-inclusive thing. Like if you're just coming to the party now, you're welcome to stay. And if you're, you've been here for 16, 17 years, then kind of maybe a reintroduction to some people that have fallen off the wagon or, or have been with us for 17 years so it was early on and then i think that made it easier to try to hone in on the visuals and the aesthetic and and really just try to create a vibe i was gonna ask where that vibe came from on the cover like who did the cover um our buddy well actually so so we So we were at a recording studio,

and we kind of had an idea of the disco ball being the vibe, and we had like a five-inch little disco ball kind of up in the corner, and we were just talking about what we could do for a photo shoot for and stuff and our our manager just like pulled pulled at his phone and like took a picture and it was like oh like maybe something kind of like this and then the game plan was to like then go do like an actual shoot and stuff retool it and then and then we were just like, no, that's actually kind of what we wanted it to look like. Yeah. That's cool.

Yeah. It was just kind of, it's rarely that. His managerial name is Tim, but his design work name is Chad. Chad made the. But then our buddy Rich, Ron has always helped us out with design and you really help focus it in

yeah yeah the whole like i love the black and white aesthetic of all the music videos and the album release video you guys did yeah i thought that was really cool yeah um i'd love to go through the record like track by track if that's cool sure and ask you about some of the songs so dose number two i love the production to start this. Almost like a, by the way, Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar intro. I really dig that, and it's such a good intro to the genre blending on the album. Thank you. We are in a bit of a Chili Peppers phase right now.

It's weird that you said that. It is weird, but it's also... We've actually discussed that. It was a blend between... We kept listening to... What's the Korn song? Oh, yeah. Oh, that's right.

Little Korn inspo. Blind? Blind. They wanted to stock with that. Yeah, we wanted to steal the ride idea from that. So that's why you can hear the ride at the beginning. I love that. Yeah, it was blind and then it was...

It was tricky because we were like, we can't really launch into a Korn song, so we should have gone with that. I tried so fucking hard to rip it. What are we doing next? Yeah. That's great. Was that early in the process, the intro song?

Because it feels like an intro song. I think we had that kind of decided. Towards the end, later. But I think we kind of knew immediately that that was going to be the first track. Yeah, once it was finished, I think we knew that kind of decided. Towards the end, later. But I think we kind of knew immediately that that was going to be the first try. Yeah, once it was finished, I think we knew the bookends, how they were going to sit. Yeah, and then you go into how to exit a room. Who is the best in the band at Irish exiting? Oh, dude, I think it might be me.

Well, I'm pretty good at just disappearing. Yeah. No, I've got to say bye to everybody. Yeah, you do. I call it the French dip. The French dip. I like that. I do an Irish hello where I tell people I'll be there, but I won't.

That's actually good. That's nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this way more. That's a better move. Yeah. I love the bridge on this song. It might be like my favorite moment on the album, I feel like.

That's awesome. I think it's such a cool explosion of a bridge thank you very much well the weird part of this song is that wasn't in the original demo that we had this song like just completely changed it was like kind of like a almost mid-tempo ballady song it's very like acoustic driven yeah and then we couldn't get the acoustics to sound good so like it we were spent like like 10 hours just trying to get acoustics to like kind of even i feel like we tracked most of it acoustic no we did yeah and then colby was like yo this sounds like shit and we're like oh god and then so like we had dinner and then the intro to the song john like colby just happened to be

recording on his phone um like in he's like I have this idea but a lot and like the riff came from that like at the end of the night and then next day I love that you used it as the intro yeah but that whole that whole outro wasn't even in the original demo we kind of like pieced it together yeah yeah did a lot of songs come together that way on this record or no I think when we work with Colby it kind of happens that way like lots of revisioning yeah we're with him we're good at that I feel like and he's really great at just kind of pulling things out of us that maybe we were blind to or didn't think we had I mean like yeah

like they're saying this this song started as pretty much a Goo Goo Dolls song. And it's really great to see, like, and that's the cool thing about a relationship with us and him is he, like, he knows there's something more. And when we all realize that, like, yeah, you're right, then we get on the same page and there's a lot of synergy. So, yeah, it's I think it's this balance of keeping the idea at its core what's good about it, but he's good at not being caught in

just because this is how you were envisioning it doesn't mean it's the best way to do it. At any point in the process, whatever's best for the song will happen. It's happened a lot, too. And then Blame. I saw an Instagram story from you guys recently where you said this one has been the most fun to play live.

And I could imagine that. It's got that super hectic verse and then bounces or falls into that groove in the chorus. How did this one come together? Because this one is maybe the biggest swing on the album, but I feel like it also is the biggest hit. Wow. Wow. like maybe the biggest swing on the album but i feel like it also is the biggest hit wow wow um i i don't know like if we were all totally locked in on it until john had actually changed the verse because the verse wasn't always like that the whole song pretty much had a groove all the way through like early on and then he came back with like a revision of the demo and it had these really fast like crazy drums yeah pat had said like he just kind of

nonchalantly said like well what if you tried something faster in the verse and so i just uh yeah doctored up i like took the session and doctored up the drums and then created something that when we listened back to like what i had done in Pro Tools it was like it was a mess it was like exciting I think the the idea was like we knew the chorus was good but the verse and everything just made it feel kind of boring and it's like just pretend this is a different song and then just put that chorus to it and it ended up i'd say maybe working out one of the most proud things on this record that i'm most proud of is the fact that i added the claps at like hour zero and colby was like i don't know man and like, trust me, let's do it. And then live. And you're like, turn them up. Yeah. Those claps are half the song now. Yeah.

Unreal. Then you've got Leaving Five. Real bouncy bass lick on this one. I love the bass on this whole record. How did this one come about? Oh, man. Jared's Cabin. Yeah, that was a pre-pro song.

Oh, yeah. We were kind of working all day and kind of didn't have much going. And then we were cooking dinner. And then you kind of pulled out the – or you had, like, the chords. And then he ripped the bass part and was just like – It was on guitar. We were playing it on a guitar. So a lot of those parts are like – I've got this, like, transposer that'll just turn your guitar way down low.

And so it sounds like a bass. So it's just like, I don't really know how to play a bass. So guitar feels better to me. Well, it also gives you like a different approach at the sound of what a bass sounds like. It sounds really weird. And I think we actually maybe left a little bit of the original. Yeah, I think we did. And or the Fender 6.

Yeah. So yeah, we were just trying to, the way it transposes, it makes it sound really weird. And Colby fell in love with that sound. So we're like, are we going to play guitar as bass on this whole record? And then we found this in-between bass and guitar. It's called the Fender 6. And it's like what the Cure uses a lot. And it's like that weird kind of in between and so a

lot of the bass on the whole record is is that kind of guitar bass thing that's why was there any other like inspirations on this record that you guys felt that you haven't felt before i mean when working with colby because we've done American Candy, Lovely Little Lonely, Pioneer, and now this. American Candy and Lovely Little Lonely was like, we were still young in our relationship with him and the one thing that we could all agree on was Third Eye Blind.

We are massive fans and he was a massive fan and I think after Lovely Little Lonely, we felt like we kind of exhausted that inspiration, especially when it came to our relationship with Colby. So this one's weird because it's, he's in the Christian music world and is really detached from, like, you know,

what we're enveloped in all the time. So it's weird because we're throwing shit out. That's just like, yeah, it's just like Fred again. Let's do it. Yeah. Because we've done so much with him.

It's like, yeah, we, we find those commonalities and he's like, I don't get, I don't get it guys. And then like, yeah, just trust us't get it guys and then like yeah just trust us and then he finds that like comfort between it all and i think it speaks speaks

again to him being on board with like handcuffing ourselves to sounds like handcuffing ourselves to the drum sound handcuffing ourselves to the guitar tones and i think that's what married the whole thing together because if you just left us in a room and we were just kind of writing from inspiration it would just be like yeah it would be all good yeah he's kind of yeah he's like he translates and that's why you get really in here yeah yeah exactly i love the scratchy tone on that song too like the solo after the uh the bridge is like such a cool scratchy tone hell yeah yeah um the mood i'm in just so you know um i love the way this one explodes and then pulls back it has such cool dynamic to it thank you yeah dynamic was huge on that one um and we felt like it was okay to play within that like normally we would be a little bit uncomfortable to leave things so you know peaks and valleys um but it just felt right on this one that's kind of like a vibe of

the record too i feel like like the peaks and valleys dynamics ride it does take you on that journey the whole way that's awesome do you guys feel like you're thinking about the vibe of the record as you're recording it or does it come together when you have the songs that you need i think subconsciously you're probably thinking about it yeah i think you're always thinking like well once you know this idea is kind of 90 all right now how does this other idea that maybe is 40 how can we get that to where that other one is we're dropping things into places in our heads like we put up a list of like where songs might end up and, and then we kind of keep on working through that. Yeah.

I feel like we talk about the vibe a lot before we actually begin doing it. But then once we're doing it, we don't really talk about it that much. We just work and not, not like you're like in the middle of working on this song and you start like talking about how it fits with the, with the vibe. You're just kind of in it. it yeah but because we've talked about it so much in advance it's kind of just in the back of your mind you know yeah but sometimes stuff does like kind of

get outside the lines you kind of have to be like wait is this actually what we were trying to do kind of reel it in a little bit but does it fit yeah yeah um and then i think about you all the time sad lyrics but super upbeat song super fun song on the album and very like the main song it feels like right yeah this one started out as an acoustic demo as well um i wrote it with our buddy andrew goldstein and um i remember sending it to you and we both kind of like i think i was just getting on the plane and it was like super super bare bones like literally just a fingerpick guitar and a vocal and the lyric just always kind of stuck with me i couldn't like shake that as a song title um then i wrote the riff at home and uh i just like that we were able to kind of

use the same arrangement from how to exit a room um where you don't go to the third chorus and it doesn't feel like we like ripped that off yeah you know so it felt like a new moment and it and it didn't feel like uh we were repeating anything i love the drums on this one too like the sloshy hi-hats and stuff yeah really cool sound thanks yeah this one i feel like definitely like set the tone for like how we wanted like the guitars to sound how we wanted the drums to sound it was like the first the first one that we kind of took from being just an idea of a song and acoustic to actually like maybe how we could actually hear like a final product.

And that kind of influenced the rest of the album. Yeah, you're talking about that scratchy guitar. Yeah, early on he had like this plug-in that he used on Pro Tools that made that fuzzy guitar. And that kind of was like, oh, that could be like the sound of the record so we were just trying to fit that in and like find a way that isn't just a plug-in to we like couldn't we like had a hard time replicating it too i think i think in that tune specifically we kept

oh there's a lot and then there's the other half of the tape machine yeah we used a like a little four-track cassette player and yeah just Yeah, just put everything into ten and just fuzzed out really wild. That's awesome. So that was kind of the fuzzy, scratchy guitar sound that you were talking about. And then kind of a different guitar sound on this one, Thoughts I Have While Lying in Bed, more of a spacey, vibey sound.

How do you nail that production-wise? That was hard. We've never really... I feel like that one for us is kind of new territory um that one was really difficult especially because the chords are essentially the same throughout the whole song so you know when you're thinking of like you're talking about dynamics it's like we wanted to really make the chorus go somewhere without having to be just like downstroke the whole time of that so but we wanted to keep the those off guitars that you know and have that be like a real big feature

it was just a really difficult i remember like laboring over that chorus well everything in that song it's rhythmic is kind of the magic in that one everything hits on the two it's like very for us that's totally new so um even though it is kind of like repetitive like rounds i think we really relied heavily on finding a cool rhythm and like something you know just like vibe it was it was actually the first one we recorded and we were trying really hard not to put too much stuff on. We were like before, don't just throw a bunch of shit on it. Let's try to hold back. And then the first thing we did was threw a bunch of shit on it. And we're like, oh, God, why doesn't this feel good?

And then we were just peeling back for days. And then you found that synth sound on this. Huge kudos to our buddy Trevor from Said the Sky, because I had written a song with him, and that was kind of the foundation of, I kind of just like chopped and screwed this little bit that we had done together in Denver. And that kind of laid the foundation for the verse. And then I was like, I don't know if I want to leave it in there. And then we added all this stuff on top of that and then we couldn't

remake the vibe so we took everything out and left it in there and he was like yeah use it it's awesome so usually it's your first iteration that's gonna end up being the best part so many times funny how goodfellas fans

was that a goodfellas reference at all when you wrote it? Wow, no. When you guys put out the track list initially, that's what I thought it was. That's actually fucking me up. No, but yeah, now. Fun fact for you guys. Did you know Ed Sheeran owns the painting from Goodfellas?

No. Really? We found that out this year. He also owns Wilson from Castaway. What? He's apparently a huge movie prop guy. Whoa. Whoa, Wilson?

That's a flex. It's real blood. It's a flex, dude. I don't know. I hope not. It's Tom's real blood, dude. But this one starts with the lyric, at 17, I couldn't dream of something like this.

What were your dreams at 17? A couple years before the main starts right yeah honestly i have no clue i mean for a bunch of us it was it was yeah i i don't i don't think for john he hadn't maybe crossed your mind yet no gotten there yet yeah no i think. No, I think I was like, I'm going to be a baseball player. Actually, no, I knew I wasn't going to be a baseball player. I think maybe just existential crisis. How many beers you could drink in one night in college? Yeah.

How many Sparks drinks can I have? I don't know. That's a good question. I think towards the end of high school for me personally it was definitely i was reeling because you know you have all your friends that they know what they know what they're doing and i didn't really have a path so that first you know going into college for me was i think i'm gonna be in business whatever that means yeah and then uh yeah fortunately we got kicking after that so i don't know yeah dreams of beer and

fun dreams yeah um and as far as this song goes it's like a very nostalgic song in general did you feel like you wanted kind of a heartfelt song like this on the album so this one had a couple different iterations this one um i wrote it thinking i was writing it for somebody else and i had a in my head i thought it was going to be a female vocalist on it um and i was just going to be like hey does anybody want to sing this you can have it and then we just wouldn't let it go. We were like, you sound so good. We love this chorus.

But then I couldn't just come to terms with it. It was just something that I was like, nah, it's not for me. It was tricky because it was a piano ballad demo. It sounded like an Adele song. But he's actually on the original demo singing full out, which isn't how we normally do stuff. You I think demos from this album interesting yeah but I think hearing it in the right light was kind of hard at first especially for probably John yeah stubbornly I like tried to make faster versions of it and tried to like come at it from a different

angle but then once I like once i started started getting on board with everybody else i was like i wanted to focus on writing a song about my daughter and kind of the changes that you know my life has taken and uh i'm really really proud of the way it turned out i think this might be my favorite song on the album oh really yeah what about you guys you guys have a favorite song in the album mine's coming up okay um i might have maybe blame which is kind of like the the obvious one but like yeah the other night we were playing it and i was like this is cool like like yeah like this is like i was like oh i'm like pumped that now we just have this

forever like this is like our this is our song we, I'm like pumped that now we just have this forever. Like this is like, this is our song. We can always play this whenever we want. Yeah. I think blame. Cause it's kind of scary. Like, especially before it came out, I was like, this is like you said, it's like, this is either like a home run or like nothing.

Yeah. And I think having that fear and then it working was like really rewarding, I guess. So yeah. I think thoughts is fear and then it working was like really rewarding, I guess. So yeah, I think thoughts is probably my favorite. Just, I remember when we had it like mostly written and we had it kind of looping. We're just kind of listening to it bad. We were at the cabin and we were like,

everybody was vibing and it's like, you just kind of have this loop and you just keep it going. And it probably went for like an hour and we're just like trying to add to it. And I love how it turned out. I feel like that's exactly how i pictured it so that's mine then we've got cars and caution signs the longest song in the album i like that i like a longer song i like how this one kind of just jams for a while i think it's

like 40 seconds before lyrics come in yeah this one's the most self-serving yeah yeah but like this was this i like that though i'm an oasis fan so yeah yeah we told colby we're like just let it let the boys have one is what we kept saying because we didn't even have it was just a loop for like until we actually went to record it was just in just that like trust us yeah we're like let us steal wilco yeah and that's kind of the same way as like we're just kind of living in that loop for like I remember in the studio just I came in early and then had the round on the bass and it was just like you could kind of live in that for a long time. It's a vibe. Yeah. And then the final song in the album, Spiraling.

This one's my favorite. Is it? It sounds like you're about to end the record on a mellow or song and then it blows up and it's like a huge dance vibe. Yeah. It's a really tough thing at this point because, um, another night on Mars just seems to be like one that we can't beat to finish a record and you always want to try to outdo yourself, but you never want to deliver the same energy and this one i think it was probably

our attempt at just like flipping the notion of what a last song is to us on its head um so yeah it's like the pump fake it like feels like it's gonna be slow and you you always described it as like the after party thing right like the like like the after the lights are on everybody's still dancing and going and like yeah i think yeah it was a i think we had it you i mean you had it like again it's like someone else's song kind of idea and then these guys jared and ken like loved it and we're like oh we can get on board and we're like what if it's the last song and we can just like let go of like having to make it be like a single or something right yeah yeah supposed to be yeah it's like let it be what it is and don't like so we ended up getting two one too. Colby wanted it to be the first song. He said this is his naughty song.

This is his naughty song. This is his naughty song. Yeah. It's got that pop element to it. It's so funny because I recorded most of the vocals in Franklin with Colby and his studio is upstairs and he's got a couple of kids and he's like, all right, we're going to have to record this like, because I say fuck like, I don't know, 70 times in the song. He's like, we're going to have to record this discreetly.

But I really want to listen to it out loud. He's like, we're going to do it when they're asleep. Did you actually wait until the kids were asleep to record it? I think we did, yeah. That's great. Now you guys are on the Sweet 16 tour right now, going through all the eras of the main. How do you hope people remember this era?

Honestly, I just hope it's just, you know, it becomes part of the experience, part of the last 17 years. I think you don't really get to decide, like, how people react to your music or who comes to your shows or, and we're just like annihilated by the idea that like this many people are coming to this tour. And it means a lot.

It means like, you know, being in a band is a difficult thing. Being away from your family is a tough thing, especially now at this point. And it's, uh, it's been the most rewarding tour I think we've ever had it's uh stairway

let's get to the solo oh is it really that's tough yeah amazing that's rad that's actually a perfect send off yeah that's perfect stay away to heaven stay away to heaven that was my last question

for you guys that's amazing thank you guys for coming in thank you obviously go see the main on the sweet 16 tour now thanks for all the love

thank you