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Everyone has
story. Whether it's some snap-jawed love saga wrapped up
in the sweet roots of teeth where they meet with the gums
or a metallic dream rainstorm that feels as real as an
urban legend or a dope-sick plea for an edgeward home, our
stories become as faded as a motherless child running
towards the fog of a denim colored San Franciscan sky
until only what remains is the shadow of a man traveling
home on a cannonball and his half-cracked voice.
I wrote my
self-titled first album in the Hudson Valley of New York
on a second-hand guitar that had been bought cheap as its
previous life was spent as evidence in a domestic violence
dispute. Having no money to spend on the luxuries of a
professional studio, around twenty friends and I spent two
late nights in the college recording studio, where I was
studying words and reading books by men telling me to burn
down the library, doing my best to capture the ditties.
That summer, I
moved to Los Angeles to finish the recording of the album
and after a few setbacks, too many favors, and headaches,
I had recorded ten tracks with over thirty musicians
spanning from the hidden nests of Pensylvannia to the
burning hot mountains of New Mexico. Being this was my
first dive into being a producer & singer-songwriter, I
found that I had to do what felt straight away in the gut.
As the songs moved westward, they began to change. What I
have now for you is an album written on the move. The
places effected the playing. The temperature, the timing
and the humidity changed the speed. The miles
reinterepreted the words when mixed with the local water.
I was born on
October 22, 1988 which makes me on the cusp of an
alcoholic and a road map depending on what you read. We
moved to the west when I was too young. My father traveled
to different countries taking pictures of the Russian mob
and where the Grimms Brothers conceived and stole their
orphans and children and witches. I learned instead how to
read & talk & write & dream in color by staring at the
sleeves of my old man's album covers. A few of the albums
that had and have an influence on me were and are "Exile
on Main St.", "Music from Big Pink", "Tonight's the
Night", "London Calling", "Goodbye, Babylon", "This Years'
Model", "Smiley Smile", "In the Wee Small Hours", "Ghetto
Bells", "G.P.", "Trout Mask Replica", "Darkness on the
Edge of Town", "The Beatles", and "Berlin". After playing
in various blues cover bands in German beer tents as a
harp blower, I became a guitar player with a good sense of
rhtyhm and a singer more concerned with how words are held
in the shape of the mouth than the notes. I became heavily
obsessed with words. My favorite writers are Dostevsky,
Berrigan, Emerson, Miller, Baudelaire, Dylan, Serling,
Rilke, Jodorowsky, Lynch, Bergman, Chilton, Wenders,
Chase, Buchner, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Whitman, Nietszche,
Malick, Tweedy, Chandler, Godard, Waits, McCarthy,
Melville, Kurosawa, Hank Williams, and Faulkner.
My beard grows
faster than I buy a pretty girl a drink. I like my coffee
black and my whiskey gold. My guitars with dead strings
and my voice with a scratch. I like my clothes with holes
and my men with dreams. I like my women complicated and my
one night stands easy. I have unpaid parking tickets and
my liscence has been revoked. In jail, I started a
singalong of "Purple Rain" and "Money (That's What I
Want)". I've played almost every club on the strip along
with El Cid and will be playing this April at the
Stagecoach Festival. I hope to be traveling more soon with
my band, the Santa Fe Seven. There aren't seven of em and
none are from Santa Fe, but they have succesfully wed
Ennio Morricone and Booker T. & The M.G.s. They are just
as versatile on accordion as they are on sitar and will
make yer bottle sound like a saxophone for a deck of
girlie cards. More importantly, they can hold their
liquor. I hope to hear what you think.
Thanks for the
memories,
Maxim Ludwig
of Maxim Ludwig & The Santa Fe Seven |
