With a recent release of his new EP, “Intoxication,” Max Frost spoke with the Mass Media about his inspiration, his vision and his upcoming US headlining tour. Max will be playing at the Great Scott in Boston on May 4.  
MM: First off, congratulations: you’re about to embark on your first US headlining tour, which is really exciting. But you’ve also had some really big things happen to you in the past couple of years: you’ve been signed to Atlantic Records, you’ve recently released an EP… Thinking back to when you first started making music, did you ever expect this to be the outcome?
MF: No, not at all. I never really even thought that I would be trying to make music for a living until, maybe, my freshman year of college. It was always something I was into, but it wasn’t really considered a realistic thing that I tried to do. Then I decided to take a break from school and take more of a shot at it, but I always thought that if I was ever signing a record deal or something that it would be later, like in my late 20s or something, you know?
MM: So it’s safe to say that you never really made music with the goal to broadcast it, but more that you made it just to make it—because it was your passion, correct?
MF: Totally—and I still do, you know.
MM: And, thinking back to when you first had rap and hip-hop artists coming up to you, asking about your music and sampling, what did you think about that?
MF: I never really considered it [rap/hip-hop] to be a world where I could culturally cross over without it being ridiculous. It was always music that I loved and it was music that felt so cool to me, but, I mean, I was a guy…a kid who played in rock bands and played the guitar. I was never like “yeah, I’m going to sing a hook on someone’s song, and it’s going to be cool, and everyone’s going to be into it.” That seemed totally insane to me in the beginning, and then it led to me finding a different way to sort of represent what I liked in the music. Which at first was kind of this wrong thing, like it was more of a “blue-eyed soul” thing, which I always knew that that was wrong, and it was more through experimentation that I found this other voice.
MM: And when people come up to you and tell you that they like your sound, or that they’re impressed by it, and they ask things like “where’d you get that sample from?” How do you feel when people come up to you and genuinely enjoy your music?
MF: It feels good. That’s how you know you’re onto something, or you’re not. In the beginning, the only audience you really have are the people you’re going to play your music for, and there isn’t anything else really spreading about it other than that. The best thing you can hope for is for someone to be like: “wait, you made that?” That’s kind of the best question because then it means that you really played them something that sort of trumps their expectation of whatever they think you’re capable of.
MM: You played back one of the hooks you wrote, “Nice and Slow,” for a group of artists and based off their reactions, you knew your sound was born. But now that you have this sound, do you feel like you built a box around yourself, musically, and that you have to stay within its confined lines?
MF: Not really, I more just think of it as like, I know what my connecting thread is and now for me, I think of it less as like I built a box around myself but it’s more like an explorer who’s found a cave or an island, and now I get to go see how far it really goes left or right. I think it’s a bigger thing than a box…It does have boundaries and if I step outside of them, there’s a loss of me and a loss of coherence, but within that voice and within that sound I think there’s a lot of possibility that I haven’t even turned over. So, to me, it’s a whole thing that I’m still getting the chance to define and explore.
MM: About defining your own sound… You produce your own music. Some other artists do this to ensure that their sound is their own, or to maintain the integrity of the music, but why do you do it?
MF: Because I like making music, and I have an idea of what I want. It’s not like I shut this vault door and that no one can come in here and be a part of it: I work with other people, and when I work with someone who’s an amazing producer it just kind of makes my ideas stronger. There’s definitely those moments where I’m like: “yeah, this really cool what we’re doing here, but this is not right, it’s not me. It might be good for someone else.” That’s more what it’s about. I’ll work with other artists even as a writer/producer, where it’s not music for me but music for them, and it’s because they’re a singer, a great singer, and they have an idea of what they want to be as an artist, but when you’re sitting there writing a song with them and you’re making the track, a lot of times they have no idea what they want so that’s kind of the difference, is that in a way, I’m kind of moving along until I stumble across something. But in another way, once I’ve got a song in place, I know what I want that to sound like. It isn’t like I’m just like “yeah, I made the track and now I’ll make little comments until it’s right.” You know? And beyond having an idea of what I think it should be, I can play what I want it to be. I feel like it’s more just a sense or a depth of understanding for what I’m trying to do and not necessarily to have creative control or just making comments when something’s not right.  
MM: When writing music, you have a very unique outlook on writing that most other musicians don’t have. When played acoustically, your music still has a modern twist on it, but the execution and the performance itself gives it a very vintage sound. How are you able to achieve this?
MF: I think it’s more in the phrasing of how I think about songs. It’s more like, hip-hop kind of invented a new way that different rhythms can be more complex…like folk music is sort of the basis of what most rock and pop is…and blues music too…those rhythms are all generally more legato; longer, smoother phrases that don’t really have quite as much rhythm to them or have quite as much of an interesting beat as like what hip-hop does. And now that we’re sort of living in the “big bang” of hip-hop, I think we can see how that’s really effecting pop song writing. It technically has nothing to really even do with hip-hop. I think a really good example of it would be “Sorry” by Justin Bieber, where the verses are like [humming the melody to “Sorry”] (baba bu baba budum bada). You would never write that song if hip-hop had never existed. The rhythm just wouldn’t be something that people would even understand or have in their mind. It’s way more complex, it’s all on the upbeats, it’s all very much out of that school of thinking. So that’s kind of how I’m thinking about it. And also, I think lyrically, there’s something to be said for…you have to say things that never would’ve been said in or the time before [hip-hop]. Not so much as saying like “oh, you’ve got to talk about this or that,” it’s more just in the phrases you use. At least that’s what I’m trying to do, but without being too clever. Like I’m not trying to write lyrics like a rapper, it’s more like the way that they’ll just make modern references and make it sound cool, it’s just being modern, it’s speaking a language that people relate to now and that makes the song more alive to now. And maybe it’ll be dated later, who knows, but it makes it feel more current.
MM: When writing those lyrics, you say you’re not trying to be clever as though a hip-hop artist would, but you do have some clever lyrics. In one of your songs, “Die Young,” you’ve got some pretty clever and deep lyrics—what’s the inspiration behind those lyrics and others like those?
MF: I’ve known a lot of people that died young; my brother died when I was pretty young and I’ve had a lot of friends die. It’s funny, that day I was in L.A. and Phillip Seymour Hoffman just died a few days before I thought about it. I was working with some guys I just had met, and I guess I was just on a run of stuff where I was trying to write more upbeat stuff, but that day I was just kind of like “fuck it.” You know? They were like, “What’s going on in your life?” And I just started venting about all the stuff in my life, but more because I was talking about how weird I think it is that we culturally, or maybe it’s just humans in general, there’s something more legendary, something more immortal, about a person who dies too young and how there’s just something special about that. And in a weird way it’s almost something we celebrate. You’re so much more likely to see a poster of someone who has died young. I guess the comparison I make is Paul McCartney and John Lennon; they’re both celebrated, they’re both on the same level, they were both the main Beatles but, the fact that John Lennon was murdered, it kind of makes him mean something different to us, as opposed to Paul McCartney being here 50 years later. It doesn’t mean that he’s any less important, he’s just immortalized in this totally different way. Whereas Paul got to live out his career. So for me, it was sort of a song that takes the angle of speaking to someone who wants to, ‘cause I think a lot of people live like that’s the sort of key. I guess maybe what it’s not so much that we love it when someone dies young, we loves someone who lives in a way where they’re not afraid to. That’s more what we want to celebrate.
MM: What’s your wildest fan or tour story?
MF: I think the best story I have is a little bit of a dark one, where looking back it’s funny to me, but I think the most interesting, couldn’t-have-made-it-up story I have from being on tour is the first time I ever toured the east coast was with Gary Clark Jr., and it was the first time I had ever rented one of those Sprinter vans, I actually own one now, but it was literally the first date, the first show on the east coast and it was in Boston, it was super cold. So we got to the venue, and we were supposed to play in the main venue but something was going on, like pieces of the ceiling were falling, or something where we had to suddenly move everything across the street into another venue. So Gary had already moved all of his things, and he was already sound-checking at this other venue. There was this little back alley thing at this theatre and this big, freight entrance was opened up and there was this dude who was just standing around and, because he was dressed in a suit and had a top-hat on and glasses and a cane, like, you noticed him, but you assumed that this guy was part of someone’s entourage or something, like you didn’t think that this was just some homeless guy who wasn’t supposed to be there. But it, pretty quickly, became apparent that this guy was crazy. We were loading in our gear and he was trying to talk to us but in this really weird way, and he was trying to sell us cocaine or something. So we were all just kind of avoiding him, and just kind of trying to do our thing, and then he suddenly starts to get just super super animated, and starts yelling things like “somebody owes me some money in this motherfucker!” And everyone is not really sure what to do, because he was a huge, huge man, like at least 6’6”, 6’7”, just a very tall, huge guy.  But it’s so ridiculous, the way he’s dressed and what he’s saying, that it’s almost like, as serious as he obviously is, no one’s taking him seriously. Everyone’s kind of looking at each other and sort of laughing, because no one really wants to engage him. But then he keeps yelling and saying that he’s Bumpy Johnson’s cousin and that he’ll have the whole show shut down. And then, we’re standing there and I just hear this [crashing] sound, and we were just like “no way, what is that?” and we turn around and this dude had taken his pimp cane and he smashed in the side of this huge piece of glass that’s the side window of the Sprinter…he just smashed it in. We’re all just kind of standing there in shock. But he’s not trying to take anything out of there [the Sprinter], it was just like this epic move he was trying to pull to prove he was dead serious. And so we all just circle up around him and we’re like “What are you doing?” I remember my tour manager at the time was just like “Hey man! What are you doing?” And then the security guys came out and this other guy, who was a friend of mine, was there visiting us and he went running down the street and he was on the phone with the cops. And then the guy sort of realized, like I think he had a sort of coming-to moment and was like “Oh shit, what have I done?” And then he decides that he’s just going to take off. So he starts running down the street and then the security guys catch up to him and grab him and pin him down. And then the Boston police came, in their big tank car, and arrest the guy and that was pretty much the end of the story right there. But I’ve never met anyone with a story like that, or anywhere close to, with a pimp smashing in their window for absolutely no reason…that may not be the story you’re looking for *laughs* or that you’d want to write about…