"so we named the house a country and we named our bodies home, there was everything and nothing, little stories that we told...
I am not going to lie, if you are already on the edge of sadness then "5 to 4" by Maine based singer songwriter Max Garcia Conover might push you over the edge. Your body might feel colder and your eyes may become watery. The song, part of a 5 song EP named "everything in winter" is compelling from the very beginning fueled by somber acoustic guitar and Paula Prieto's voice humming in the background, a voice that seems to slowly grow into a church like mini-chorale of voices drenched in melancholia. Max's voice, existing between singing and talking is compelling too. As words tumble from his lips at a fast clip, poetic, metaphorical and coated with a resonant pain you may try to make sense of those words.
Max has the ability to craft imagery and steep it in memories maybe connected tenuously to nature and, in a way, to all of us, to all of our memories deeply painful and lovely too. In the end, at least to me, "5 to 4" feels like a eulogy but not sung at a funeral but, instead, at a place where life is being birthed, where the cycle of life is flourishing, in a forest or in a hospital because as things end, other things begin.
[the five songs on 'everything in winter' are part of a larger group that i've been working on, all inspired at least in part by a suitcase full of letters i came across last year. the letters were from my grandfather to my grandmother and they'd been sitting untouched for 70 years or so. he wrote them in the late 1940s while my grandmother was quarantined in a hospital for the consumptive poor. he was 16 and for two years he poured all his love and frustration and hope for the future into those letters. by reading and transcribing them, i've learned so much about who he was and what he believed in. it's kind of taken over my songwriting imagination and i think it's fair to say that, even though each of these new songs is mostly set in the present and each is about many things, the ideas in his letters are what unifies them.]
-Robb Donker Curtius
https://open.spotify.com/artist/4ztTnsVkjvWdYvrrXLFdW4
https://maxgarciaconover.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/scanciones/
Max is a songwriter from New York. He’s played shows throughout the US and Europe and he releases albums both independently and through the Barcelona-based label Son Canciones. In between songs he tells stories, and his storytelling has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and Stories From The Stage. When he's not touring, he teaches at a public school near his home in Maine.
Of the EP "everything in winter" (out now), Max shares (via press notes):
[the five songs on 'everything in winter' are part of a larger group that i've been working on, all inspired at least in part by a suitcase full of letters i came across last year. the letters were from my grandfather to my grandmother and they'd been sitting untouched for 70 years or so. he wrote them in the late 1940s while my grandmother was quarantined in a hospital for the consumptive poor. he was 16 and for two years he poured all his love and frustration and hope for the future into those letters. by reading and transcribing them, i've learned so much about who he was and what he believed in. it's kind of taken over my songwriting imagination and i think it's fair to say that, even though each of these new songs is mostly set in the present and each is about many things, the ideas in his letters are what unifies them.]
Anything I write won't be able to express how special this song is and how poetic the words are. They are the kinds of words you wish you wrote, the kinds of words you want to type out and hang on the wall, a piece of art to move and inspire you.
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://open.spotify.com/artist/4ztTnsVkjvWdYvrrXLFdW4
https://maxgarciaconover.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/scanciones/
Max is a songwriter from New York. He’s played shows throughout the US and Europe and he releases albums both independently and through the Barcelona-based label Son Canciones. In between songs he tells stories, and his storytelling has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and Stories From The Stage. When he's not touring, he teaches at a public school near his home in Maine.
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