Dine Alone Records and Say Anything are pleased to announce the band’s forthcoming studio album titled Oliver Appropriate. Out on Friday, January 25, 2019, Oliver Appropriate (pre-order) finds renowned frontman Max Bemis at yet another creative apex, delivering an album he deems ‘the first truly inclusive Say Anything record.’ Produced, mixed and mastered by Will Yip (Quicksand, The Menzingers, Turnstile) at Studio 4, the album is a bold body of work that scours for various explanations to one’s sexuality, personal life, complicated interpersonal relationships and more through a complex character that has been developed by Bemis across his career, and also serves as the proper sequel to the acclaimed …Is A Real Boy.
‘This record is the story of what would happen to the ‘Real Boy’ many people thought I was,’ Bemis continues. ‘His band did well but then fell off hard. He’d be my age, of course, but he’d still be living in Brooklyn, struggling with financial woes, single and strung out.’ Brand new tracks from the collection, ‘Daze’ and ‘Pink Snot,’
Spanning 14 songs detailing the course of two days in the life of the album’s anti-hero, Oliver, Oliver Appropriate was heavily inspired by the band Museum Mouth and its LP, Alex I Am Nothing, a revelatory album Bemis’ friend and musician Karl Kuehn wrote about unrequited love that resonated so deeply with his own personal struggle with reconciling the various layers of his sexuality. Through Kuehn’s songwriting that reminded himself of what it felt like being heartbroken growing up, Bemis began to form the character whose voice came to define this new album and the unfortunate events that would transpire within it.
Additionally, Bemis has been forthcoming recently about his struggles with substance abuse, PTSD and anxiety attacks, all through the period that his comic book writing career began to take off and the energy it required to balance it with his ongoing musical obligations surrounding this record. But with the recent birth of his son, Charlie, Bemis, as he puts it, “dove headfirst back into life and found it warm and waiting for me to wake up again and confront all of my demons.” With a healthy outlook on his personal future and Say Anything, Bemis claims to have achieved what he’d set out to do with the band and is content with Oliver Appropriate serving as a fulfilling bookend to the first phase of its story.
‘My prediction is that I’m going to live a happy life until my universal, all-loving, all-inclusive spirit chooses to take me home,” he says. “Say Anything will probably make music again, and I’m not claiming this is our actual last record, but it may be. Who knows. That’s up to me and my family.’
Oliver Appropriate track listing:
The Band Fuel
Daze
Pink Snot
Greased
Ew Jersey
Mouthbreather
When I’m Acid
Captive Audience
Your Father
Send You Off
Fired
It’s A Process
The Hardest
Sediment