Max Subar/Photo: Kirsten Southwell
Max Subar’s debut album, “Anything Could Be,” out July 17 via Merge Records, is a folk-rock collection of songs full of hopeful curiosity about what the future will bring—but it presents a hard-won sort of optimism rather than a naïve kind. The album’s eleven tracks never deny loneliness, uncertainty or depression; they just refuse to let those things have the final word. Instead, the record makes the case that even after life’s darkest chapters, there’s still reason to remain open to whatever comes next.
Subar has spent years producing, engineering and playing with other Chicago musicians, like Case Oats and Sleeper’s Bell, but “Anything Could Be” began as a mostly solitary endeavor. Subar began building the record from live vocal and acoustic guitar takes recorded during a self-imposed winter retreat at a Wisconsin lake house. He then came back to Chicago, where he’s lived since 2016, and carefully expanded the tracks with friends and longtime collaborators, including Chet Zenor, Jason Ashworth, Spencer Tweedy, Sarah Weddle and his brother Sam Subar. It was important to him that the album preserve the intimacy of those original solo takes, and he succeeded. As a listener, you never lose the sense of hearing one person sitting in a room, guitar in hand.
Acoustic guitar—gentle strumming and meandering fingerpicking—anchors the album, but pedal steel, fiddle, vibraphone, organ and electric guitar appear throughout, adding a country-western twang and an interesting indie rock dissonance.
Even before hearing a note of the album, its cover image gives the listener a sense of what to expect. Subar sits with an acoustic guitar in front of a black mantelpiece and a warm, white expanse of wall. The photo composition, shot by photographer Kirsten Southwell, is vaguely reminiscent of the Jim Croce album “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim,” and Subar takes a leaf from the seventies singer-songwriter playbook, using distinct lyrical images to conjure emotion. On the record’s first track, which shares the album title, Subar sings, “we are drifting through a state of being, hungry for an impulse we can’t eat./Finding meaning like a kid in a grocery store, being pushed down aisle seven, always looking for more.” The image doesn’t answer the question of purpose, but it reassures us that the search itself is something we’ve all been doing since childhood, one way or another.
Max Subar/Photo: Kirsten Southwell
Less is more for Subar, in terms of lyrics that quickly and effectively paint a picture without overexplaining and instrumentation that is beautifully layered but not overdone. His philosophy, as he describes it, is about peeling away rather than adding. He has in mind the idea of people being able to turn on this music to reflect.
His recording process mirrors that philosophy, too. The live recordings that he collected at the Wisconsin lake house were controlled by a specific limitation: Subar decided, for the most part, to record only three takes before moving on. Rather than chasing perfection, he wanted to prioritize presence.
Several musical moments reinforce that idea. “See Saw” gently suspends itself in rhythmic space before resolving, with fiddle and pedal steel lending the song a subtle western sway without slipping into genre cliché. About halfway through, “Like You’ve Known It” drifts with a beautiful uneasiness reminiscent of Nick Drake. It includes field recordings Subar captured outside the lake house, rooting the album in a strong sense of place. Wind chimes sway somewhere in the distance as water laps against ice. These ambient sounds of the physical landscape become almost another instrument. On other tracks, electric guitar rips through otherwise hushed arrangements, from the slow-building crescendo of “I Never” to the striking flourishes on “Everything Is” and “Words Unkept.”
Although Subar has spoken about writing these songs after emerging from depression, “Anything Could Be” isn’t structured like a dramatic journey from darkness into light. Like chicken soup after a sore throat, its comfort carries extra weight because you can still sense the memory of pain beneath the warmth. Hope exists from the opening moments. There’s no triumphant breakthrough waiting at the end, only a steady reminder that possibility continues to exist even when certainty doesn’t. The message of the album title isn’t wishful thinking. It’s an acceptance that the future remains unwritten. In a cultural moment increasingly dominated by cynicism, that openness feels surprisingly radical. It comes across convincingly because the album resists the temptation to romanticize sadness or manufacture profundity, but just keeps returning to curiosity. True to Subar’s intention with his music, the album encourages slowing down long enough to hear your own thoughts.
Subar will celebrate the album’s release with shows in New York, Philadelphia and Columbus before coming to the Hideout in Chicago, joined by opener Sarah Weddle.
Max Subar will celebrate the release of “Anything Could Be” with a performance at the Hideout, 1354 West Wabansia, on July 24. Tickets here.
