A while back we had the pleasure of talking to Max Bemis, lead vocalist of  Say Anything.  After the jump read all about the most recent tour they were on, the future of both Perma and Two Tongues, the possibility of a rarities collection and even the success of his popular song shop.

What’s your writing process like? Do you think of something and jot it down and expand on it or is it more of a spur of the moment type of thing?

It really varies…a lot of the time though I tend to write the best when I’m totally inspired so a song will come pretty quickly.  But then I kind of work on it and edit it over the course of a month until I have to record it.

Do you have a sort of “ceiling” you want to reach with this band?

I’d say I’ll probably just do it until it’s not fun for me anymore, which I don’t see happening.  I’d rather do it forever and take breaks and come back to it…especially Say Anything, I don’t think Say Anything will ever break up.

What do you find yourself listening to a lot of lately?
Um…Los Campesinos, Tegan & Sara and Grizzly Bear

A few months ago you re-opened your song shop. For those who don’t know, what is it and how did it go this time around?

It’s going great! I mean it’s a pretty consistent business at this point.  It’s like a project and a business at the same time.  It’s this thing where someone can go to our merch store and instead of buying like a t-shirt or a CD; you can buy a song which is written for you by me about anything you want.  Its $150 and it takes a little while to get your song but I’ve never had a complaint and every single person seems really stoked on it.  It’s really gone extremely well, better than I could have ever thought.

When the self titled first came out, the public’s response ranged greatly. Some argue that the album that taken on too much of a ‘pop’ sound as opposed to a sound similar to older tracks. How do you respond to the commentary? What direction were you headed in with this album?

I think it was a mixture of wanting to say something really profound but doing it in a really fun way.  I guess I understand when people say that it’s our ‘poppiest’  record, in a certain way it is.  But I mean I think that the things being said are actually a lot deeper and substantial than anything we’ve ever done before.  There’s a lot more thought put into what each song stands for and what the record itself stood for, there’s a lot of substance behind it.

I think it’s safe to say you’ve been at this for some time. Seeing as the music industry is changing so rapidly, what would you say are some of its biggest problems?

I think that there’s a mob mentality where people kind of scare each other out of doing anything really original by saying certain things are cool and other things aren’t cool or that certain things suck.  A lot of the time people sort of gang up together and forget….like Lady Gaga, just in the world of pop, she’s a good artist like she definitely can write a good song and has a solid voice…very few people talk about the fact that she is like a complete Madonna rip off.  Literally this is like the biggest artist period right now and her entire thing is based off another artist’s work.  But no one really talks about it, all we can talk about is “whoa Lady Gaga is crazy.” It’s crazy, no one really thinks about the fact that this person essentially is a Madonna rip off.  There are artists making music right now that are stereotyped and people don’t really listen to them because they’re associated with…like a band like Manchester Orchestra because they’ve played with so many bands of a certain type of music.  There are people like indie rock elitists who will never listen to Manchester Orchestra even though they sound a lot closer to the type of music that they would be listening to.  I think that applies a lot to our band, I see it through our eyes a lot because we’re one of those bands that’s right on like the cusp of being an indie rock band or a punk band or a modern rock band…we often get generalized in either area and it’s a frustrating experience and I get sort of seen through the eyes of someone who’s deeply in the industry that people are often too close minded and there’s a lot of amazing music being made that doesn’t really fit into any box.  And that includes, as I brought up, the Gaga thing but in the world of indie rock it’s even more where people will just decide a band is cool and they may not even have so much substance and that will be all people talk about until it fades away because there was nothing really there to begin with.  But like why do we have to go through that whole experience to get there?

Is it too early to ask about plans for a future release?

Well it’s not too soon to ask but I’m not sure if I can provide a substantial answer.  We’re definitely going to put something else out and that’s all I can really say.

So how has your mindset and state of mind in general changed since In Defense? Do you think it’s better for your music?

Uh yes I do.  I think that I was faced with just a mass of nerves, anxiety and negativity for a long time.  It had a lot to do with the choices I was making in my life and so I’m a lot happier of a person and I’m able to like focus on being a better substantial and write about them as opposed to writing about…It’s not that it wasn’t important to write about just being neurotic and hating the world forever but there’s only so much of that you can do.  So now that I’ve made like two and a half albums about it, I think that it’s time for me to sort of peel back the essence of who I am as a person and write about that as opposed to not wanting to be happy and putting myself through hell…it’s the biggest cliché.  You can only do that so much before you burn out and that’s like Nirvana, put out 3 amazing records essentially and then like burnt out.  There’s only so much of living that type of a lifestyle and being that type of a person that you can a) write about or b) you know…live.

What can you tell me about the future of Perma? When can listeners expect to hear new material and what’s the overall intention of that band?

Well I mean I was in another band with Chris and David, called Two Tongues and we did that record, and our whole goal was like “we need to put something out” because we love each other as friends and we love each other as musicians.  We basically holed ourselves up in Chris’s house for a couple months, wrote and recorded a record cause we just wanted it to get out soon.  But with Perma with Sherri it’s like this is my wife and we consider anything we write together to be like powered down.  It’s like anything we do we want to put extremely a ton of thought into it, a ton of writing into it before we even release anything and we also want the space and the room for it to breathe and right now we’re both so busy that if we were to make a record it would be hurried and rushed so we’re waiting for the perfect time when we have the luxury of being able to chill and write it naturally.

What about Two Tongues? Was that a one album sort of project or do you intend to follow up?

I intend to make another one and go on tour with it as well.

You mentioned not too long ago that you intended to release a rarities collection. Will there be any re-recordings on it? What can you tell about it?

I can’t say when it’s going to be but I’m really stoked that we get to put it out before our next record.  So hopefully within a year or two we’ll be putting out this box set rarities collection.