Max Shrager - Thoughts of You

Max Shrager's debut EP, Thoughts Of You is a collection of songs Max recorded over the past 7-8 years, which he calls, "the best of everything he has recorded up to that point." 

Max Shrager is a songwriter, producer and musician who has collaborated with artists ranging from soul superstars Sharon Jones and Lee Fields to Lana Del Rey and singer-songwriter Diane Birch, with whom he toured as a guitar player in support of Diane’s album Speak a Little Louder.As a producer and engineer, Max shares the “analog philosophy” of production and prefers to work in four-track formats, resulting in a minimalistic, yet warm and focused aestheticFrom Max: Each song on this record represents a period of my life. Listening to them brings me back to the experiences that inspired them, like a smell that causes a flood of memories.

I wrote "Sophia" in a piano rehearsal room at my high school. It started with those first two chords, and I just kept going because the harmonic movement was making sense. I came up with the chorus a few minutes before we cut the rhythm track. Tom Brenneck got excited about this one early on, which was very encouraging.This one was written the summer I moved to NYC. I thought of it as a country ballad as I was writing it. It ended up having some interesting rhythms and flavors. My grandmother came downstairs to my parent's basement as I was recording the guitar, and she was into it.I bought a 12 string Martin guitar at First Flight music and brought it to school. I ended up skipping class and sitting in the park, working on a song idea that came to me the night before. My new girlfriend had given me a silver ring, which I put in my pocket. It got all scratched up, among the coins, which made me feel guilty and provided the inspiration for this song.This one was really fun to record. It's very much about the production for me, which I did with Homer Steinweiss. Listen closely for the Spanish radio crosstalk at the end.This tune is about the train ride from New Jersey to New York City that I must've taken a thousand times. There's also some stuff about a trip to Las Vegas, where my dad and I walked miles out of the city on a dusty highway and ended up at a nuclear testing museum.This is a love song that was inspired by a specific feeling I had one night in Atlantic City. The feeling was so deep and unique that this song just poured out of me at the piano. The drums were recorded by putting the microphone under a ceramic pot."Sophia""Thoughts of You""Silver""Girls of the Galaxy""Train Song""You're Still There"