The album features the amazing Laura Stevenson, and members of Signals Midwest, Sincere Engineer, Into It, Over It and more.

Colored Vinyl w/ Download Card and Printed Inner Sleeve.

For Max, Impossible Sum his first proper solo record is an honest-to-God effort to wrangle heartfelt and sometimes confusing feelings of adjustment, displacement, and settling into song. These songs have the kind of heart-on-the-sleeve vulnerability that fans of his other bands (Meridian (22), Signals Midwest, Timeshares) have come to admire, but presented in a completely unaltered fashion, existing exactly as they need to be. “When I’m in the mode of writing for a band, everything gets fi¬ltered through a particular lens or genre, or I present certain ideas that I know will play well with specific band members,” Max tells me. “So I really tried hard to throw that kind of thinking out for the sake of making something different.” And Impossible Sum really is different than anything Max has done before. It’s a departure from his emo and pop-punk roots; a collection of songs that exist outside of genre, as if he were contributing to the Great American Songbook. Songs like “Born At the End of the Year,” “Going to My Brother’s House,” and “Pull the Stars Down” certainly have an Americana twang to them (especially with the presence of Magnolia Electric Co.’s Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner on pedal steel), while “Water Tower” and “Never Ending Equals Sign” sound like the best songs The Weakerthans never wrote. And you can hear other classic influences elsewhere on the album a dash of Neil Young and Crazy Horse here, some of Tom Petty’s cosmic chooglin’ there. But for Max, Impossible Sum is, in essence, a rediscovery and reconnection with the roots of songwriting.