Max Bien Kahn is a songwriter, bandleader, and side-man who has been based in New Orleans for the past 13 years. His fourth solo album Flowers comes out Nov 1st.

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When Kahn moved to New Orleans, he was already a songwriter, but in Louisiana he became a performer—busking up and down Royal Street with jazz and country bands, playing upright bass and guitar until it became a full-time gig. Right now, most of his time is spent playing tenor banjo in the traditional jazz band Tuba Skinny. But it’s been a busy four years for Max Bien Kahn, the solo artist, too.

After putting out his first solo album in 2016, Max and the Martians, he was a session player for many tunes on the now legendary Mashed Potato Records compilations recorded in the Springs of 2017-2018 (his song "Island" was included on Vol 1).

In the fall of 2020, he finished his second album, All the Same. By the time it came out the following spring, Kahn was already nearly done with his next project: When I Cross It Off, which he made with local folk hero Duff Thompson. Somewhere in there, too, he and his now-wife were making COVID-themed songs (called, aptly, the Stay at Home Demos) and releasing them on Bandcamp to raise money for mutual aid. But once he was done with those demos and ready to take the next step, Kahn reached out to his friend, Video Age’s Ross Farbe, about working on some new material together.

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Cut to Kahn, Farbe, Howe Pearson, and Cameron Snyder convening at Kahn’s house, setting up a studio for a few days at a time, recording, taking a few weeks off, and then returning to each other and doing the same thing all over again. The quartet did this for an entire year, lasting from extreme lockdown to a post-vaccine world. “The first few sessions we had,” Kahn says, “we had the windows open, doors cracked, we were wearing masks, everyone was really paranoid.” But it wasn’t all nerves. Kahn’s partner, Mik Grantham, would hole up in the back of their house while working on her now-published poetry book, while Kahn and his friends would work on songs in the front of their house. “It was a really nice, healthy thing to see happening during lockdown,” Kahn adds. “To have that time was so rare. That’ll never happen again. We were able to sit on it and not worry about a deadline or anything like that.”

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Kahn’s never made an album like Flowers before. When he’s recording in New Orleans, the projects are usually live material or feature a lot of guest performers. It’s how you get a record like When I Cross It Off, which includes folks like Esther Rose, Matt Bell, Ray Micarelli, Steph Green, Charlie Halloran, and Shaye Cohn. This time, though, it was just Kahn, Farbe, Pearson, and Snyder. “It’s a much more intimate process,” Kahn says. And the songs get personal without losing Kahn’s trademark brightness. He’ll always try to be funny about the things that are following him around, be it death, marriage, and whatever triumphs and tragedies fall someplace in-between. Flowers is a rock-steady album that inexplicably documents our humanity and who we become in the wake of loss and on the precipice of falling in love. “When I was writing these songs, I was trying to make it more of a spiritual journey,” he continues, “spiritual not as in God, but in connecting to the planet, connecting to your family, connecting to yourself more.”

 

 

—Matt Mitchell