Like plenty of albums before it, Max Devereaux’s How To Show Love began with a crush. Devereaux had been living next to a friendly German exchange student who he discovered, in typical meet-cute fashion, shared the same interests as him. They both played music, and each had a particular fascination with the bass guitar. She was on his mind, and inevitably the songs he wrote at the time ended up being about her and their situation.
“I probably wasn’t able to go out with this girl or have a real relationship with her because of the cultural barriers, so these songs were my way of working through all of that,” Devereaux says. “I had wanted to make a record with her, but didn’t have much of an opportunity to record with her, so I decided I’d just make the record myself and have her do the backing vocals. That way her spirit is in there; her ghost is in the record. Now she’s back in Deutschland, but she sang backing tracks on all the songs, and she just brought a wonderful energy to them. Without her the album wouldn’t have existed.”
Devereaux spends the bulk of How To Show Love nursing an achy heart. “What can I do?,” he sings on “How Can I Change,” the song that most directly addresses his predicament. “What can I say? What can I learn? What can I change? How can I grow? How can I find? How can I see into your mind?”
How To Show Love is a light, good-natured little album, and a bit of an odd duck. Singing in a open-hearted croon that feels like a cross between Jonathan Richman and Bryan Ferry, Devereaux colors the album with baroque accompaniments and jazzy orchestrations inspired by ’70s and ’80s songwriter records. He laid down the core of the album himself before recruiting outside players to bring it to life.
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“That’s the fun part,” he says, “Getting all these musicians together in a room and getting to play with them in the same room. We had this drummer [Waymon Tatum Jr.] and he’s amazing, like a gospel player, and he just solidified each groove and pushed each song over the edge. Then Kevin Gastonguay played the keys. I told him to give me the weirdest combinations of keys he could, and he’d come through and bring this remarkable depth to the songs. And then there was my brother [Nelson Devereaux], who is a pretty big-time horn player in Minneapolis. He figured out a lot of really cool ways to bring the songs to a nice climax. That’s something I’ve been focusing on as my songs have developed over time, how to bring them all together.”
That tidy, irony-free execution puts Devereaux a bit at odds with a music scene that traditionally prefers its acts a little rougher around the edges, and he says he’s still figuring out how to break into the local scene. He admits he could probably be playing more live shows than he currently is.
“I love performing, but right now it’s hard because I play so many instruments on the record myself,” he says. “I don’t know how to play the guitar and bass and the drums all at the same time. I’ve probably got to get a core band together and start playing the music, but I’m waiting for a time when people are asking to hear the music live.”
In the meantime, Devereaux says he plans to keep going in the studio, where he’s already been quite productive. Over the last two years he’s populated his Bandcamp page with more than a dozen releases.
“Back in the day I wouldn’t have been able to record the way I do,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to make records in the ’70s or ’80s because you’d need a tape machine to do anything. But nowadays you get a laptop and fire up GarageBand and plug in.”
