Photo by Anya Belomoina
Fellow Travelers
Fellow Travelers
Fellow Travelers’ debut album Don’t Fail Me Now represents the culmination of a creative detour.
A few years ago, songwriter Max Niemann was drowning in country songs that his rock band simply couldn't play. For eight years, the Milwaukee musician poured his creative energy into the raucous garage-rock trio Diet Lite. Privately, however, he was writing a completely different style of music—mellow, delicate alt-country folk.
“I tried to bring a couple of those songs to Diet Lite, and it didn't really work out,” Niemann says. “This kind of alt-country/folk/rock and roll is really what I listen to in my day-to-day.”
Realizing these songs needed a separate home, Niemann launched a solo project with Isabel Schmenk and his younger brother Alex Niemann, building a foundational lineup of fiddle, guitar and bass. But they soon felt the music demanded more. The lineup expanded gradually, pulling in local “free-agent musicians” like Evan Ceman—dubbed by Max as the band’s multi-instrumental Swiss army knife—to layer in pedal steel, keys and banjo.
Finding quick momentum, the group—also featuring Miller Matthews and Maxiamiano Janairo (the later also serving as producer)—settled on the name Max Niemann and the Fellow Travelers and began work on what would become their debut self-titled EP.
They boosted their lineup midway through the EP recording sessions with guitarist Gunnar Schmitz, who replaced Maxiamiano. Now, anchored by their newest addition—a powerhouse drummer named Preston Carr behind the kit—the group is really hitting its stride.
You Never Know Where They’ll Go
'Don't Fail Me Now' by Fellow Travelers
“From the get-go, we had an idea that the project would be sort of nebulous, and it has stayed like that even with a somewhat fixed lineup,” says Alex. “I think it's pretty fun that way. It keeps things fresh.”
“It's modular,” Max adds. “You never really know which Travelers you're going to get. Depending on who's playing that day, what mood we're in, or where the stars are in the sky, it might be heavier. It might be a little more jammy, or it might be right to the point.”
The release of Don’t Fail Me Now marks the next chapter for the group, complete with a streamlined identity: they have officially shortened their moniker to the punchier Fellow Travelers. Max initially kept his own name out front to reflect his role as the primary songwriter, but as the project developed, it transformed into a deeply collaborative effort.
“I come with the bare-bones songs and maybe a loose idea for an arrangement, but I'm really not telling anyone what to play,” he says. “These guys are all writing their own parts and adding their own personality. This is not just a solo project anymore. This is a proper band, so let’s lop the frontman name off and just be Fellow Travelers.”
The band will celebrate the release with a show at Cactus Club on September 25. Maximiano and Madison’s The Spine Stealers will open. They also will also tour around the Midwest in September and October.
Sanctuary From the Storm
The band recorded the new album with producer Maximiano Janairo, who also helmed the EP, at Wauwatosa’s Wire & Vice Studios. “For both our recordings now we've had Maximiano as our producer, and I think it's great to have them as a producer because they're also a phenomenal songwriter,” says Alex Niemann. “So, you can really trust their intuition in putting a song in the right direction.”
The band went into the studio shortly after southeastern Wisconsin got inundated with damaging floods. “I remember we were there before the news crews showed up, just watching the whole downtown flood,” says Max. “We were all just standing there watching this natural disaster happen. And then were like, ‘OK, got to get to work.'”
As they compiled their songs together, Max realized common themes were starting to emerge, specifically relationships with people that one is “really trying to hold onto … even if it's just asking for something out of someone, whether or not they have the capacity to give it to you.”
“I think a lot of the themes that pop up in the album are themes of just struggling towards something more and knowing that maybe there's something across the horizon or on the other side of that hill,” he says. “But how do you get there? It’s leaning on people. Even the band name is kind of reflective of that. It's like we're the fellow travelers. It's like you’ve got something to add.”
For example, the song “Fine Line” came from hard personal events for Max, like a broken-down car and a family funeral. Meanwhile, “On the Mountainside” tells the story of getting lost with his partner on a trail in the Wyoming wilderness.
“She was just following my lead and counting on me to get us back home and get us back to safety,” Max recalls. “And I led us into the literal wilderness. I think that name and that theme just kind of resonates. It's like, all right, we're in this now. We got to get out of this. And how are we going to do that?”
Finding A Dynamic Sound
While the band’s EP had a rustic country sound due to its acoustic nature, their debut album is much more dynamic thanks to the addition of electric instruments. As they grew comfortable playing together, the band found their collective sound getting looser and more expansive.
“The moment you record, you have all these light bulbs go off where you’re like, Oh, I could do this differently,” says Max. “By the time you put it down to tape and go, ‘Play it again,’ the songs have already transmutated. We were like, ‘Okay, we got to work on the full album now. We sound different as a band. Let’s try and capture that.’”
As the band experimented with jamming and song structures, the material stopped being just Max’s and truly belonged to the collective. “We all bring different tastes and musical inclinations,” he says. “That diversity of influences is coming through a bit more. These new songs are a really good cross-section of the range we’ve developed.”
“On The Mountainside” showed Max just how expansive his songwriting could get, shattering his old perception of what a Fellow Travelers song could be. “I think someone outside the band heard it and said, ‘That’s almost a Diet Lite song,’” he recalls. “But I didn't think it was. There’s so much space for the guitars, the fiddle, and the pedal steel. It starts off really sparse and spacey, then gets really heavy—like Neil Young and Crazy Horse rocking towards the middle. It freed us up from thinking we needed to be just this one kind of Americana, alt-country sound. If we want to put a crazy distorted guitar solo or feedback on a song, we can.”
Schmitz agrees that the album balances tight songwriting with sonic exploration. “Sometimes it’s about the lyrics and a tight arrangement,” he adds. “And then there are songs where the lyrics are still very important, but the big point is this broad, overall musical experience. “Mountainside” was our entry point into developing compositions in that lane. It can be 15 minutes, or really weird, or really dynamic, and it can just coexist alongside tighter ideas.”
Ultimately, says Max, debuting these songs in front of a live crowd provided the vital spark needed to fully realize them. “There’s a certain point where you got to kick the baby out of the nest and see if it flies,” he says. “Once you do, you see what you can do with it. It pushes everyone to make decisions and commit to what they’re going to play. The EP was a little more of a bedroom project, and the album is definitely a little more of our road-tested material.”
