At times, students just want to be rock stars . and, at other times, rock stars just want to be students.
Don’t believe me?
mae guitarist Zach Gehring said that he thought it would be fun to go to school without any particular goal or restrictions, to be able to “just kind of learn and learn until .whenever,” he said.
mae (pronounced “may”) is full of deep thinkers and dedicated learners; drummer Jacob Marshall was inspired to take their music a step further, and enrolled in classes at Old Dominion University in “aesthetic theory,” the study of emotion, perception, sensation and meaning in music. It is from these musical theories that mae, which is actually an acronym, acquired its name: multisensory aesthetic experience.
mae released its newest album Singularity (Aug. 14, Capitol) earlier this year, labeled by critics as having a newer, different sound than their previous albums, Destination: Beautiful and The Everglow.
“It is a little bit more of a hard-rock album,” Gehring said. “There wasn’t any kind of conscious decision to change . [and] it isn’t anything explicitly different from what we were doing before. [These are] just the songs we’re recording right now.”
The band is currently on the road, with a stop in St. Louis at The Pageant scheduled for Dec. 11, something about which Gehring expressed anticipation.
“We love St. Louis; we’ve always done really well there,” Gehring said. “[The audience] should expect a good time.”
The newest album, Singularity, was mae’s first to be released via its new record label, Capitol Records. In addition to their switch from Tooth & Nail Records in 2006, mae also parted ways with its former Christian Rock genre.
“Some really want us to be a Christian band; they’ve really held on to that idea,” Gehring said. “We all grew up in the Church . [but] mae is not trying to spread the gospel or Word of God; [we’re] just singing about our experiences.”
Religious overtones or not, mae’s popularity has been on a steady rise during the six years since its inception, and with the public’s increasing attention has come an increasing number of new fans. Gehring said that some make them cookies; others show their enthusiasm in different ways.
Gehring described one particular inebriated fan at a show in Houston who attempted to tackle and choke-hold the tour manager when he refused to allow the man on the tour bus. He had stumbled over from the nearby Ultimate Fighting Championship, an organization for brutal, martial arts-type fighting, and was attempting to put his best moves to practice on mae’s crew members.
The police had to come by to sort out the violence and arrest the man before the band was able to continue with its night.
With the possible exception of drunken, belligerent UFC fighters, though, Gehring labeled fans as among his favorite part of tours.
“[Touring] gets to be a drag sometimes . [but] when I sit back and look at my life objectively, the whole package is just great,” he said. Gehring said that the band has always tried to meet fans in person.
“We always do our best to come out and say ‘Hi’ and make contact with them,” he said. “If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t get to do what we are doing.”
When Gehring isn’t creating multisensory aesthetic experiences or fending off inebriated wrestler fans, he loves listening and learning from others’ music, listing his three staple bands as Wilco, The Beatles and Pearl Jam. Between mae’s rigorous touring schedule, including a third tour in Japan and its first tour in Australia, mae will be busy for awhile.
Hopefully in the future, though, fewer fans will be belligerently drunk.
