Green can hold many meanings, but for The Maine, it represents their tenth studio album, Joy Next Door. After nearly twenty years together, the alt-rock band has tapped into a good place—a green place, if you will—and only find new ways to keep it going.
“The fact that I’m still able to do this with my buds is pretty wild,” says The Maine’s bass player Garrett Nickelsen. “It wasn’t a goal, ’cause I didn’t think it was possible, but I guess at the same time it was.” Melodic Magazine caught up with him on an early Wednesday afternoon in March to chat about the new album and how far the band has come, during which Nickelsen said that despite the band’s two-decade tenure, he’s humbled by the fact that The Maine is still kicking it. “It was the only thing I ever wanted to do and try to do,” he says. “It’s incredible. I feel so lucky.”
So, what about Joy Next Door lends itself to the color green?
“The first song on the record is called ‘Green.’ Maybe that was just a subconscious thing that helped push it there, but there was something about grass and suburbs and trees and stuff that we were all picturing when we were making the record,” Nickelsen says. “So, there was this nature aspect to it that maybe also helped. It just felt right, it was an idea Pat [Kirch, The Maine drummer] had early on that was kind of like, ‘That just feels right.'”
Joy Next Door contains eleven tracks that elaborate on this green concept, but don’t be fooled—this is “not a concept album,” Nickelsen says. “When we first started writing, we put a single out called ‘Touch,’ and that was its own thing—we were definitely in that sweaty, New York, early 2000s thing—and we were like, ‘Oh, that’s probably going to be the feeling of the next record.’ But then John started writing some more and he was adding piano and acoustic, and then it was more fitting pieces together of the plot. It’s not a concept album, but there is a theme that is happening that each song has its part as to why it’s there.”
Storytelling has always been at the forefront for The Maine, with fans drawn to the cinematic, coming-of-age quality of their music and its unmistakable sincerity. “We’re pretty hard on ourselves when we’re actually in the studio [and] want to put something out that feels special for the moment and hopefully has legs and can carry on for a while,” Nickelsen says.
With an expansive past, it’s easy for any band in The Maine’s position to try to outdo themselves and up the ante with each project. There’s a fanbase to entertain, a label to please, and an inner desire to make music that they can be proud of later on. “I guess the pressure comes from wanting to do good work and make something that matters to us, and hopefully people like it,” Nickelsen says.
To better preserve this sound and the storytelling on Joy Next Door, the band did something a little different for the recording process. Instead of recording the songs out of order, they recorded the songs in the very order in which they are presented on the album. “It was crazy. We talked a lot about arcs of records, and we were referencing a lot of movie arcs as blueprints,” he says. “On Lovely Little Lonely, the whole thing was, ‘How do we make it connect? How does every song go into each other?’ This was more of, ‘How does a feeling get you through a record?'”
The Maine’s favorite indie films served as inspiration for their structures that can go from this thing that happens early on that sets up the story, then do a big arc, kind of chills out, and then there’s a big climactic moment near the end.
Joy Next Door follows this structure from start to finish…
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