MAX BIEN KAHN - FLOWERS (COLOURED) VINYL

13 years ago, Max Bien Kahn moved to New Orleans. He was already a songwriter then, 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. 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.

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.”

Making a record in your living room is not an out-of-the-ordinary affair in New Orleans—often, it’s a necessity. There aren’t many middle-tier accommodations for musicians in the city; you’re either home-recording or in a fancy studio. That’s why you can hear the sounds of shotgun houses—a distinct reverberation of a long, narrow room—on a lot of New Orleans albums. Environments bleed into the finished products. Kahn’s latest album, Flowers, is heavily influenced by his time spent playing traditional jazz—even if the record, musically, sounds nothing like it. You’ve probably heard a song or two from the tracklist at one of his shows around the city, as he’s more inclined to workshop his new material on-stage rather than save it until it hits streaming.

Flowers is a departure from the maximalist Americana recordings of Kahn’s previous work. On the title-track, Kahn and Farbe wanted to explore the idea of “What if Suicide made a folk song?” and tracked synthesizers and a between-the-lyrics melody. On the spacey, vibey, cinematic “Ghost,” they created an actual ghost character through the song’s sounds, using a warbling synth as a specter. Too, Kahn was aiming for a Phil Spector-esque, classic-sounding tune—where the producer would implement fascinating bridges. The chords move oddly, taking you someplace else for a moment and returning quickly. From track one to track nine, Kahn, Farbe, Pearson, and Snyder stretch the limits of their own pre-determinations, pairing electronica with lap steel in a way that feels historical and futuristic all the same—“Planet of Love” is a distinctive earworm, timeless and lived-in yet existing someplace beyond the folk bonafides that have long encapsulated Kahn’s off-kilter lilt.