If you predicted a carefree ending, you haven’t been paying attention for the past two decades. Max Bemis was never built to placidly ride off into the sunset to pursue the sedate joys of white picket fence life in small-town Texas. That isn’t to say that he didn’t try. The fact that you’re about to listen to another Say Anything record is the evidence that something went lethally askew. And the tale of the chaos is embedded into the band’s latest sly-but-searing opus…Is Committed.
We last left the band in a different dimension. In 2019, Say Anything released Oliver Appropriate – with Bemis claiming that this meta-fictional critique of mass culture and the band itself would be their last epic. It was admittedly closer to an extended hiatus in the vein of Jay-Z, but the implications were clear. When Bemis co-founded the band in the first years of this hexed century, Say Anything served as a vessel for the most caustic, obscene, and harrowing thoughts of his id. It was something like the pop-punk Portnoy’s Complaint or an emo Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles: artful satire that could double as a wounded confessional.
The post-modern masterpieces of Bemis’ early 20s splintered the lines between hero and anti-hero. Grandiose myths were elaborately constructed only to be savagely punctured. It’s supposed to be funny, but it never was just a joke. But like most creations where the fictional narrator is frequently confused for the artist themselves, the carefully delineated boundaries began to collapse. The character began to seep into real-life and the demons returned. Bemis began to feel like Jerry Seinfeld playing the empathy-averse fictionalized version of himself on Seinfeld.
“There’s a lot of truth in the Say Anything albums, but I was often misperceived by the fans and the press,” Bemis says. “Eventually, I found myself starting to act like the character and it didn’t agree with me. I started wondering if I was a bad person who was completely insane and should be locked in a mental health facility. Or am I flawed but ultimately good person who has just been writing about himself in very unhealthy ways?”
A semi-permanent sabbatical from the project felt like the most reasonable course of action – especially as Donald Trump rose to power, the crimes of Harvey Weinstein were brought to light, and the rock scene seemed to become more misogynistic. Bemis was now focused on being the best parent possible to his five children and repudiating the occasionally crude jokes and youthful indiscretions of the past. He concentrated on recording solo material and on his second career as a comic book writer.
Then everything began to unravel. The pandemic caused financial and mental health struggles. For most of his adult life, Bemis has publicly grappled with addiction and bipolarity, while his wife and collaborator, Sherri Dupree-Bemis operated as a grounding force. But for the first time, she experienced her own psychological woes, which led him into the unfamiliar position of being a stabilizing figure.
The spiral continued. A few years earlier, the Bemis family relocated to Tyler, Texas, where Dupree was born and raised. As the strife and chaos metastasized, his in-laws began blaming Bemis for the duress. Public accusations were bandied about and family services was called to investigate false claims of his children being at risk. In due time and at great expense, Bemis cleared his family’s name and reputation, but the traumatic effects lingered.
“With my family, I found a place where I was safe, and then someone tried to take it from me,” Bemis says. “I basically turned into Frank Castle from The Punisher. I had to defend my family and hire a lawyer and fight. The experience took a ton out of me. And writing this record helped. I wrote it to save my own life – to remind me that this is what you can’t become.”
The next step required reforming the band. Bemis started by writing an acoustic song and sending it to drummer, Coby Linder, to successfully woo him back into the fold. Everything followed from there.
“I was genuinely feeling these familiar emotions of angst and turmoil – a serious punk anger that I hadn’t felt in a long time.” Bemis recalls.
The track eventually became “PSYCHE!”, which became a first step towards exorcising the agony. In the same way that Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares” intro serves as an adrenaline shot to help shake off self-doubt and depression, the songs on …Is Committed are meant to be played at pulverizing volume. These are sing-a-longs for listeners to shred their larynxes. Raw power tapping into atavistic rage, and offering catharsis for anyone who has ever felt like the world was conspiring against them.
..Is Committed represents both a return to form and a mid-career left turn. Bemis still traffics in exaggeration and Jewish humor, but the hyperbole has been tempered by the blows of reality. This is no longer the angst of post-adolescence, but the grim phantasms of adulthood. Coming full circle in a sense, Bemis says these are the most autobiographical songs that he’s written since high school.
As with any Say Anything record, the songs are rollicking and self-referential, jampacked with meta-references and in-jokes. Before “lore” became a Gen Z cliché, Bemis was employing it was still called “world-building.” The opener “BE, CHILDREN (INTRODUCTION TO THE REUNION RECORD)” starts off with what might as well be a mission statement: “to the self-indulgent/indulge yourself with me.” It’s partially a satire of a reunion song, but filled with a jarring and uncomfortable honesty that belies the tongue-in-cheek humor. It also rocks hard. Bemis did not bring Say Anything back to make an Iron & Wine record.
Take “ON CUM,” a textbook second song ripper packed with allusions to the bands that formed the soundtrack to Emo Nite and the When We Were Young Festival. It has a chopping punk thrash backbeat, a battering NOFX-style second verse attack, and an idiosyncratic and emotional outro.
No one is better than Bemis than leaning into the cliches and subversively deconstructing them. With “AUTO HARMONIC ASS FIXATION,” he riffs on perverse tropes of sex and masturbation, but manages to write a sincere and liberatory ode to the joys of carnality. On “I VIBRATOR,” he lampoons the traditional “for the ladies” song” by writing about his desire to be a disembodied vibrator used as a tool of female sexual empowerment.
There are songs about needing to get the band back together (“DAISY”) and songs about religious oppression (“SAY ANYTHING, COLLECTIVELY, MADE LOVE TO YOUR GOD”) and 8-minute, five-part odysseys that mock the expectations of a final song (“FAN FICTION”). But the nuclear reactor core of the album comes when Bemis unpacks the layers of trauma and writes fearlessly about the vicissitudes of the last several years.
On “WE SAY GRACE IN THIS GODDAMN BAND, MISTER,” Bemis attacks with grace and venom, aiming acerbic barbs at the small-town in Texas that nearly destroyed him. The façade of kindness that dissolved when its fundamentalist Christian, anti-civil rights philosophy was directed towards his family. “CARRIE & LOWELL & CODY (PENDENT)” find the author getting into conflict with his mother for the first time. It’s a song about co-dependency, alienation, and resolving conflict with the ones closest to you.
The penultimate “WOMAN SONG” might be the most important song that Bemis has ever written. It was penned a few days after child services came to his home. He’d been up all night, sleepless, in tears. In front of his sleeping daughter, he improvised this requiem for his estranged mother and his vanished youth. A rumination about the devils that had been expunged but had returned with vengeance. It’s frail and vulnerable and ridiculous and funny, distilling all the heart-on-sleeve pathos and self-parody that define the Say Anything canon.
…Is Committed is much an album as a labyrinth, a therapy session kvetch, a conflagration of obscene horror, familial distress, and humanistic lament. A defining capstone to a period of blinding trauma that has only now begun to heal. You probably already knew that anesthetized bliss was never in the cards. After all, the closest thing to a happy ending in real life is one that is bittersweet.
