Interview: Max Childs, Ithaca Singer-Songwriter

ITHACA, N.Y. — Ithaca singer-songwriter Max Childs sat for a 49-minute interview with the Pulse of Ithaca Podcast recorded on March 20, 2024, nine days before the release of a single called “From the Get Up” and a release show the same night at The Range in Ithaca.

The most practical stretch of the conversation is Childs describing how songs actually get written: roughly 300 voice memos recorded in his car, labeled by the iPhone with whatever address he happened to be near, and a technique for breaking writer’s block that involves scrolling through book titles on Amazon looking for a single usable word.

The single release show was set for Friday, March 29, with doors at 9:30 p.m. and the set at 10:30 p.m. Cover was $10, or $5 with a student ID. Episode 13 was published to the show’s YouTube channel on May 26, 2024, and is embedded in full below.

A burned CD in middle school

Childs comes from a musical household. Both parents are professional musicians, his father is also a composer, and of his three brothers two play, one professionally.

“It’s kind of in my blood,” he said. He started piano lessons at six, picked up cello in third grade, and studied both classically through high school. Jazz piano lessons came later in high school, and led him to study jazz piano at Oberlin Conservatory.

The moment he points to as the turn toward doing it seriously came from Josh Oxford, the Ithaca composer and performer.

“He gave me, must have been in middle school at the time, a burnt CD of Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale,” Childs said. “Josh was like, this is stuff you got to listen to.”

"I immediately became a Stevie Wonder fan and I was like, I want to write tunes like this. After that it was just kind of game over."

Max Childs

Proposing on Friday, competing on Saturday morning

Childs won the Battle of the Bands contest at the 30th annual Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival in 2022, which put him on the 2023 festival bill. He describes the weekend as crowded for other reasons.

“A few days before that contest I proposed to my now wife Christina,” he said. The couple treat GrassRoots as their dating anniversary, and he had waited five years to ask.

He is less romantic about the slot he drew.

“It was like 10 or 11 a.m. that I played on that stage after a Friday night at the festival, and it was like, I can’t believe I’m about to do this,” he said. “I drank a bunch of coffee and water and got up there and did it.”

On competitions generally he is careful.

“Music competitions are funny because you’re judging someone’s art,” he said. “Everyone that performed definitely deserves to win. I think the biggest takeaway was really just how humbling it is watching other people be vulnerable on stage.”

Three hundred voice memos, filed by street address

Childs writes in the car and records on his phone. He estimated the archive at about 300 memos, some dating to high school, and none of them deleted.

The filing system is accidental.

“The way that iPhones work is they just label the recording based off of the nearest location that you are,” he said. “So I’ve got a bunch of recordings that are like, near GreenStar Ithaca, or some random address on State Street.”

For lyrics, which he says are always the hardest part, he built a workaround during the pandemic after reading blog posts about writer’s block. He searches book titles, on Google or on Amazon, and reads until a word catches.

"It's like my way of using a thesaurus. A lot of the titles are like, the man I fell in love with, just kind of cheesy stuff, but sometimes there'll be one word where I'm like, oh, that's a good word."

Max Childs

He traced a specific song to the method. “I put out a song last September called Fireflies,” he said. “The word fireflies, I forget the full title of the book, but it was part of a title, and I was like, I saw that word probably page like 10 of the search results.”

A live album, and the nerves that come with one

Childs recorded a live album at Deep Dive in Ithaca in November 2023, and was working on the mix with Alex Perialas at Pyramid Sound Studios in Ithaca at the time of the interview. Pyramid Sound is the studio where Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad recorded its 2006 debut, also with Perialas.

Asked which he prefers, studio or live, he chose the studio, and explained why in terms of stakes rather than sound.

“With live recording you get one shot at it, so the nerves are up,” he said. “Knowing that the whole thing’s being recorded from the top of the show is a little nerve-wracking.”

He does not treat the mistakes as a problem. “You hear those mistakes, you hear the perfect moments,” he said. “It’s like a very human experience.”

Of studio work he said the appeal is being able to go somewhere he would not go on stage. “That’s kind of what a recording studio is for me,” he said, comparing it to how a painter must feel. “Studio time for me is a place to kind of venture outside your comfort zone.”

Four hours in Los Angeles

“From the Get Up” was written in December on a trip to Los Angeles with his brother Sam for a music conference, in an afternoon session with a producer friend.

“He was like, I kind of want to write a tune with this type of beat, then he got a drum beat going, and then within four hours we had the song,” Childs said. The pair spent four or five hours writing, recording and tracking lyrics, went back the next day for edits, then left it alone until March.

“A month ago I was like, this is a good tune, we should put it out there, we don’t need to do much more to it,” he said. He described the result as pop soul, and said the studio album he was sitting on runs to pop rock and soul, with songs about love and loss.

Watching a professional band from the keyboard

Childs joined Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad on keys the previous summer and was booked for further shows. He frames the experience as an education in stagecraft rather than in playing.

“One of my biggest takeaways is how they command an audience on stage,” he said. “You’ve got Dylan, James and Eli up front there all singing, and they all have their own stage presence.”

He singled out bassist James Searl. “I love watching James perform,” he said. “Most active bass player I’ve seen on stage. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s sweating through his leather jacket trying to keep the sweat off the bass.”

Childs describes himself as a quiet performer, and says that is exactly why the vantage point is useful. “I learn a lot, like, oh, that’s how you engage an audience on this song, or things to say on the mic,” he said.

He also named Ithaca reggae figure Kevin Kinsella among the artists he has played with, and said the through line among all of them was the same. “They’ve all just inspired me to be humble and to do your craft the way you do you,” he said.

The show he still talks about

Asked for a memorable concert, Childs went to a Big Mean Sound Machine set on the Ithaca Commons at the Bernie Milton Pavilion, which he placed about six or seven years earlier, before the pandemic. The band billed it as an I-Town Revue and handed the microphone to singers from other local bands across the set, among them Maddy Walsh of Maddy Walsh & The Blind Spots and Dan Keller, then a guitarist in Giant Panda.

“I knew a lot of the people on stage as well, just being here in the local music scene,” he said. “A stage full of awesome people and a community of listeners that love them all.”

For a venue, he named Deep Dive, and his reasons are unglamorous. “I love the people there, good sound system and easy loading,” he said. “You get to park the vehicle right next to the door, no stairs involved.”

The country records he has not put out

Asked about unexplored territory, Childs volunteered something he had not put on a release.

“I’m a huge country buff, I love country music,” he said. “I definitely don’t have the confidence to perform country now.”

He listens to both pop country and older material, and says pop country feeds his own writing because of the instrumentation. He has written country songs and has no plans to release them.

“I definitely don’t have the twang,” he said. Told he could release them under a different name on a separate account, he said he had already considered it, and floated writing country songs for other people instead.

What he tells musicians who ask

Childs’ advice runs in two directions, craft and business. On craft, he said the constraint is time rather than talent.

“A lot of us artists we all work other jobs,” he said. “It’s important to find that time in your week or your month, however much you need, to sit down and do your craft.” He added that being honest in the writing is the part that cannot be copied.

On business he was blunter, listing Spotify and Apple Music account management, social media, and learning to write a short pitch email to a venue. “Short and sweet, to the point,” he said. “You don’t want to waste their time.”

"I've played shows where I made 20 bucks and played shows where I've made a lot more, and I've loved all of them. But to make a living as a musician you got to stand up for yourself."

Max Childs

Watch the full episode on YouTube

The author co-hosts the Pulse of Ithaca Podcast and took part in this interview. Quotations are transcribed from the episode audio and lightly trimmed for filler. Speaker and band names have been corrected against published listings where the automatic transcript garbled them, and names that could not be verified against a published source are omitted.

Pulse of Ithaca Podcast, Episode 13, “Interview with Max Childs,” running 49 minutes and 19 seconds, recorded in Ithaca, New York on March 20, 2024 and published to the show’s YouTube channel on May 26, 2024. The “From the Get Up” release show was held at The Range in Ithaca, New York on Friday, March 29, 2024.

Sources: Pulse of Ithaca Podcast, Episode 13, Pulse of Ithaca Podcast channel, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, Maddy Walsh bio, Josh Oxford, Mother Mallard concert listing, bandsthatjam.com, GrassRoots 2024 lineup.