Max Subar

Chicago singer-songwriter Max Subar joins the Merge Records roster with his debut full-length album "Anything Could Be." Laid down on a mobile recording rig in a house on the shore of a frozen lake in Wisconsin, Max emerged after ten days of solitude with a record of neither fallow nor verdant earth, but, staggeringly, one that occupies the threshold between the two, a space that accommodates the potential for stagnation and growth: their hopes, their worries, the time it takes to arrive at an unknown destination, and the courage to accept what’s there, waiting to be realized.

“There is so much room for newness in the weightiest or seemingly most paralyzing of times,” Subar explains. “No matter how foreign, frightening, anxiety-ridden, or unfamiliar chapters of life can feel, there is always an opportunity to tap deep into ourselves and land somewhere new, somewhere forward.”

To arrive at Anything Could Be, Subar returned, again and again, to the sonic and spiritual landscape he’d cultivated during the initial session, remaining present in that moment by working when he could truly occupy its heart, as opposed to forcing it to completion in snatches of stolen time. The arrangements that took shape over the course of these returns are generous and illuminative, giving flesh to the bones of Anything Could Be’s live guitar and vocal takes without sacrificing their spontaneity. It’s a mesmerizing, open-hearted debut that grows with the listener, rewarding time and close attention with an ever-deepening resonance.

Additional sessions for the album were recorded in Subar’s home studio, in the same house where Case Oats, the Casey Gomez-Walker-led outfit in which Subar plays guitar, recorded their 2025 debut "Last Missouri Exit." In one session, he added bass. In another, his brother, Sam Subar, played drums. Further instrumentation was provided by Case Oats bandmates Spencer Tweedy (drums on “I Never” and “Way Up”), Jason Ashworth (upright bass), and Scott Daniel (violin), as well as frequent collaborators Chet Zenor (electric guitar), Kelly Hannemann (piano), and Sarah Weddle (vibraphone, organ, and electric piano).

"Anything Could Be" heralds Max Subar’s arrival as one of his generation’s most exciting singer-songwriters, but, more importantly, it offers the listener both the transformative space in which the album was shaped, and a portrait of the artist, and person that artist became in making it. Its 11 songs are imbued with what the poet Adrienne Rich called “a wild patience,” a radical stillness that is, itself, a journey towards consciousness, peace, and self-awareness. It makes no promises about what’s next. Just the same, it leaves you in breathless anticipation for what that may be, so long as it stirs Subar to pick up his guitar and play through it as he did this chapter of his life.