Max Subar's 'Anything Could Be' is a Warm, Hard-Won Debut of Lakeside Folk-Rock
Max Subar has been a fixture of Chicago’s music scene since 2016 — producing, engineering, and playing behind acts like Case Oats and Sleeper’s Bell — without a record of his own. Anything Could Be, his Merge Records debut, changes that. Newcity’s Elizabeth Jakaitis praised the album for embracing “the classic singer-songwriter tradition with warmth and originality,” offering “hard-won optimism” that acknowledges loneliness and depression without surrendering to either.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: The record began as live vocal-and-acoustic-guitar takes recorded at a Wisconsin lakehouse over ten days, then grew in Chicago sessions with Chet Zenor, Jason Ashworth, Spencer Tweedy, Sarah Weddle, and Subar’s own brother Sam — the acoustic foundation stays audible under every later addition.
The Spatial Dynamics: Pedal steel, fiddle, vibraphone, organ, and electric guitar layer over that foundation, and the lakehouse field recordings thread ambient texture through the record so the setting never fully disappears from the mix.
Standout Performance
The arrangement choices themselves. Eleven tracks in, the instrumentation never crowds Subar’s plainspoken vocal — every added layer earns its place instead of competing for space.
Why It’s Certified
The title track and “See Saw” set up the record’s central tension between stagnation and growth; “Like You’ve Known It” and “Everything Is” are where that hard-won optimism actually lands. A producer’s producer finally steps into his own songs, and the songs are more than ready for him. Certified great.