From rocking performances to carefully crafted compositions, The Maxines have established themselves as mainstays in the Savannah music scene. They’ve won Best Local Metal Band in Savannah, Best Rock Band, Best Punk Band, runner-up for Best Concert, and were finalists for Best Local Album… and somehow we have a feeling they’re just getting started.
Last Friday Reverie’s own Dylan Kennedy and Josh Garwood had the opportunity to sit down for an interview with the certified rock queens of The Maxines: AJ (vocals), Coco (drums), Maddie (lead guitar), and Emma (bass + back-up vocals). We discuss their inspirations, upcoming album, and the state of the music scene here in Savannah!
Images furnished by Amber Guimaraes, Sal Martinez, and Beck Wolfe.
How did you first get into music?
Maddie: Our [Maddie and Coco] whole family is pretty musical. Our dad played piano, guitar and stuff like that, so we were always encouraged to play music.
We grew up listening to the music our parents listened to, like U2, Lenny Kravitz, Smashing Pumpkins, White Stripes, all the essential rock. Our family always encouraged us to do music, which is really cool.
Coco: We would just play stuff together, like I would be on drums and Maddie would be on guitar and we would switch and play any random instrument, really.
Emma: My parents were band kids so I always wanted to be in band. And I ended up getting into that in 4th grade, and I played saxophone up until I graduated high school. I taught myself guitar in 6th grade. Then I just stuck with guitar and drums and piano for a long time. I was gifted my bass for Christmas in 2020. I thought the instrument was lame until they [Maxines] asked me to start playing with them and I realized I really love playing bass. You don’t just have to sit there and play whole notes … I’ve gotten to really love the instrument.
AJ: My family loves music. I took piano lessons for about 5 years, and when I was younger I took guitar lessons for a couple of years too. I always connected to lyrics and vocals and tried to emulate the people that I really looked up to. I didn’t grow up around a lot of musical instruments, singing was what I always wanted to do. I just love music and I’ve always connected to music.
Do y’all ever have the desire to incorporate piano, or other instruments into your music?
Maddie : For one of our new songs we were thinking about having a piano outro, and I guess one of us would play that, but I feel like I’m not as good as I used to be because I don’t really practice that often. It’s fun for us switching around instruments sometimes. Actually, everybody in the band can play guitar now, which is awesome.
Are you all originally from Savannah?
Emma: Born and raised. Well, technically I wasn’t born here, but I’ve lived here since I was a baby, so that’s just what I say.
Maddie: Coco and I are from Canada originally, near Toronto. We moved here at the same time as AJ, right before COVID happened, and we’ve been here ever since.
AJ: I’m from North Carolina originally, Wilmington.
What brought you to Savannah?
AJ: I wanted to be closer to an artist community. I just really wanted to be around a lot more creatives. I was curious about going to Scad, I’m a painter as well, so I was looking at going for painting, but decided not to. But I’m really happy to be in Savannah around these creative people. Because they’re everywhere.
Sidenote, AJ is a super talented painter! She was featured in the Cedar House Gallery in Savannah, and various pieces of hers can be seen on instagram.
Maddie: Our mom is American and our dad is Canadian. Our mom decided to come back to the US to get her masters in art history from SCAD so we had the option of staying in our hometown and living around and seeing the same people that we went to high school with all the time and working in the cold. –
COCO: – Or we came to Savannah and just work down here. We didn’t know anything about the music scene, so we got really lucky that we picked Savannah.
How did you guys meet / form?
AJ: I had recently gone out west for a cross-country road trip and it completely changed my life. I guess I just had an epiphany. I was like, “I’m going to make this work.” I had tried to form bands in the past and it never worked. There were egos and people not taking it seriously, to put it simply. So I was like, “I’m gonna try it one more time, but this time, it’s going to be all women.” And so I made it a point to reach out to Veronica from Bero Bero. I was like, “hey, so do you know of any women who might want to start a rock band”? And she was like, “Oh, yeah. Me. Maybe I can play bass”. We knew Maya, a guitar shredder, who doesn’t live in Savannah anymore, who knew Coco and Maddie.
COCO: Yeah, I worked with Maya. I ended up talking to her one day and she said she played guitar, and I said I played instruments too and she said “Really, do you want to start a band?”
Maddie: The next week we were in a group chat with AJ and Veronica. We picked some songs to do covers of and play together. Maya had to leave the band, but she brought us together.
So, Emma, how did you join the band?
Emma: I met the twins working at a country club and they mentioned that they were in a band. They told me they had a show, finally, and I went. I didn’t ever think they would ask me to play with them, but it just so happened that Veronica couldn’t do it anymore and they knew I played bass, so they asked me one day while I was at work if I wanted to go on tour with them and I literally sent them a picture because I had a Maxines shirt on. I was a huge fan at the time and we were friends so I was like “Are you kidding me, yeah”. We went on tour and it was an immense amount of fun and I’ve been playing with them since.
Speaking of tours, do you enjoy touring?
AJ: I enjoy spending the time together. I enjoy the car rides, the hotels, we get food together, it’s really fun. And then it’s like “oh I get to play a show with these awesome women too”, it’s great.
Maddie: I feel like we’re all so busy in our lives outside of the band. I feel like the only time we get to see each other is at practice, so it’s really fun to get food together and have a whole day to explore a city together.
Emma: I don’t travel outside of shows. I’ve never really been to any of the places that we went to on tour, so I love the traveling aspect, as well as being with them [Maxines].
How do tour shows compare to local?
COCO: We definitely love playing shows in town. It’s such a different experience playing shows in Savannah versus playing shows out of town. In Savannah, it’s just so good. Sometimes we’ll go out of town and it’s like, you know, there’s only a couple of people who show up to the show, which is awesome if there’s anyone there, but it also makes us appreciate how good the Savannah music scene is.
Does playing in different locations / venues impact your performance? Is prep different?
Emma: The preparation and performance is normally the same. I feel like we’re more hyped up in Savannah because the crowd is.
Maddie: We pick the set list when we get to the venue. We read the vibe of the audience and the other bands we were playing with and decide what songs we want to play based on that. Like, is anyone going to mosh if we play cannibals or are they just going to watch AJ jumping around in the audience and give her weird looks?
AJ: It can be so awkward! It’s so interesting how different cities react. There will be some cities where nobody’s reacting. People are just standing there staring, there’s not even a bob of the head or any sort of move, and then in another city people are just moshing, going crazy. Like Charlotte, that crowd was awesome. And Savannah, Savannah is really special.
So you guys primarily tour the southeast currently?
AJ: Primarily. We’ve played in Brooklyn and Chicago. We definitely want to branch out.
How do you connect with the audience?
AJ: We love to get them to mosh, or come closer, or sing the lyrics with us. We do the call and response with “burn”, which people love. I try to connect by making eye contact. The bands that I connect to are ones that are looking at me. I always try to interact with the crowd as much as possible, get in their faces, look them in the eye, maybe scream at them a little bit, dance with them, give them a shove, because, I don’t know, they just want to feel seen. We all want to feel seen. If you’re a band and you are reading this: “Look at your f*cking audience”.
Maddie: We just played a show at El Rocko with three other bands, very fast punk. I could tell people wanted to mosh and push each other. During “Cannibal” there’s a sped-up part near the end. We sort of hold the last chord and do the cymbals and it tells everybody to…
COCO: The wall of death.
AJ: It was so epic.
Maddie: She did the wall of death.
Coco: Yeah, that was our first time doing the wall of death.
Coco: The audience is a part of it too. It’s not just about the band. It’s like the audience is performing live.
AJ: I always say the energy between the audience and the band is a constant movement of give-and-take energy. When we acknowledge them, we give them permission and a safe space to do that. If we interact with them, they think “Oh, I can be a part of this”. Yeah, you absolutely can, because you are.
Do you ever get nervous before a performance?
Emma: I do sometimes. Just randomly I’ll be like, “I’m so nervous right now. Like, you’re going to get up there and suddenly not remember how to play anything.” But that’s never actually happened, and it’s not too often. Most of the time it’s a feeling of, “we’re going to get up there and play with our friends and it’ll be fun.”
AJ: The first time we ever performed at the Wormhole open-mic night, I was so nervous my teeth were chattering. I was terr-i-fied. I remember standing on stage and my hamstrings were just, shaking uncontrollably. It was so nuts. There are random shows that I get nervous, and it’s hard to pinpoint why I’m nervous… but sometimes there are moments like when Lzzy Hale showed up at our show. I remember Emma and I were both like, holy sh*t I’m so fu*king nervous.
Emma: But then I got up there and wasn’t nervous, and it was just like, ok let’s play a cool show.
AJ: Yea, I’ll be nervous before occasionally, but when I get on stage with these women, it’s such a safe space and the nerves just go away. Like, immediately when Maddie strikes a chord, or Coco hits the drums, or I just look at Emma, the nerves just melt away.
Ok, so I want to talk about what y’all have coming up! Word has it that you’ve been taking some time off from touring to work on some new songs. Is there an album in the works?
AJ: Yes! We’re currently almost finished with our sixth song for the upcoming album. We literally wrote the sixth song in one practice. Coco and Maddie came up with the meat of the song, and then I came up with the lyrics. It’s kind of feisty, kind of tongue-in-cheek; nu metal vibes, a little playful. We have a lot of new inspirations that are influencing our sound for this album; it feels really dynamic and vastly different from our first album.
And just having Emma as part of The Maxines now; she’s just a fu*king stellar bassist. She has so many incredible ideas that hit the mark, and her bass lines just create a deeper and heavier sound for us.
I feel like we’re all leaning into our craft a little more, and we’ve learned a lot. Lyrically I feel like I’ve improved and I’m not afraid to say certain things; I’m very blunt about certain things, and I really like the direction things are going. I’m really really really, really fu*king excited for this album.
Awesome! Can you share what some of those new inspirations are for this album?
COCO: We’re going for more metal influence, like we’re trying to get heavier.
Maddie: I’m doing more research on classic bands that I feel like I can draw inspiration from. Bands like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, … Like, anytime I listen to music I feel like I’m analyzing all the different parts of it…. I wonder what effects they’re using on the guitar here, and analyzing the song structure.
COCO: Like really studying it, not just listening, but understanding “what makes this song ‘good’”. Especially with grunge songs, and asking ourselves, “what makes this ‘grunge’”
Are there any songs on this upcoming album that you’re particularly excited about and can’t wait for people to hear?
Emma: I’m most excited for Rotten, because I feel like it starts off very melodic and then jumps into a really heavy ending. It doesn’t scream grunge or heavy metal, it’s a mix of a bunch of sounds that blend really well together. And I get to sing with AJ, which is always a good time.
Is there a message or theme in the new album that you would like to come across?
AJ: So the theme is in the title that we’re currently dancing around, but I don’t know if I want to give it away quite yet. But generally speaking, I feel like we’re focusing on “calling out the bullsh*t”..
Emma: Yes, calling out a**holes and speaking about equality across the board.
Sadly you have a lot of material to pull from at the moment, given the state of our country… but that’s also why music is so great – it’s an outlet for people to rage, reset, and connect with issues that are important.
Ok, so looking at the local music scene, Savannah has lost a lot of venues lately: Lodge of Sorrows, King Oliver’s, Southbound, Das Box… and we’re still mourning the loss of the Jinx… Does that have an impact on y’all as a band?
AJ: It does, it’s really sad. I think that music needs to be more supported than it is.
Emma: Yea, we don’t have as many all-ages venues any more and that really impacts who is able to come see bands play.
As a quick follow-up to that, what do you think Savannah can work on to improve the music scene here?
COCO: I feel like the local support is really good. The crowds and the patrons of venues always seem to show up. Like, Lodge of Sorrows had to close because the rent was too expensive to maintain, but it was always packed any time we went. So the fans are doing everything they can do to support local music. Maybe venue owners can lower the rent so venues can continue to operate!
Maddie: Yea, I think there are a lot of things that the fans and venues can’t control. The scene has been so supportive of local bands, but if you have great music and nowhere to play, what can you do? I know there are a good amount of house venues, but that’s a big sacrifice for people to offer their house as a venue… And it’s expensive. Like, people don’t have money to buy elaborate PA’s to have the right setup to really host a band.
Ok, and lastly, is there anything else y’all wanted to share before we wrap up?
Maddie: Yes, so the album is coming out this year. We don’t have a release date yet, but we’re taking this month off to continue writing and get the album done as soon as possible.
AJ: And now is not the time to be complacent! Bark loud and bite hard!
We couldn’t agree more, and are super grateful for you, and bands like you, who give us all an outlet in difficult times like these. Also, we can’t wait for the album! We’ll keep our ears to the ground in anticipation for your next release and look forward to seeing you at some shows soon!!