According to the RAE, a martyr is that “person who suffers death in defense of his religion.” Devotee of The Beatles, Maximiliano Calvo kill the carefree musician we knew in 2023 as “The Rooster”to introduce us to a new man. In his most recent “Group Therapy” (Universal, 26) we meet a Maxi artisan, an annoyingly sincere recovering addict, and above all, a rock & roll martyr.
Returning to times when he was not alive to be able to live once and for all, Maximiliano finds himself in his seventies. With color and psychedelia. Accepting what surrounds you in order to have the will to want to escape from it. “At one point the sun has to come out, in ‘Plastic World’ exactly that happens. It generates all those tensions and puts you in that maelstrom of unease about life and in the end everything is a flash. We are all in that maelstrom and don’t believe anything, don’t feel strange and nothing happens. We live in this madness of colorinchis and screens and everything is fine. Like in all the stories that moment of hope arrives.”
His glorification of the past in line with his new sound has been necessary to find a vanishing point in a world he doesn’t like. “I think that the classic will always be avant-garde. You always have to go back to a love song, to sing, to play someone you love a song. So you always have to go back to doing things with your hands, to doing things with humans. That’s why I always say that I find it very funny that ‘Group Therapy’ is an album made by humans and monsters.”
“I’m addicted, I like to cry, I want to talk about my vulnerabilities, but I want to make rock & roll”
Beyond the almost ten collaborators present in this work – from Iván Ferreiro to Marcel Bagés, including the Monsters! from his head to María Rodés or the actor Leonardo Sbaraglia–, this album cannot be understood without the collective value, explicit in the title, that makes art such. “I feel that the collective is the bond and the bond makes me able to make the album. I make the album only because I have to take charge of my life. In the past I confused the collective with ‘Come on, I’ll throw you this brown’. Here I am suddenly very aware that the bond, the collective, sustains me. That’s why I close with ‘For Mariana’, which is a thank you to one of the most important people in my life who is my representative. A little bit of a mother, a little bit my therapeutic partner at the time and always house.”
Composer of some of the most ingenious lyrics so far this year in the Chat GPT era, Maximiliano considers himself an outsider. “I am an addict, half faggot, half immigrant”. Among the margins, the singer has found a place where he can heal by helping others. “Part of the album was created on a tour of rehabilitation centers. There is a part of delivery. I am better when I am giving than receiving because everything I receive will seem little to me. My compelling reason for doing the tour was the feeling that the songs had no other place. When I felt most useful in my life was doing that. It was a way of accompanying using the martyr of rock. I thought about what message would have served the Maximilian of his time, many people understood it as a very heavy message of hope Because if this kid is doing a rock concert and seems high, I can get my life back too. I did what I would have liked to happen.”
It is inevitable to talk about addictions when we talk about Maximiliano, drugs and behavioral addictions being “the game, networks and sex” the leitmotif of the album. “My music cannot be heard in a headline, you have to pay a little more attention. You have to read the entire news and that is the issue with today’s society. Maybe my music, my life, message and ways are not headlines and nothing happens, whoever wants to find out well and whoever doesn’t will stay with that. I don’t think it’s bad either, it’s thanks to what I’m here alive.”
Sometimes we don’t read the news because it is difficult to digest, in the Argentine’s case we find ourselves in his words “an annoying honesty.” “Art has to make you uncomfortable. We are in a wannabe world that in the end carries problematic things behind it. I am addicted, I like to cry, I want to talk about my vulnerabilities, but I want to make rock & roll. The group wants you to stay in the mold and I don’t think that is the place for the artist. Here nothing protects you, it is much more extreme to release an album like that and live these moments in which you are afraid that it will be forgotten because suddenly there is no refuge. There is no rude or nocturnal character, nor rocker. It’s just you going to the most basic message.”
However, of all the Maximilians who live in Calvo, we still find traces of what was the terror of the Madrid night, although from a new perspective. “There is a theme shared by the other album that my friend RENEE invited me to redefine. She invited me to change and create new memories in ‘FENGSHUI’. It reminded me of my emotional relationship with my house because it was a fucking disaster and I was not empathetic or understood that I lived with someone, and now there is another place in that song in which suddenly there is a search for calm to put order in my life.”
