“Noah Kahan, Tyler Childers and Zach Bryan are My Big Three”: Max McNown Discusses Influences, New Album and More

In today's genre-blending world, it can often be difficult to find a sound that feels entirely fresh and unique. There's Zach Bryan's navel-gazing Bloke-Folk, Noah Kahan's anthemic Folk-Pop, middle-of-the-road Country, Trap-infused Country...and so on.

As a result, when a new artist bursts onto the scene, they're usually quite easy to place into one of these categories. This is what makes folk-country prodigy, Max McNown, a particularly exciting figure. The Oregon native flits between soulful folk, raw, introspective alt-country and hook-driven Radio country with an ease that belies his age.

Max McNown muses, “There's a ton of freedom now in the country space. It hasn't always been that way, and for better or for worse, the genre of country has embraced this country-adjacent folk world. I mean, Noah Kahan is considered country. Dylan Gossett is considered country...Country is much bigger than it used to be and there's a lot more variety...I like that country is becoming wider-reaching”.

McNown cites Kahan in particular, alongside two other contemporary folk and alt-country titans, Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers, as his trifecta of primary influences, “I like to say that Noah Kahan, Tyler Childers and Zach Bryan are my ‘Big Three’ that inspired me to get going in music. Noah Kahan inspires my writing style most, whereas Zach Bryan gave me the courage to be confident in four chords, while Tyler Childers gave me the confidence to sing with my chest and belt it out...”

On his sophomore album, Night Diving, McNown imbues a weight and gravitas into each track, building on the achingly soul-baring - yet quietly hopeful - ambience of his viral break-out hit, ‘A Lot More Free’, which exploded in popularity last year.

“I don't go into the writing sessions thinking, ‘What genre am I fitting it into? Is this going to be a happy, light-hearted song, or is this going to be a sad song?’ It's whatever poetry I have written in my notes - I read it, and we decide which entry we want to use. I think that leads to a lot of honesty, but it also leads to the self-consciousness I feel about Night Diving, because it's like, ‘Man, is it too sad? Are the songs too depressing?’ We have ‘Marley’, the optimism of ‘Hotel Bible’ and the love of ‘Better Me For You (Brown Eyes)’. But ‘It's Not Your Fault’, ‘Night Diving’ and ‘Won't Let Me Go’ - these are all deeply honest and emotional, heavy songs”.

For much of Night Diving, it feels like Max McNown is getting some burdensome troubles off his chest, exemplified by the aptly chosen title-track and ‘Love I Couldn't Mend’. When setting out to be this vulnerable, it can frequently go one of two ways - either it's an immensely cathartic experience for the artist, or they end up buckling under the weight of the themes they're attempting to tackle.

“I think definitely it depends on the song”, McNown reflects, “With some of the songs, I would finish them and I would feel like I couldn't write again for weeks. I'd expended all the emotion that I had - songs like ‘It's Not Your Fault’ and ‘Night Diving’. Those two specifically are very heavy and deeply honest, and difficult to write about”.

He expands, “I always reference a therapy session. Writing these songs, I had to be emotionally present. I had to be there, I had to be honest and I had to say uncomfortable things. It definitely felt good to get a lot of that off my chest, but it's also very scary”.

If Night Diving does emphasise the blue tones over the lighter, sunnier textures, it's for good reason. Over the past five or so years, Max McNown has dealt with significant personal challenges. His brother, Brock, was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2019, and shortly after Brock's first relapse, one of McNown's close high school friends took his own life. Thankfully, Brock has been in remission for just over a year, and travels alongside McNown for many of his tour-dates.

“It started everything”, Max McNown underlines, “When he was battling the worst of his cancer, he would always struggle with the question of, ‘Why?’ Why does the world keep going when his is crushed? Why does everything just keep spinning? When he has to do a stem cell transplant, or he gets news that he relapsed, or has to do his chemotherapies? Everybody just keeps going. So at the beginning, when I wrote my first song ever, ‘Freezing in November’, it was right after he had relapsed. In the same span of time, one of my friends from high school took his own life. So it was like a compiling of difficulties that I had to find an outlet for”.

He stresses, “The first line of the first song I ever released is, ‘How can a world be crushed while another goes on?’ He was directly...almost ripped off, in a way! So from the very beginning, he's been one of the main inspirations, and then you find more specifically a song about his story - ‘Can't Hide Light’ - which is a track on the Wandering album. That is pretty specifically about cancer and the battle that he went through, and to this day, he just continues to inspire me”.

Given how ‘Freezing in November’ arrived back in April 2023, before the success of ‘A Lot More Free’, it feels fitting that Max McNown has decided to re-release ‘Freezing in November’ as part of Night Diving, so he can share his origin-story with new fans.

McNown explains, “In this age of social media, you release something and then it's like, ‘Okay, onto the next thing, and then onto the next...’So I feel like a lot of my fans who have enjoyed the songs I've released recently deserve to hear ‘Freezing in November’. For a lot of people, it's lost in time, so I want to give it the credit it's due - and what better way to do that than to end the album with where everything started?”

While Night Diving is melancholic at its heart, these crestfallen moments only accentuate the chinks of light that filter through on the sweet, rose-tinted lead single, ‘Better Me For You (Brown Eyes)’ and one of record's hidden gems, the evocative and beautifully intricate ‘Hotel Bible’. Both explore the similar sense of dependence that McNown feels towards his partner, as he declares her to be his reason for living.

“They're both heavily inspired by the exact same person”, Max McNown confirms, “They're both fully inspired by my girlfriend. ‘Better Me For You’ is a little more on the nose, but ‘Hotel Bible’ is about the moments we share where she may not feel the self-worth that she deserves to feel. ‘Hotel Bible’ is trying to get somebody to see themselves in the way that you see them, because some people will have so much importance in your life, yet you'll see them doubting themselves”.

He concludes, “You're like, ‘I could live an entire life just on the light that you emit’, like, I need you to understand that. So ‘Hotel Bible’ is very much a sibling song to ‘Better Me For You’”.

‘Better Me For You (Brown Eyes)’ is well on its way to emulating the virality of ‘A Lot More Free’, with the heartwarming ode to young love currently approaching 18 million streams on Spotify at the time of writing, less than three months after its release.

Night Diving cements Max McNown as a premier songsmith, one unafraid to leave parts of his soul in his music, and one unsullied by attempts to conform to genre boundaries. Many of today's dizzying plethora of sub-genres may well have fallen away in a year or two's time - but you can rest assured McNown will not suffer the same fate.

In addition, Max McNown discussed his debut performances in the UK as part of C2C Festival 2025, the way that faith colours his songwriting and his decision to turn down a high-profile talent show appearance early in his career:

“My faith keeps me humble. It keeps me grounded - my faith, paired with the family that I have around me. My brother traveling with me all the time, my uncle managing me...I have a strong familial and faith foundation that keeps me on the straight and narrow. I remember when I was younger, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, my dream is to be a singer’. I didn't know what genre I was going to end up going into, or if I was even going to pursue singing, but I used to think that I want to sing as honestly as I can. I think that's why you can hear the references to faith in there. I'm not going in thinking, ‘I'm going to reference faith in this song’, but I am understanding that what makes me who I am is going to show itself in certain ways”.

“Man, I'm super excited. I can't wait. I've never been there before. I've spent basically my whole life in the US, I've only gone out of the country twice - once to Canada and once to the Bahamas to go scuba-diving. It's going to be completely new for me.

In this business, I've built a strategy that works for me, and that strategy is to not think too far ahead, otherwise I'll overwhelm myself. So right now, I'm only thinking about my show tomorrow night...But I am extremely excited, and just the fact that I'll be over there doesn't feel real yet, because it doesn't even feel real that my music is enjoyed over there. Like I had a video sent to me from a gentleman in Australia, and he was playing ‘Freezing in November’ for the grocery store he runs.

40% of my music streams come from outside of the US. ‘Surreal’ is the best way to explain it...I plan on scheduling a couple more days in London if I can, and just soak it all up. A lot of the times in this business, I'm so oriented on getting the stuff done and moving on to the next thing, that I don't stop and smell the roses”.

“I don't know if we're saying names, but we'll just call it ‘a talent show’. It wasn't the best move for me. I felt as though I had cultivated a brand and a career outside of it. I think anybody who goes on shows like this one, a lot of the time, they never end up shaking the name of ‘You're the guy from that game show’ you know? There were over a million people listening to me from month-to-month at the time, and that was a larger number than a lot of the winners, so I looked at the upside, and I was like, ‘You know what? I had a great time. I went and I survived the first round, I met the judges, and I was super honored. But at the end of the day, it just wasn't the right decision for me’. I see its importance, but for me, it wasn't the right time and place in my life, and I'm grateful I made that decision”.

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