Both metaphorically and literally, it is hard to get Max Kerman to stay still. The Arkells front man’s brain and mouth are constantly moving. Ideas erupt constantly – for songs, for ways to market those songs, for concert-enhancing showmanship and, lately, for passages in his debut book.
That’s where the walks come in. Moving is part of his process. He sometimes takes walks alone, sometimes with his manager, Ash Poitevin. They’re usually around his home in Toronto’s west end. And they have helped shape much of Try Hard: Creative Work in Progress, out April 22 via Viking.
To hear the 38-year-old describe the point of his walks is to hear his brain erupt, again, with inspiration. “Why are you hitting your head against the wall when you could’ve just gone for a walk?” he told me in his kitchen on a warm April day after moseying around the neighbouring park for 45 minutes. “I’m also a big believer in showers, because a lot of good thinking happens there. And I’m a believer in consuming as much art and music as possible. Listening to artists with a sense of humour is really helpful, because it lightens you.”
He offered the example of Michael Lewis, the author of many non-fiction books that pull narratives from complicated finance, sports and government stories, who once told Kerman that he sometimes finds himself laughing along as he types. Kerman took that as inspiration for his own writing.
This would sound like a stretch if Kerman wasn’t Kerman, possibly the most earnest career musician on a major label in Canada. As we spoke, he name-checked writers from both books and television not just for their work, but for how they’ve described their creative processes: Haruki Murakami, Jesse Armstrong, Elizabeth Gilbert, Stephen King.
It would be very easy to take a book on creativity by one of Canada’s most recognizable rock musicians as a vanity project. But Kerman really is an avid reader. We used to be neighbours, and I’d often catch him mainlining books on his front porch. Once, as I unloaded groceries, I caught him reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. We wound up talking about the author’s research process for at least 30 minutes. Kerman cares about how creative work is constructed.
He also cares about sharing the things in which he finds joy. Primarily, that’s music, the field that has allowed Arkells to ascend from a gang of McMaster University musicians to one of the few Canadian bands that can fill a football stadium. But Kerman doesn’t care much for music memoirs. Titling his book Try Hard is both a joking self-jab and manifesto.
Kerman is not recording-obsessed; he’d rather focus on the act of creation instead of navigating mixing boards and Pro Tools.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
“I think some people go, ‘That guy’s a bit of a try-hard,’” – they do – “because I’m eagerly involved in lots of different things,” he said during our walk. “But whenever I talk to anybody who’s living a full creative life, they’re try-hards. They’re the ones actually getting [stuff] done.”
Try Hard has the contours of a music memoir only in the sense that Kerman employs a chronological structure and personal examples to show how he managed to make a career making songs. He recounts Arkells’ rise through the lens of his relentless determination to build a life around a band, but also acknowledges the tumbles along the way. Creativity, as he describes it, is the art of the possible.
“Some people go, ‘That’s not who I am – I’m not an artist,’” Kerman said. “Anybody could be an artist. It’s just a matter of being a little bit vulnerable, a little bit curious and pursuing the thing. I hope the book demystifies a lot of ideas of what it means to try something.”
Trying also means finding indirect ways to encourage creativity. To that end, Try Hard explores what happens when Kerman’s not writing or performing – walking, playing pick-up basketball, calling friends who share his earnest curiosity – to share how he feeds his creative process. That process gets its share of pages, too. For Arkells records, it lately means sitting at an ancient, out-of-tune piano that sits in his kitchen.
Kerman is not recording-obsessed; he’d rather focus on the act of creation instead of navigating mixing boards and Pro Tools. When he writes music here, he fiddles with notes and vocalizes sometimes wordlessly, trying to find something that captures the emotions he wants to convey.
As we spoke in his kitchen, he alternated between sitting in front of his writing tools – laptop, that piano – trying to showcase how he makes songs move from his brain to his band.
He offered an example, tapping out root notes with his left hand, testing out chords and melody lines with his right that could become rhythm and lead guitars, and built a song around C, A-minor and G. When he first wrote this, he realized it had the jauntiness of a song by the Band. So he returned to his other seat, opened his phone and put on the latest mix of a song Arkells recently recorded with producer John Congleton in Los Angeles.
It was the fully realized version of what he had just shown me. And at the end of the opening verse, there it was: Arkells keyboardist Anthony Carone plunking out a Garth Hudson-like fill. The song began by Kerman trying. Maybe it’ll be the band’s next big hit. That’s what Kerman wants you to know: You can try this just as easily. He wouldn’t have written a book if he didn’t think that way.
“I make no claim to be good,” he said of writing. “The only claim I make is that I try hard.”
