MidWest Friends Fest: The One With Signals Midwest

Pick up some Skyline Chili, make a few friendship bracelets and grab your buds as Midwest Friends Fest is returning to the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area for its sophomore year. Midwest Friends Fest is once again taking over the Southgate House Revival in Newport, KY. 

The 2-day festival with multiple stages and amazing national and local acts like Cinema Stare, The 1984 Draft, Nowhere Fast and Tooth Lures A Fang will take place from 30 & 31 May with tickets available here. 

Maxwell Stern of Cleveland’s Signals Midwest has joined TGEFM to discuss this year’s festival for this installment of our MWFF interview series. Check it out below and we’ll see you at the bonfire in the woods!the whole PA, flyering the show around town, selling tickets at the door. But getting on stage at a fest with a great lineup and an attentive audience just opens so many more doors for the bands, especially when it’s as well executed as MWFF. 

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Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! I believe most if not all of our readers are already pretty aware of Signals Midwest, but for the few stragglers, what should they know about the band; your history,
your mission, your sound?

We’re a rock band originally from Cleveland, OH that formed in 2008, in our late teens and early twenties. I don’t think our story is particularly original. Initially, we just wanted to sound like the bands we loved as kids – the whole No Idea / Epitaph / Fat Wreck world that we discovered through things like skate videos and compilation CDs. As we started to play and tour more and got a little older, we gravitated towards music that existed a bit further outside of straight-up skate punk or pop punk – stuff that was more lyrical and left-of-center, but still had really good live energy, memorable hooks and thoughtful, intentional songwriting.

Some of our biggest influences are bands like Braid, Bear Vs. Shark, Hot Water Music, The Promise Ring, The Weakerthans, Jets to Brazil, and early Against Me! And I still think the best band in the world – lyrics, music, visuals, politics, all of it – was The Clash.

You are gearing up for Midwest Friends Fest in the coming months, what does the festival circuit mean to artists like yourselves?

I don’t think of it that way. I think the term “festival circuit,” at least in my mind, refers to things like Bonnaroo and Coachella, which are just so much bigger than our little corner of the world and so tied up in corporate sponsorship and mainstream media. I view what Jared & co. are doing at MWFF as much more of a community-based festival – a lot of local bands and a healthy amount of touring acts in an historic venue, and a good dose of local engagement and partnership. Events like this were a life-force for me when I was discovering that I wanted to be a person who made space for music in my life, and I hope that MWFF can do something similar for everyone who attends.

What does Signals Midwest have planned for us beyond MWFF?

We’re getting ready to release a B-sides record called Layovers that will hopefully be out in late May or early June. We’ll do a little bit of touring on that this year, maybe a week or two, but mostly we’re just focusing on writing songs for our next record and that just kinda takes however long it takes.

What have been some of the most memorable moments or experiences with the band so far? What’s been the most unexpected? The weirdest?

Anytime we’ve been able to go overseas has been really special. I feel like once we started touring, doing the band just kinda became an excuse to see as much of the world as we could. We’ve done Europe and the UK a few times, Australia, and got a chance to go to Japan in February of 2024. Everyone we met was so remarkably kind. I’ll carry that one with me forever.

The weirdest experience was probably sleeping in an abandoned house in the middle of a forest in Austria. At the end of the night, the folks who put on the show said, “We will go back to our flats now, but we have arranged a sleeping space for you that is, how do you say, interesting.” They gave us the address and we drove up a mountain into a forest to get there. There were a few still family photos on shelves and some old mattresses on the floor. In my memory, one of them had blood on it, but I might have been imagining that. The only light that worked in the entire house was one flickering lightbulb on a pull-chain in the bathroom. Definitely a haunted situation. I figured we were gonna get murdered, but we made it out.

Regarding live sets, what are you most excited to bring to the Midwest Friends Fest audience? What do you want the attendees to say about your set when they tell their friends about you?

I look at playing live as an athletic, aerobic experience in addition to a musical one. I don’t drink alcohol before we play anymore because I want to be able to physically give everything I can to the people watching us. Steve (drums) and I both have dedicated stretching regimens that we do before every show. Rock and roll! We’ll never be the most on-key, tightest, professional band because that’s not really what this is, but we do try to get out there and play with as much energy and movement as we can. I want us to have as much fun and exude as much energy as we can so that the people watching us feel comfortable to do the same.

We’ve all got a few, what is your biggest regret? A gig you turned down, advice you didn’t take, what one thing do you wish you handled differently as a musician?

I try (and often fail) not to get too hung up on that stuff from a philosophical standpoint because it’s so easy to lose sleep over it all.

I will say that I wish I’d paid more attention to some of the methodology behind songwriting and production a little bit earlier in my “career”. That whole world is really fun. For our first three records, we rarely edited songs – we just tacked on part after part, and whatever idea we had usually made it to the end product in some way, regardless of whether it was good or appropriate. Now, taking a critical ear to an initial idea and figuring out how to make it better is one of my favorite parts of the process. It also keeps me more focused on the music we’re making, and less on the administrative / logistical work that inevitably surrounds it.

The punk, ska and indie scenes have almost always been at the forefront of inclusion and diversity within the music scenes.   The flipside of course is that the gatekeeping in the scene is also very prevalent.  Why do you think the genre brings in such a welcoming community and is so happy to let everyone in and also seems to shut the doors so quickly
behind themselves?

I don’t know why that happens. If I had to guess: It’s hard to start a scene, and I get that people want to protect what they have. Communities are often welcoming and fickle at the same time. I do think it’s important to notice the impulse to gatekeep when it arrives, and to question it if you can. In a way, I feel like it’s my responsibility to do that, especially as an older person with an established(?) band. But yeah, I’ve fallen into that trap of gatekeeping/overprotection quite a few times, and have actively tried to resist it by seeking out younger and up-and-coming bands to play with at our shows. I don’t wanna just shout into a vacuum and play with / to the same people – I wanna have a breadth of human experience.

This festival is all about friendships and music. What do you value most in friendships amongst yourself and your stagemates?

We’ve spent nearly two decades working on what essentially amounts to a shared class project that we get to present a few dozen times a year. I value that it’s still fun as hell, on a core level. I value that I don’t have to constantly think about who I’m being when I’m around them – we can just work, laugh and create together in an honest and supportive way. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t take a lot of work to keep those relationships up, but when it’s good, it feels like nothing else. A gift of aging together is that I feel like we’re able to be in that space more often than not.

Signals Midwest is one of the most well traveled performers on MWFF.  What advice do you have the younger acts coming up in the scene?  What has been the biggest change you’ve had to adapt to since starting out 15+ years ago?

Do it for love and for fun. Be intentional and think critically about what you’re offering the world, even if it’s silly. Other than that…get gear that works. Never, EVER go over your allotted set time (this is an important one, and a very easy way to get everyone else in the room to dislike you). Show up on time, and be gracious and kind to everyone unless they give you a reason not to be.

The biggest change for us is that we don’t live down the street from each other anymore. I live in Philadelphia, Ryan lives in Pittsburgh, and Steve and Jeff are back home in Cleveland. Practices, shows and tours have to be planned months in advance, and there’s a financial and logistical component to all of that. There’s an upshot, too, which is that when we do get together we’re usually very focused and can knock out multiple ideas in a single day and get a lot of work done in a small amount of time. People have full-time jobs, serious relationships, family commitments, etc. There’s just no time to fuck around, so we make it count.

I know Signals Midwest now has some roots in PA, but the band is originally from Ohio. I thought the state was only known for amazing chili, a Senator turned VP that speed dates at Ashley Furniture and the birthplace of rock and roll, but MWFF is proving the area is home to some amazing artists. What’s going on in the Buckeye State that has led to so much of an overabundance of great music In the scene lately? How does the area feed into the music you are writing, if at all?

As a kid, I just figured every band was from New York or LA. At age 12-13 I discovered Delay, who is an amazing Cleveland punk band that ended up relocating to Columbus. They had a lot of Ohio references in their lyrics and on their T-shirts. They were the first band I saw who was really proud to be from where they were, and who actively engaged with and cultivated their community by booking shows for out-of-town bands and throwing DIY festivals not unlike MWFF. I just loved what they were doing and wanted to do it, too. I still do, even though I don’t live there anymore. I mean, shit…for better or for worse, we have “Midwest” in our band name.

What album or band or significant singles made you go “Yeah, this is what I want to do”  Not just an influence but who or what was the catalyst?  On the flipside to that one… Who are some non-MWFF bands on your radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should?

I guess I just kinda talked about that with Delay. But another one is this: My best friend Josh played me “Lost In The Supermarket” by The Clash when I was 13 or 14 and it pretty instantly became my favorite song of all time. It’s not obviously major- or minor-key, the lyrics are intensely personal yet immediately relatable, and it’s got a persistent beat that sort of feels like three genres at once – and it’s got a great guitar solo. I heard that song and I was just different afterwards.

I haven’t been listening to a ton of new music lately, but I do want to shout-out my friend Michael Poggioli who releases songs under the name “Mike Pajamas” here in Philadelphia. His style is super cool – acoustic singer/songwriter-based stuff with clever lyrics and really good sample-based grooves & drum production. It’s just easy to listen to and connect with. Talented dude, deserves some shine.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this newcomer by the name of Taylor Swift. Her growing fanbase trades friendship bracelets. If you made a bracelet for MWFF, what word or phrase would you put on it?

DRINK WATER (YOU’RE DEHYDRATED)

Post show jam session in a large, empty field. What song are you singing around the bonfire? (Pardon my playful biases, but everything I know about the Midwest comes from shitty movies and songs by the KinsellaBros. so I assume everyone playing here has spent some time at bonfire parties in the fields off some lonely county road)?

I did this more than one too many times in my teens and early twenties, and the song was always “Sink, Florida, Sink” by Against Me!. 

Midwest Friends Fest is a smorgasbord of fantastic acts. Which bands are you most excited to see?

Mike Adams at his Honest Weight, The Tisburys, Nightmarathons, Tooth Lures A Fang, The 1984 Draft

Was there anything I missed that you’d like to share or dive deeper into with our readers?

Nope, thanks for reading this far if you made it here, and thank you for the questions Ed!