About Max Davidson
I’m a singer-songwriter and musician based in Kingston, Ontario. I’ve been making music in one form or another for most of my life, but these days my focus is on writing and recording under my own name, and performing my original music live with Max and His Equals.
My music tends to land somewhere around melodic rock, power pop, baroque pop, and alternative rock. I’m drawn to big hooks, strong melodies, layered vocals, guitars, keyboards, and arrangements with a lot going on beneath the surface. The Beatles, Queen, Brian Wilson, Jim Steinman, Pete Townshend, Michael Stipe, and Steven Page are among the songwriters and artists who’ve had the biggest influence on me.
I’ve never had much interest in staying inside one stylistic box. Depending on the song, things can get bright, heavy, strange, theatrical, introspective, or some combination of all of them. I like contrasts — upbeat music carrying darker ideas, dense arrangements built around something emotionally simple, or serious subjects filtered through characters, stories, metaphors, and occasionally very silly imagery. I write a lot about yearning, adversity, romance, disappointment, growing up, speaking your mind, dreaming, and life in general.
Onstage, those songs filter through Max and His Equals. The band gives me a way to take the more carefully constructed studio versions and turn them into something louder and livelier, while giving each musician room to put their own stamp on them. We play covers too, but the original material is increasingly at the centre of what we do.
My obsession with music started around age four, when The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” sent me digging through my parents’ record collection. I eventually started learning guitar, piano, and bass, and began writing songs as a teenager. From there came a succession of bands and projects, including Traction, Shouting at Turtles, and Scarlet Sublime.
Right now, I’m focused on getting more of those songs properly recorded and out into the world, continuing to write new ones, and seeing where it goes from there.