Milwaukee-based musician Maximiano is preparing for their Iowa debut on April 18, bringing a deeply personal and close-listening performance to the stage at the Black Angel Restaurant and Bar in Iowa City.
Touring in support of their new full-length album Rokeby, released April 1, Maximiano’s music captures a rare blend of intimacy, playfulness and emotional depth, forged in a secluded retreat in upstate New York. Maximiano will follow a set by Iowa City stalwarts the Feralings.
“I could walk a forest mile, and leave my phone behind,” Maximiano sings, a lyric that perfectly captures the ethos of Rokeby. The album is a testament to processing suffering and transforming emotion into something generative: a creative process Maximiano describes as a “composting” of life’s difficulties. They describe the body as a container, a vessel for feeling. And in the making of Rokeby, they created an artistic container to safely confront and process grief.
After recording a lush studio album earlier in their career, Maximiano made a deliberate choice to limit themselves to the instruments they had on hand, secluding themselves in nature to create Rokeby. Their only companion was a seven-month-old rescue dog, Bandit, whose trust and joy shaped the writing of the fifth track on the album, “Puppers.”
“It took a week for her to stop shaking before I could put the leash on,” Maximiano recalled. Eventually, she ran joyfully through a field and later curled up in their lap to sleep, inspiring the song in one fell swoop. The album, like the dog’s act of trust, flows through the space between presence and attention, fear and joy.
Nature and place are central to the record. Walking along rivers, listening to the ambient sounds of forest and field, Maximiano recorded the surroundings and incorporated them into the album. The river becomes a symbolic and literal place of contemplation and return, a source of healing, emotional sustenance and a chance to wash away worries. These elements give Rokeby a sense of place and time.
Right from the start, Rokeby communicates an honest reckoning with life’s distressing moments and the tension of facing oneself in solitude. Songs like “Let Go” and “Countryside” explore unhealthy love, loss and the eventual return to self. Countryside in particular reflects Maximiano’s engagement with mutual aid and community care over consumerism:
“They taught me how to turn crying / to buying the things I should buy / The hole in my head where my soul has gone dead / Is the land that they occupy. / There’s no hope for the country now / Besides the folks that you’re around / the only answer that I’ve found / Is use your heart and serve the ground.”
Maximiano’s thoughtfulness extends beyond the songs themselves into their live performance. In a Wisconsin PBS interview, they reflected on performing in difficult or inattentive spaces: “I’ve played enough drunken bars to know what it’s like to be driving one direction and have everybody else driving the other.” Instead of confrontation, they advocate for quiet, attentive playing, offering the audience a choice to engage with the music and experience it fully.
The album is also playful and joyful. The interlude “On the Hudson” features what at first sounds like muted trumpet, until closer listening reveals it as a “mouth trumpet” solo, beckoning the feel of an old riverboat song. And lyrically, blunt and unexpected lines like, “truth is, I ate so much I just remember throwing up” make you laugh at first listen, but take on deeper meaning as the song “I will not abandon the river” unveils itself.
In another nod to the importance of retreating to nature to record, listeners hear river sounds, field recordings and ambient textures that evoke solitude, reflection and the restorative power of being present. While songs like “I Would Spend a Lover’s Year with You” capture that same presence by capturing a live recording in its entirety. “Lover’s Year” somehow draws on timeless musical archetypes found in traditional Irish folk songs, while clearly being a contemporary song.
Maximiano’s Iowa City debut promises an intimate, nuanced performance that embodies the ethos of Rokeby. The show is an invitation to witness the culmination of a year of reflection, solitude and emotional composting, offering the audience a window into the quiet spaces where lamentation, joy and creativity intertwine. For attendees, the experience will be a journey through rivers and fields, through loss and return, and through the gentle, careful presence of a musician fully attuned to both their inner world and the world around them.
