[Cover photo credit to John Travis]
Songwriter Max Vanderwolf has announced his upcoming album, Songs You’ll Never Hear, and has shared the non-album single “Borderlands.” After three years in the studio with producer Tim Sonnefeld, Vanderwolf’s new album, Songs You’ll Never Hear, is set for release on April 17, 2026 via Another Record Label.
“Informed by the utter wreckage of our current epoch”, Vanderwolf’s album integrates strings and horns. Although it isn’t on the album, the song “Borderlands” still takes on the same themes, “voicing Vanderwolf’s frustration and sadness.”
Of the track, he says:
“This song came late in my process and it hit hard. I originally named it, “Songworthy,” and it resonated with the desperation of our current predicament. Tim Sonnenfeld, the song’s producer and guitarist, played through it once and he felt immediately connected and we developed the voicings.
In this year of cultural disintegration, unbridled corruption and the brazen attacks on civil rights, it’s clear that we are in a desperate situation that marks the end of the American experiment. I feel heartbroken and ashamed that the American system, no matter how flawed, is now at an extreme level of abuse. I’ve had the pleasure of living outside the US for many years, but 5 years ago I grew to embrace my return to the US.
With the re-election of this venal psychopathic narcissist, I was again seeking a way out from America’s rise to fascism. While “Borderlands” portrays a desperate escape from a dangerous situation, it remains unclear where we are escaping from. For decades, the escape was from foreign lands to America, but now thousands take flight from the US. Is no place safe in these times? Where is sanity? Where is humanity?
In the grip of the algorithm, under the jackboot of corporations, we are kept divided and powerless.”
On the final mixing session of Songs You’ll Never Hear, Vanderwolf’s vision became blurry. Following an MRI, he discovered he had a 5 centimeter brain tumour. He is currently receiving treatment in San Francisco and is determined to return to the studio to complete a fourth album that he has started.
Along with his career as a composer and performer, Vanderwolf, under his birth name Glenn Max, has had a career as a curator, programming festivals and booking artists like David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Davie Byrne, Kraftwerk, Patti Smith, Beck, Stephen Malkmus, Massive Attack, Jarvis Cocker, Kim Gordon at places like the Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival Hall and Village Underground in the UK, Knitting Factory in New York, and most recently at the Skirball Center in his new hometown of Los Angeles.
