Senior Art Profiles

ARTIST PROFILE

BY MIA GOLDSTEIN

Photos by Max Steiger

Last summer, Max Steiger, Community High School senior bought his first film camera. It was an Olympus OM2N. He had been around photography and cameras his whole life — but on a sudden impulse, he bought his own. During the past year, Steiger has learned to be deliberate and purposeful with each photo he takes. When the shutter snaps, there’s no redos. Every picture must be carefully framed, the angle perfected and hold true meaning before he takes his shot.

Recently, he has found a new inspiration for his photography. In August, his family is moving to North Carolina. Steiger decided he wants to start collecting photos that are most relevant to him and his town. Anything that catches his eye or holds a memory for him, he hopes to capture in a way that resonates with him and his audience. He hopes to extend the feelings he captures out to anyone who sees his photos.

HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INTO MUSIC?

The first real time I got into music was when I was seven or eight. At my old school in England, this dude came to our classroom one day and he was like, ‘Hey, who wants to learn an instrument?’ He had a list of instruments that you could go and take after school private lessons that were through the school. I wanted to play guitar because of my granddad on my mom’s side. He’s big into music. I grew up with him playing a lot of piano and guitar for us and showing me a lot of

HOW DID YOU GET STARTED IN THE LEFT LANES?

So there are five guitar players in Jazz four. Two of my good friends, and now bandmates, Isaac McKenna and Noah Hogan, were in my Jazz One class. And it must have been like midway through the first semester, and maybe closer towards the end. Isaac came up to me one day and said, ‘Oh, you should watch this movie, ‘Sing Street.’ A week or two later, he was like ‘Did you watch that movie?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’ll do it tonight. I promise.’ I went home and I finally watched it and it’s about these Irish kids that start a band. I saw [Isaac] the next day and I was like, ‘Dude, I watched the movie. It’s great. We should do this. We should start a band.’

ARE YOU GOING TO PURSUE MUSIC IN COLLEGE?

I’m going to Columbia College Chicago. I’m going for a Bachelor of Music in Urban, Contemporary and Popular Music. It’s a Bachelor of Arts music degree but with more focus in business and production aspects. So I get to learn how to produce my own music.

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE SONGS?

Isaac, Gabe and I, we’re all really into this band Hippo Campus. When we started the band together, we were like, ‘Oh, we should cover some of those songs.’ For many of our shows, we played the song “South” by Hippocampus and that became one of our staples at our shows. Before the Left Lanes, we were in this other band with the Ann Arbor Music Center. We used to play “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” by Taylor Swift at all our shows. Once that band ended, me and Isaac were like, ‘Oh, we should totally do that at the Left Lanes gigs.’ In that same Music Center band, one year we played the song “Fatlip” by the band Sum 41. One of the most inappropriate songs to play. We played it at the Ann Arbor Open Ice Cream Social. Right at the end of the song, there’s a little drum break, where our drummer, he shouts, ‘The doctor said my mom should have had an abortion!’ It was such a good memory.

DO YOU HAVE A MEMORY OF THE FIRST TIME YOU PERFORMED ON STAGE?

My first memory of really performing was with the Music Center band. We’d finally gotten enough material to play a full 30 minutes or 40 minutes. And we played The Session Room. Alex Johnson, who’s the one of the head teachers of the Music Center, he’s a Community graduate. When he was in high school he had this fake band. They just did funny promotional videos for it and bumped around. They were called Goatus. Their logo was this goat head with the anarchy symbol. So the month before our gig, our band leader custom printed these Goatus shirts for us. We had them under our sweatshirts. After the first song, we ripped off our sweatshirts to reveal our Goatus t-shirts. We gave one to Alex.

ARTIST Q&A

BY CATE WEISER

Photo by Ebba Gurney