Brothers of AJR Open Up About Losing Their Father During Creation of New Album

Adam, Jack, and Ryan Met of the band AJR released their fifth studio album, The Maybe Man, on November 10, but the release was tinged with grief for the brothers, as their father passed while they were making the album. Speaking with Steve Inskeep of NPR recently, the Met brothers discussed the new album and how they processed their father’s passing during album creation.

Ryan Met described them as “not depressing people, but realistic people,” he said, “[and] we can always find a balance between if we’re going to talk about something really deep, let’s add a little juxtaposition in there.”

Inskeep then mentioned that the album was created during a time of loss. As Jack Met explained, “Right as we started this album, our father got really sick. And it turns out there was an issue with his lung, which turned into cancer.” He continued, “And basically the entire time we were writing the album our father was getting sicker and sicker. Things got so bad so quickly that [the album] became a lot more personal and emotional than we had planned on.

“And it was this sort of tough thing which made us kind of grow 30 years in the span of eight months, which was needing to write this album, we had a due date for it, and needing to out everything we had into it, but at the same time being there for our father … we inadvertently wrote our most personal and most emotional album.”

Their song “God is Really Real” includes the line “My dad can’t get out of bed,” which Inskeep noted as “devastating.” Ryan explained, “It was made through massive amounts of tears and anxiety and fear, an amount that we never felt again. Even when he passed, it was the saddest thing any of us have ever had to go through, but that fear in the moment of ‘what’s going to happen,’ imagining the worst, that never came up again.”

Of the line “We don’t know how to express our feelings so we’re making lots of jokes,” Ryan said, “That’s something you never really know until you’ve experienced a grief in your family. There’s like a weird fun element to it. It’s like, all the barriers that made your dad, your dad … that goes away, and you’re taking care of him like he’s a baby, and you’re making jokes the whole time.” He continued, “That was the year, it was really sad, but it was also really funny and we got to see a side of him that we never saw before.”

(Featured Image by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)