Written by Gabrielle Sangataldo
The past year for Detroit-based band Mac Saturn has been a whirlwind. After discovering horrific news about their former keyboardist, the band canceled the tour for their debut album and took time to focus on recuperation and what matters most to them: music.
Now, a year and a half later, the five-piece band — which now consists of Carson Macc on vocals, Nick Barone and Mike Moody on guitars, Ian Lukas on bass, and Angelo Coppola on drums — hits the road again for a comeback tour following the first single since their 2024 freshman album Hard to Sell. With a sound that’s equally infectious as it is nostalgic, the album’s title is far from reflective of the band’s innate knack for groove.
Dig a little deeper past the ’70s flair, and what is found at the core of Mac Saturn is not fear or fatigue, but community. Zest for life. Sharing vulnerability. Writing songs. The desire to keep moving forward.
In their first out-of-state interview from last year, lead singer Carson Macc and guitarist Mike Moody opened up about their healing journey and the vital ring of people that is born through music. An eye-opening, heartfelt preview of their Asbury Park debut at the Wonder Bar on October 24, this is what Mac Saturn truly is: real.
So first and foremost, you’re about to be back on the road after a year and a half hiatus. What emotions have come up? How are you feeling? Are you excited? Nervous? What’s going on?
Carson Macc: That’s a great question. There’s a lot of emotions that have happened in the last year, but it’s been a year of healing and a year of a lot of writing for us. We’ve got a lot of new songs that we’re excited to bring back to the stage, as well as Hard to Sell, the album that we put out.
A lot of those songs, we’re gonna be bringing back to the stage. [At] the last couple of practices, we’ve been starting to put a set together and visualize what we wanna bring to the stage. And it’s been so incredible. We’re so excited. There’s gonna be some fire and some spark there.
That’s super exciting to hear.
Mike Moody: The momentum you can gain when you’re on the road, too, and especially trying out new material on the road, is essential for any band, because you get to see how people react to the new songs, to the new music. And, oh, geez, it’s the best feeling in the world. It really is.
That makes total sense. It kind of, honestly, segues into my next question perfectly. Do any specific preparations go into getting yourselves ready to be on stage again? You kind of touched on it with getting the set ready, but is there anything specific that you guys have done to kind of, like, amp yourselves up for the energy?
Carson Macc: Well, we’ve been recording, too. We’ve been in the studio, and we’ve got some new music coming out, actually. On Friday, October 10, our first new song is coming out. We jam here at the house. We play here. We live here, we live together, we cook together, we clean together, we write, and we play together here. But we also go over to the studio that’s right up the road, and we work with Al Sutton over in Rust Belt — the team that did the Hard to Sell album.
I think between going over there and getting excited about what we’re hearing in the studio, and then coming here and working on the show, as well as just us spending time with each other and checking in with each other to see how we’re doing and if we’re ready. We’ve been talking a lot and communicating and just making sure everybody’s, you know, in the right headspace to really play these songs, because we’re so excited about them.
That’s awesome. I have to ask, too, since you guys spend so much time together, do you ever get sick of each other? Are you kind of just like, “I need my space?”
Carson Macc: They get sick of me. Everybody gets sick of me. So they just take it all out on me, and that’s how we do it. So it works. I can take it.
Mike Moody: We’ve been doing it for a while, so it conditions us for when we’re on the road together, spending every single waking hour. We know each other’s boundaries. We know what we can handle. We know what each person can take. We’re lucky that we can live under the same roof and be able to make this whole thing work.
So then, living together, how do you think that affects your writing process? How do you think it adds to it or takes away from it?
Carson Macc: Well, it rarely ever takes away. It only adds because, if there’s an idea that comes, we can talk about it and play it right away, or throw ideas at each other, even first thing in the morning, or, if somebody’s about to go to bed, we start working on something, and they end up staying up.
It always helps it. I think the more time we spend together, the more powerful it gets. I think this is a real group-oriented thing. There’s even guys that aren’t in the band that are here all the time, our managers, our road managers, our sound guys. Even our guitar tech flies in from California just to spend time with us. It’s a group thing. We’re kind of married to each other at this point. We spend so much time together, but it’s like we have to be together.
Mike Moody: And we’re lucky we have cool neighbors, too.
Carson Macc: Yeah, the neighbors love the music. It’s Detroit, you know. Detroit’s incredible. It’s got a certain style to it. Hardworking people, but they enjoy life, and they enjoy talking to you, and they enjoy hyping you up. So we’re excited. It’s a blue-collar town. Segueing into Asbury [Park, NJ], we’ve never been there. We never played there. We love the music that comes from there, and we cannot wait to see it for the first time. I think there’s gonna be some similarities between us and Detroit, for sure.
Well, I was going to ask what city you guys are most excited to hit, but going off of that, Asbury is super awesome.
Mike Moody: I’m really thrilled. When I was younger, I was really big into this band called The Parlor Mob, and they were from Asbury Park. I had heard of Asbury Park through Bruce Springsteen, but that was a band that they were kind of claiming that that was their home turf as well, and I was like, “Okay.” And we had this gig booked, [and I] couldn’t be more excited.
Carson Macc: To answer your question, Asbury Park is where we’re excited to go.
So kind of a different question, but you’ve played with The Struts, which is an iconic modern-rock band. Is there anything that you’ve taken or learned from their performances that you’ve incorporated into your own shows?
Carson Macc: Oh, absolutely.
Mike Moody: Oh, God, yeah.
Carson Macc: Let us preface by saying when we open for somebody, we always take something from them, and it always affects us. We opened for Dirty Honey before The Struts, and that made us, I guess, a little bit more, I want to say sporty. I don’t know. We got into the athleticism of it, right? Just because of Marc [LaBelle of Dirty Honey] and his thing.
But then, when we started touring with The Struts, it was a whole other ballgame. They really, obviously, put on a show, right? And they’re very animated, and Luke [Spiller] is very animated and all over the place. Not to say that the other bands aren’t, but I think what we took from The Struts is just the sparkle of it all. Just giving somebody an experience, you know? Taking them to a complete other planet, visually, on the sound and the show, and just the movements that they make on stage. It’s very incredible what they do. So I think we took that and we’re like, “Okay, we’re gonna try and coordinate some stuff and really nail certain moments that we want to nail on stage.” And so, yeah, touring with The Struts definitely increased our show, for sure.
Mike Moody: They were such professionals, too. We were in awe of how serious they took their craft and how much practicing went along with their show, and how serious they were about the music, too. We learned a lot about health through them as well.
Jed [Elliott] was very in tune with meditation and being able to do breath work and things that can make that experience so much more enjoyable, other than just getting on stage and ripping a high-energy rock show. Those ways to chill out were also really, really cool. But those guys are such great friends. We could never thank those guys enough for taking us out on the road like that. It was really cool.
So, kind of on a similar note, what sort of self-care things do you guys do on the road to keep your energy balanced between performing and then chilling out?
Carson Macc: It highly depends on how far away the next city is, probably. If it’s a faraway city, the self-care routine goes on a little bit of the back burner, and we just gotta get out of town and get going. But on tour, the main thing we were told is to drink water. You gotta drink water, which we tend to forget sometimes. On top of that, we got foam rollers. One guy brought a massage gun. We try to stay active as much as we can. We walk around a lot. We’re always walking to dinner. So you just gotta stay active. It’s hard. It’s almost harder to have days off than to just keep going.
And then when you guys are performing, are there any songs from your discography that you are excited for when you’re playing? Or is there any that you kind of dread, like, “Oh my God, this song’s next. I don’t wanna play it.” How do the emotions kind of rise and fall during your set?
Carson Macc: You’re hitting the hard questions here. What songs do we hate to play? Let’s start with the ones that we hate to play. Let me think. Uh, nope, there’s none that we hate. There’s absolutely none we hate to play. But some are a challenge. And there’s some in terms of lyrics for me that I’m like, “Uh-oh, I hope I nail all the words.”
Mike Moody: The fans really bring some of these songs to life, too, and I think that that’s the most beautiful thing about the live performance and the thing that we’re most excited about for this new music. The curiosity of, “I wonder what song the fans are gonna be able to sing the chorus back to us by the second chorus,” just to see what’s sticking and what’s working. It’s gonna be so cool.
But having those moments within our show, especially with songs like “Ain’t Like You” and songs that everybody can come together to. There’s nothing more powerful than seeing a room full of people, um, you know, as a choir, almost, singing back the lyrics that meant so much to us. That’s higher power stuff. It feels really special. The anthemic songs are always fun.
As the artist on stage, I can’t even imagine what that must be like for you guys to kind of have your words echoed back to you, and everyone knows them. That’s gotta be so insane.
Mike Moody: It’s just gratitude, really. It’s just a grateful feeling that this many people are so into these songs just as much as we do. And it’s just a powerful, powerful thing. It fuels the fire to keep on writing more.
Carson Macc: Music’s a powerful thing. It’s been very powerful for us. Obviously, you know, we’ve been away for a while. We had to take some time off with everything that happened to us. We brought somebody in to tour with us, a keyboard player that we trusted, that we thought was a highly recommended professional person. And he ended up being a monster. So we had to take some time to recover from that, to process that, to get back to ourselves. And music was a big part of that, listening to music together and writing music together.
So we took this year or so to, I guess, let everything take its course, for us to heal and obviously for the actual victims to have some time. We also took the time to educate ourselves. We partnered with Darkness to Light, which is a great organization that helps in that realm. We took a course that educated us on a bunch of things that kind of blew our minds. So we’ve partnered with them. We’re sharing their story through us. They’re sharing ours. We’re excited to implement some of that on the tour and have some resources for some people to help prevent this from happening.
But underneath it all, it’s been music, music, music. We’ve been thinking about our fans, like you were saying, singing these songs. We’ve been writing with them in mind, like, what could we sing with them? Some of these new songs we’re about to release, there’s a lot of emotion that we put into them from what happened to us, from what’s happening in the world. We’re excited for that to be turned from a very intense, scary, negative thing to something that can help people, something that can help anybody in any situation.
So that’s what’s got us through, and that’s what’s keeping us going. We wouldn’t be talking to you, and we wouldn’t be going back out on tour if we didn’t believe we had some incredible new music. That’s the truth. So we’re really excited to share what that’s been. A band has to share what they’re doing. A band has to play. And we obviously haven’t been able to, but we’re thankful for the chance to again, and we’re not gonna take it for granted, and we’re gonna share as much of ourselves as possible through the music and through the performances.
I’ve obviously been reading a lot of interviews with you guys, and the phrase “musical brotherhood” has been the one that I’ve seen around a lot. So, in your own words, what does that mean to you? How would you define that?
Carson Macc: When it comes to this world we’re in now, especially with technology and what you’re able to do with technology by yourself, so many people do it and have done it, and I’m not just talking about DJs, I’m talking about artists that are even doing the type of stuff we’re doing. You could do it yourself. You really can. The technology gods have gifted you that right.
But what you can also do is, instead of a computer and technology, you plug into other people and their minds and create this hive mind of all this information coming in. Mostly, what it is is information of what each of us are listening to, because it’s not the same. We’re not all listening to the same thing at all times.
…I think there’s a trust that we have with each other through everything that’s happened over the eight to 10 years we’ve been together. There’s been so much that has happened and so many things that we’ve tried out together musically that there’s a trust that, okay, I trust you to bring something that you believe is good, or that you believe in. So all the information coming in, as well as us just caring about each other as brothers, spending time together, living together, cooking and cleaning together, and just having healthy outlets. I think it has all led us to be able to have a musical brotherhood, which is trust and just belief in each other.
It’s not about, ‘Oh, you need to bring a song to the group.’ We don’t do that. We all have the songs that we all brought in, and we are all working on them at the same time. And somebody brings in a riff or a lyric idea or this or that, and it begins a new song, but it all becomes all of our song right away. It’s never a disconnected thing. I think that’s where the brotherhood comes from. It’s fun to do it that way. It makes it more open for everybody to get ideas in, and nobody feels like there’s one person running the show.
…Not to say you can’t be a solo artist or do it on your own, it’s just this is how we always wanted to do it, and it just makes sense to us, you know? We just always wanted to do it that way. We’ve been doing it that way from the start.
Mike Moody: Our biggest inspirations are bands, too. It’s all about the bands that we love. It’s just something about that idea of people coming together to make something greater than what one person can do by themselves, and letting someone finish the next lyric for you, someone relating with you on something that could be so vulnerable, and jumping into that situation with you. The next thing you know, you’ve got five people jumping into that story with you, and you have something that connects you for life. That’s the most beautiful thing; we’re gonna live the rest of our lives knowing that we really did this thing together and that we had that bond. I wouldn’t take it for a second for granted.
I know you said that you have your new single coming out and you’ve been working on new songs, but what else can fans expect from you moving forward? Is it a new album? Is it just more touring? What can they look forward to?
Carson Macc: I think for now we’re gonna just try and put out as much music as we can via singles. The frequency of our single releases should be pretty consistent going forward now, hopefully. We just wanna share songs for now, these songs that we’ve been working on the last year.
…But I think the main focus is, again, gonna be getting back on stage, trying a lot of things out on stage, seeing how people react, and then going back into the studio and just doing that. The show is a big thing for us. And like what we wanna say, I guess, and what we want to be heard through this, doing this with you, is we want people to come out and decide what this is for themselves. Come to the show, see it for yourself, see what the energy is, see what the environment is. Take the temperature yourself. Come there and experience it and see what you think about it. Because we believe that with the old songs that we have and these new songs that we’ve been writing, you are gonna come and enjoy yourself and leave feeling good and empowered and fired up. And that’s why we do it.
So come out and see it yourself. But we really are focusing on the show going forward and just trying to play as many places as we can around the world and the universe. I mean, we’ll do other planets one day, for now, we’re just gonna hit the Earth.
