Value Select Kills the Moon Near You
Image courtesy of Value Select
By Joe Frederick
The Youtuber and musical artist Value Select, aka Max Renner, has 196,000 subscribers and is going on a national tour starting in April 2022. It was my pleasure to have been able to interview him about this tour and his Youtube career.
The Value Select Youtube channel is composed of songs and comedy skits. When asked how long he has been practicing music, Renner responded, “I joined the high school choir, that’s when I started getting pretty good at playing guitar and piano as well.”
Renner has his own unique genre of music called Mirth Pop. He describes this kind of music as “a different thing. It’s not quite parody, it’s not quite just straight comedy music. When I think of comedy music, I think of a lot of songs that are funny, but they’re not really groovin’, you can’t really dance to it. So I think Mirth Pop is comprehensive. I would describe it as a song that is funky in nature but also brings about a sense of just hilarity and delight. [It] focuses on having a danceable and groovin’ beat, but is set to kind of more inane lyrics.”
He told me that at times he approaches his songs from the angle of sketch comedy and another from the musical side. The process Renner described for writing a song was to start by creating a sketch that is acted out and as he works with it, a melody will come to him or a chord progression he is working on will fit in the sketch, and a song will come from that. Some of these sketches are inspired by his interactions with his friends; two of the songs he said came from such a source are the songs I miss you(r friends) and Living With Your Girlfriend You Don’t Like Anymore (the song).
When discussing the Kills the Moon tour, he described, “that there [are] some definite nerves behind the idea about going on the road and doing 25 shows in 30 days, because it’s just a lot. We’re pretty much doing one show a night, saying ‘Hey’ to everybody, and then we gotta sleep in the van because the next day we gotta be in, you know, Texas or something like that to do another show.”
Renner also described the grander scale that this tour would have compared to the other live shows he has done, such as Mirth Pop 2018 and Fables and Legends, including costume changes, headset mics, and monitors for the band. They will also be transmitting tour visuals on a screen behind them and will have more lighting cues than before.
When asked if he was nervous about the performance itself, Renner told me he didn’t think so; he is confident that they will go on and kill it. In preparation for this tour, the band had a test showing in November that sold out in 12 hours and had audience members present from the Eastern seaboard of Canada coming to California to see him perform. Value Select Kills the Moon will be coming to D.C. on May 5 at Union Stage. If his videos are anything to go by, it will be an amazing event to go and see.
