(footsteps plodding) - My full first name is Maximiano.

I go by it, because it's a piece of me, it's a piece of my heritage.

My full name is Maximiano Janairo the 4th.

My great-grandfather was the first Maximiano.

(gentle guitar music) I picked up music in so many different places.

I started in violin.

I was about four, and I was bad at it like a 4-year-old is supposed to be.

But I think the thing that made me a musician is definitely my parents.

They, whether we liked it or not, showed us good music when we were babies.

I have a childhood full of indie rock and hipster nonsense, and I eventually came around to it.

It's really beautiful music.

I was listening to things like Wilco and Sufjan Stevens, and a little bit of Pavement, all sorts of different things.

And from that point, I guess I just had it in my head that that's something you could do with your life.

♪ Flowers are dying in my window ♪ - I would say that one of the big building blocks of my professional career was coming out as non-binary and as queer, things that are outside of one world or the other, and my racial identity is that as well.

I'm a mixed race person, though I'm white passing.

And I was at times during my childhood, really confused about this.

The connection to ancestry is a major part of making music.

Your familial ancestry, your ancestry of influence.

I would say that those pieces of me are more important to my style and to my themes.

I am who I am because of the way I'm raised and the way that I am artistically raised and the ways that I choose to break or to affirm those parts of me.

So it took coming to grips with my identity to feel comfortable enough to play music.

♪ Found hideaway in the towers, in the towers ♪ ♪ In towers ♪ - I've heard so many different things describing my music, folk and indie and Americana.

I just know that I use an acoustic guitar a lot, so I'm kinda folk.

But I use an electric guitar, so I'm kind of indie.

But I have a friend who plays Pedal Steel, so I'm kind of Americana.

I think that all of the genre elements are just things I've soaked in.

I try not to think about it too much and I try to just keep soaking things in.

♪ All that I remember ♪ - There's something to music that expresses things that we don't have words for or we're too embarrassed to say or we're too fearful to say.

This is something I wrote in my journal one time and then scratched out because I thought it was too corny, but it's true.

I wrote these songs out of necessity.

I went through experiences that I didn't know if there were any songs about that specific thing.

Losing friendships as opposed to relationships, or being in strange liminal spaces where things don't feel quite right, but you can't put your finger on why.

I felt very lost in those feelings.

And so I wrote these songs to be companions.

♪ Maybe they'll feed the garden ♪ ♪ And give something new the will to sprout ♪ - What stands out the most about the Milwaukee music scene is how much I genuinely love the people I get to make music with.

I'm very lucky there's a quality to Milwaukee being a mid-sized city where there's not a lot of institutional support musically, and so we're not in competition with each other, you know, there's not some limited amount of social capital.

We're here to lift each other up, we're here to help.

And I felt that since the minute I joined the scene and it's only grown stronger.

I really hope to be the kind of person that other, you know, artists that are just getting started can look to, just talk to.

(gentle guitar music) ♪ Cold of the night on our clothes ♪ - [Max] So I'm Maximiano.

You can call me Max, but my name is Maximiano.

♪ No better time, nowhere to go ♪ ♪ But still you have a heart in me ♪ (no audio)