Stuart Maxfield: Mormon Musician
Stuart Maxfield is a lead vocalist and bass guitarist for the alternative rock band Fictionist. The band has its roots in Provo, Utah.
Fictionist has produced albums including Invisible Hand (2009), Lasting Echo (2010), and Fictionist (2014). They produced another album while signed with Atlantic Records, but neither Fictionist nor Atlantic were happy with the album, so it was never released. Atlantic released them after three years.
Maxfield said: “With the Atlantic scenario—and I should say that that whole thing said more about the industry at large that it did Atlantic—we could just feel the fear and the uneasiness at that level, that everybody’s worried about getting fired, everybody’s worried about making money, and no one knows how to do it in music. . . . Now, one of the first things to sort of be restored to us after parting ways with Atlantic and doing it the way we were meant to do it . . . is there’s a whole lot more harmony in the band.”[1]
Of their independently made album Fictionist, he said “We recorded this album at our homes, primarily—at my house and at Robbie’s— and our producer gave us a lot of flexibility working that way, and it was really that. We had some limitations working at our houses and not being in a really decked-out studio but we embraced that, and we let some of those limitations become the strengths of the record. So some of the more grungy sounds—Robbie mentioned the keyboards; he found one of them in his dad’s dental office. It’s nothing special but we figured out every creative way we could possibly use that keyboard. So stuff like that. It was trying to maximize the skills and talents that we had and the instruments that we had, and that kind of became a defining quality of the record that we made.”[2]
Maxfield is from Utah and currently lives in Springville. His brother Andrew has managed the band but is now pursuing his own music. The two have collaborated recently with “The Bridge,” a musical performance premiering at Brigham Young University in February 2016. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
