In November of 2024 Lake Views News wrote a feature about rising country star and songwriter, Max McNown. At the time of that article he had an already impressive five million monthly listeners on Spotify, and only a year later his monthly listeners have more than doubled to an even more impressive 10.7 million. 

Even with his ever-growing fame, his goals stay similar to those from the start. McNown said it is of the utmost importance to him that he doesn’t “lose sight of who [he] is.” He keeps a “level head, level hopes and takes things one day at a time,” and nothing that his life throws at him will change that. The fact that he agreed to an interview with Lake Views is a testament to his down to earth mentality.

Some of you may even know his most popular song, “A Lot More Free,” which has amassed over 200 million plays, but what you maybe didn’t know is that he went to the same school as you and me.

Recently, McNown returned back to his home state, Oregon, on Oct. 20, to do a show in Portland, and to finish up his “Forever Ain’t Long Enough” tour through the U.S. and Canada. But it didn’t stop there because he is currently touring through Europe as a continuation of this tour—and, it doesn’t even stop there. McNown is constantly releasing new tour dates and snippets of new songs on his social medias. 

A quick scroll through McNown’s Instagram shows a collection of short clips from concerts and sneak peaks into what he plans to do next. In fact, he even went as far to say that in the past five years he “could count on one hand how many times [he’d] gone more than three days without throwing a video up.”

A deeper dive into McNown’s social media presence reveals older videos of him singing popular country songs by artists like Zach Bryan, Luke Combs or Tyler Childers to strangers on Omegle. This act was a decision made by McNown to finally decide to start posting to promote his dream on social media. His plan was to “ignore the likes, comments and followers,” to stay consistent, true to himself and to express his passion towards music rather than focusing on the numbers it had produced. 

One more step, even farther back in time, before the era of McNown’s Omegle videos, music was still and had always been a “unique comfort” to McNown. Even though he was not overly zealous at the idea of sharing his singing with a crowd larger than his family until much later in his life—the simple act of listening to different artists is what helped him the most to “navigate the stress of [his] high school years.” 

McNown explained that the hardest part of high school was the “not knowing,” a feeling many of us can probably relate to. As college applications are forthcoming for seniors, now is the time when we have to settle down for a second and think about what we want to do with our futures. McNown sets a good reminder to us all that the path after high school is not linear. And, while it is pretty common for the seniors of LOHS to go out of high school and immediately move onto a four year college, McNown admired that his teachers “had grace and understanding for the kids who don’t know what’s next for them.” He even explained that he never felt pressured to go one way or another and that the “freedom to choose played a huge part in encouraging [him] to chase something different than what many of [his] peers were after.” He would especially like to shout out teacher, Christopher Hill, who was “one of the most caring and good-hearted leaders [he’d] ever encountered in [his] years of public education!”

“The future takes care of itself, all we can decide is what to do with the time we’ve got now.” McNown said. So in short: take that leap of faith, stay true to yourself, embrace mistakes and pursue your dreams.