When musician and GW alum Max Bowmore finished writing his newest single last summer, he had his old statistics courses and walks to Gelbucks on his mind.
One year later, the 2014 business graduate is gearing up to drop his second single “Poetry” on Friday. He said the track is about “walking the walk” of university life and his “core memories” at GW, like his biweekly stop at the Starbucks below Gelman Library between classes with his now-wife and his days embracing creativity through performing arts extracurriculars on campus.
“As you’re growing up, you’re learning about academics, but you’re also learning about yourself and how you see, interact with the world both socially and romantically,” Bowmore said.
After donning the George Washington costume as mascot, volunteering as an orientation leader — then called a Colonial Cabinet member — and joining the Sigma Chi fraternity, Bowmore said his mom encouraged him to further his campus involvement by finding a creative outlet that he’d been missing since graduating high school. Equipped with a Michael Jackson classic and a song from the musical “Footloose” that he knew as the former male lead in his high school’s production, Bowmore decided on a whim to audition for the GW Troubadours, a co-ed a cappella group.
“It was the first time I was part of a group where it was kind of self-directed,” Bowmore said. “So we were all kind of on the same playing field with the same goals of creating really good, cool music.”
Bowmore was no stranger to being center stage in high school theater and choir, and said auditioning for solos in the acapella group at GW helped him feel more comfortable putting himself out there through performance in college. The lesson would prove fruitful as Bowmore sang at fraternity events and filmed a cover of Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” titled “Buff and Blue” in 2011 for “GWFanVideos” — the now-inactive YouTube channel that published promotional videos for GW Athletics. As of Wednesday, the video has amassed 12,000 views.
“It behooves the powers that be at a place like GW to encourage people to express themselves and kind of create things, because it creates a more vibrant campus experience,” Bowmore said.
Entering the corporate world of digital advertising post-college paused Bowmore’s own musical creation. He said living in New York City and immersing himself in its artistic culture through concerts and museum visits filled the void of not making music himself.
Bowmore said he and his wife decided to move to the Philadelphia suburbs in 2021 after having a baby during the COVID-19 pandemic to have more space for their growing family. He said he missed the creative environment in New York City after his move to the Philadelphia area, pushing him to find music “within” himself again.
“That’s kind of when I started dipping back into a lot of those feelings and those ways I expressed myself back at GW and before that,” Bowmore said.
He said he wrote his first original song “The One” last summer about his wife — whom he met at GW through the orientation team — after a wave of inspiration while listening to Taylor Swift’s 2019 album “Lover” on a road trip they took together. Since then, Bowmore said he has written about six songs, hired a talent manager and found a producer on social media who helped record “The One” and “Poetry.”
Bowmore said after releasing “The One” last summer, he performed “Poetry” for the first time at an open mic night at Perkins Center for the Arts in New Jersey. He said multiple people in the crowd told him to release the song, a stroke of positive feedback that motivated him to finally plan a release date for the already-recorded track.
Bowmore, a guitar player himself, said artists like Noah Kahan inspire his Americana, folksy songwriting. His single is teeming with academic and romantic imagery, evoking nostalgia for his days in Foggy Bottom with lyrics like “My composition might be middle school level, but I swear my love’s got college degrees” as he invites listeners to sway along to the guitar-driven accompaniment.
“My goal is to make stuff that I love listening to and singing along to and hearing other people sing along to,” Bowmore said.
He said a photoshoot and music video are in the works for the promotion of “Poetry,” which he’s juggling with working a full-time job in digital advertising at The Philadelphia Inquirer and taking care of his son. He said he hopes to continue releasing one-to-two songs a year to focus on quality over quantity while immortalizing his personal experiences through songwriting.
“GW was such a huge part of what I think made me who I am,” Bowmore said. “Not just because I met my wife there, but the spirit program and Colonial Inauguration and the fraternity and the Troubs are all reasons why I have such, such fond memories of my time there.”
